After half a day hike followed by a moonlit night, Wednesday would be our first full day on the mountain. As the sun started to hit the valley in the distance, we arose and started the day. The beauty of the full moon and the slow morning sunrise reaffirmed that this saddle was the perfect place for our first night’s camp. A Mountain House breakfast was followed by breaking camp, packing up and heading down the mountain. One thing that is imperative to realize if you take on this trip is you will not seem to do a whole lot of contouring. The second day we dropped down into the bottom, which ended up leading us into the south fork of Smith Creek, then back up. This is followed by a trek down to another fork of Smith Creek. You gain elevation and continue to lose it again only to climb once more. This seemed to be a recurring theme on several posts that I had read. As I came to realize when I was putting all of my gear together, my backpacking has been fairly focused around one particular activity. As a hunter, following the trail is not really something that I focus on. When there is one that will help me accomplish the goal of where I am going, I take it, otherwise I use the landscape and contour around when I
Looking down toward Smith Creek
can and go straight on if I need to. Not that this trail is bad in anyway (it is actually a great trail); I just kept hearing the advice of my dad and grandfather in my head telling me to contour. Every side hill trail lead us back down into the bottom and back out and up. It felt more like the Ruby up and down trail than the crest trail at this point. I am sure my wife was wondering how her vacations went from drinking a Miami Vice on the beach in Cabo to dehydrated lasagna and water. In hindsight, I probably should have brought her an umbrella for her Mango Bango Hydrate and Recover. While this part of the trip has some beautiful scenery, I chose to start on this end for a reason. The rugged beauty of the Ruby Mountains is more picturesque as you head towards Lamoille Canyon. The heat of the day in those lush green creek bottoms followed by the open, sun baked climbs back out can definitely take some pep out of your step. At one of the forks of Smith Creek, I was loading up on water near one of the many potential campsites in the area, when I somehow tweaked my back. I once read that when you are caught between a rock and a hard place, the only way out is through it. The only way we would be able to complete this hike in the time we had was to just keep going. Any time that I am in the mountains, I like to marvel at the landscape and its creation. As we took a few minutes to rest before trudging on, I looked around the country side. This is some big country. We started back on the trail taking small breaks as we needed, stretching my back as I could. Choosing to go with a heavier pack load as conditioning and training for the upcoming hunting season did not make that final pull out of the bottom toward Overland Lake on that sun baked slope feel like a vacation. The heat kept beating down on us as we topped out. The rugged beauty of the Ruby Valley side of the mountains seemed like a fitting back
Heading down into Overland Lake
drop to sit back and enjoy some lunch. I started to learn something about my wife at this point. She handed me a small bag of trail mix. As I sat there pondering whether I had asked for lunch or a snack, part of another group topped out behind us. We sat and visited for a bit with Matt and his son as they waited on his wife and other child making their way up. They were the camp at McCutcheon Creek the night before. As we talked, Matt mentioned that they brought the left over steak from the star up for their first night’s meal. Little did I know that steak would haunt my mind for the remainder of the trip. We
said our goodbyes and off we went around the mountain. The snowball fight my wife and I had was fairly lackluster but it felt great on a hot July hike. As we followed the trail, we hit the pass that dropped us down into overland. The snow drift forced us off the trail and around, but greeted us with a beautiful sight below. We made our way down to Overland Lake where we set up camp once more. Watching the water look like it was starting to boil as fish came to the surface to feed was all of the motivation I needed to set camp in record time. It didn’t take very long before we added some fresh trout to the dehydrated menu. We shared the lake with several other camps including Matt and his family. As we enjoyed our evening camping on the lake, you couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast in where we had hiked that day and where we had camped. As we settled in for the night, my mind started wandering. The longest day awaited us in the morning.
Some days you need a little mojo. Had to represent my friend Jimmy Herman with the Mojo shirt on the Ruby Crest Trail.
Awesome second day. Beautiful pictures.