canyon boys vs. wind rivers mountain range

This year was about our 7th annual backpacking trip. Michael and I try to do these get togethers once a year, but sometimes we skip one or two years because of busy schedules. This year, we were able to pull it off. The approximate mileage was 53-56+ miles. The guys who went were myself, Michael, Bruce Larson, and Dan Smith. No dog this year. Typically, we take my dog but this year Simba became ill and just wasn’t strong enough to do it. 

I’m mostly going to let the pics tell the story this year, (the photo album) but I wanted to write some highlights. We caught about 100 fish total which was not as much as previous years. The scenery was some of the most epic I’ve seen. We were above treeline for about 4 days. No campfires this year so we had to cook all food with gas stoves. We even tried boiling fish this year. It’s not so good. We only had slight physical damage and that was mostly to our feet. Bruce pulled off the worst heel blisters I’ve ever seen. 

The route we took roughly went like this. We started at the Green River Lakes trail head. We hiked the Highline trail the first day until we got to Beaver Park, just past Squaretop Mountain.

The next day we hiked up towards Peak Lake. We took a bad detour here and headed up a wrong canyon. This little adventure cost us Michael’s fishing pole and a good 2 hours and about 4 miles. We realized our error and headed back down the canyon and up over Shannon Pass to end up camping at Elbow Lake. This was my hardest day and, in my opinion, the most beautiful campsite.

Next day, we fished the creek between Upper and Lower Jean Lakes and it was the best fishing we had all week. We pushed all day to Island Lake. We fished the upper creek towards Fremont Crossing and had some epic adventures, casts, and footsteps.

We then backtracked our trail from the day before, but sprinkled in a little cross-country shortcut that saved us about 2 miles and a couple hours. We pushed back on up to Elbow Lake and had a good long lunch. At this point, we cracked open the Mountain Dew that I had been carrying. After lunch, we hiked to Summit Lake at which point we made camp. After dropping our packs, we took a day hike to the No Name Lakes for some really big fish. Not many, but big fish. And the sunsets we saw were stunning.

We woke up next morning and hiked back down to the Beaver Park area, but kept going farther and found a good campsite right next to the water. We were all beat at this point, and we didn’t do any more fishing that night. We just sat on a big log by the water and talked the night away. I think it was the most time we all spent with each other the whole trip. It rained this night and we saw some really awesome lightning storms. The majority of the storm missed us though.

I forgot to mention that today was the only day we were able to fish in the rain on the way down Green River Pass. My favorite.

For the last day, we woke up early and made it to the cars before noon. We took a slow pace and just kind of lamented going back to work. Getting in the cars was kind of sweet and sour. We were glad not to be hiking anymore, but were sad to be leaving some of the most beautiful mountains I’ve seen.

Posted in: adventure,backpacking,canyon boys,hiking,wind rivers