Sunday, October 2, 2011

Ship Island Lake with Dad














I decided that my birthday present to Dad would be planning and taking him on a backpacking trip to ship island lake. He told me that he had wanted to go there since he was 15 years old, so I'm glad that we were able to make it there. We left thursday morning and made the 5 hour trek to the trailhead. We got to the trailhead around 2 pm and started heading up the trail. It was full of gorgeous views the whole time we were hiking. It was an intense hike as well, since we were following the ridge line of mountains the whole way, full of up and down. We hiked all the way to Wilson lake where we set up camp and cooked dinner.

The next day we went down fish fin pass, which had literally been cut and blasted out of the rock and followed the trail to get to ship island lake. It was a long day hike in, but well worth seeing the large granite monoliths that were at the outlet of the lake. Dad also packed a spinning reel up to the lake, and we caught all kinds of trout, rainbow, golden, cutthroat, and hybrids of all of the above.

We then hiked back to our base camp at wilson lake and headed back to the truck. We ended up hiking about a total of 24 miles in the three days we were out hiking. with most likely at least 6,000 feet of vertical gain thanks to all of the up and down we did on that hike. It was a good time spent with Dad, and I'd love to go back and spend about 4 or 5 days back in the mountains!

4 comments:

Rachel said...

So JEALOUS!!! Some day I would love to go there!! It is breathtakingly gorgeous!

Susan said...

Love the sunset pictures. It sure is some beautiful country there. Glad you had a good time.

Kevin and Leonora said...

You need to send me some of those pictures! I want to frame them and put them up. It looks like you had a lot of fun with dad!

Shanna Butler said...

What a thoughtful present Daniel. It looks beautiful there. Too bad I'll never see it in person since it involves camping :)