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Progression along the Salt Lake foothills brought us to Jack's Mountain this morning. Of course, there had to be some drama as when I arrived at the trailhead and opened up the hatch of the Subaru, I realized that I had left my daypack at home and had to turn around and go back and get it. :mad: While this hike is a short one, it is steep, gaining roughly 1240 feet in 1.05 miles. I was looking forward to see how my knee would handle this at this point of my recovery. On our way down, we...

On this trip I wanted to check out a few Maze packraft access options I've been thinking about for a while. Backpacking from the Island in the Sky trailheads is limited and mostly on the shorter side, plus water is scarce from the White Rim and up. But used as a transit to access the rivers one can enjoy the vast views and stark landscape untroubled. On the Green river side of ISKY from near Queen Anne Bottom and 35 miles downstream to the confluence of the Colorado I know of only one...

As far as knee testing is concerned, Mount Wire is a step up from what I've been doing, and so the family headed up this morning to see if I could make it or not. My knees were pretty sore after the descent. Review Photo Overview map of our hike - roughly a 2100 foot elevation gain to the top. We headed up George's Hollow and came back down the ridge Just off the trailhead Looking back across Research Park towards downtown SLC Arrowleaf balsamroot is blooming now at the lower...

Backpacking season hasn't really started yet for most of the US and I realized that I had never put together a trip report for my blog about at trip I did in the fall. I figured some people here might like to see something a little different. 10/4 - 10/6/25 The weather was nice, there was no soccer and my wife was taking the oldest kid on a trip. So, I took the youngest two kids on a short backpacking trip to VA. We started at the Elk Garden Trailhead, it was completely packed, not...

September 27 - October 1, 2025 I took even longer than normal to write this up, somehow. Sitting here at the end of the Winter That Never Was (for the western, non-Alaska US, anyway) has me thinking about backpacking. This was the 6th year in a row doing a trip in the Bechler area of Yellowstone. The group changes a little every time, but it's always a good time. The plan was to start at the Pitchstone Plateau, then head off trail to the upper reaches of the Bechler drainage, down the...

Here is a brief trip report and a few pictures from last fall. The centerpiece of my trip was to make it to the top of South Guardian Angel. I had failed on two previous attempts over seven years and I was hoping the third time would be the charm. I knew it would be a beast of a hike and just hoped I had enough juice in the tank to do it. I have realized that as I get older, trip planning for each day has become paramount. 20 years ago, I would just go "all out" each day but I'm...

I headed back to Antelope Island with Katie and Sheila to complete a six mile lollipop loop hike on the northwestern side of the island this time. We started at the Lakeside Loop Trailhead and made our way along the shoreline of the island before heading up and over Buffalo Point. After dropping down the north side of the point, we hooked back up with the Lakeside Trail to complete the lollipop portion and then retraced our footsteps back to our car. We saw and heard lots of birds on this...

The weather report was ok( 80 ish and 50 overnite) so I met some folks for a short overnite trip near home…but things don’t always go as planned. The trip turned out good except for the excessive wind which whipped up the cedar pollen in the air that affected most of the people out there …you can see th pollen in one of the pictures -that yellowish looking smoke is the cedar pollen. 80 degrees in central Texas with th humidity can be icky…it was hiking in. The temperature is dropped about 40...

Continuing from part 1 here - https://backcountrypost.com/threads/seki-2025-part-1.12520/ Preview photo - Day 5 - Casper Lake to Milestone Basin (2.5 miles & 658' up & 510' down + wandering) I had originally thought about climbing up to one of Lucy's or Millies's Foot Passes, but I was still feeling off and was very tired. I was very glad that my pack was getting lighter even if I wasn't eating as much as I normally would. Let's make it a short day and head to Milestone Basin. I took...

7/22 - 8/1/25 Inyo NF and Sequoia NP Trailhead: Cottonwood Pass Camera: Sony A7CR and Tamron 28 - 200 lens I had big plans to see a part of SEKI that I had not seen before. It was going to involve a lot of elevation gains and a lot of off-trail travel. Then my son and I did a 5 night trip in the Smokies and I realized that I had let my training slip (I had broke my shoulder in March and that slowed me down a lot) and there was no way I'd be able to do what I had planned. So, I pivoted to...

Since I've been upgraded to do some light hiking by my knee surgeon for the next month, it was out to Antelope Island with my daughter to hike the South Island Trail to Unicorn Point at the south end of the Island. Originally it looked like it would be an 8 mile out and back hike, but the gate was closed at the historic Garr Ranch, so we ended up doing an additional 1.55 miles each direction for a grand total of 11.1 miles. We had the southern part of the island all to ourselves until we...

Temperatures have held well below twenty degrees for the last two weeks or so here in North Central Ohio. Lake Erie is nearly frozen over and so have a lot of our inland waterways. It might start to warm up next week, so I thought yesterday would be a good day to see what a few more frozen waterfalls looked like in Cuyahoga Valley National Park before the melting starts. Brandywine Falls gets most of the attention in Cuyahoga Valley. It is technically the largest, but it is also one of...

PLAN B We escaped the madness of Jackson by driving west over Teton Pass and through Victor and Driggs, Idaho. I had originally hoped to do a short hike along the way, but time, energy, and motivation were all in short supply. Instead, we headed for our campground. From Driggs we headed back east towards the Grand Targhee Resort and Teton Canyon. The resort, Teton Canyon, and most of the rest of the west side of the Tetons are in Wyoming, even though the adjacent towns are in Idaho...

SUPERBLOOM We got off to another slow start on Saturday morning. I worked on organizing our gear and loading my pack while Christy picked up breakfast at Rise Coffee. We eventually made it out of the hotel and drove to the Green Mountain Trailhead at the confluence of North Leigh Creek and Tin Cup Creek. The area features some primitive campsites, a field for horse trailer parking, and a rougher road to the actual trailhead. Christy dropped me and my pack off there at noon. Christy...

My first trip report. Here is a bit of a preface to this trip. As mentioned elsewhere on the forums, my partner and I relocated to Mexico City a year and a half ago as she is attending a graduate program here. Due to all of the reasons that come with such a move, we have been unable to accomplish anything in the way of outdoors activities just yet. The logistics and busy-ness of life in a new country, coupled with there being very little in the way of a backpacking culture here, have left...

COWBOY UP Note, the first two parts of this trip report are in the Hiking & Camping subfolder. We left Brooks Lake and headed for Dubois, as I had promised Christy breakfast at Cowboy Café. Our history with Cowboy Café goes back 26 years. In September of 1999 we made our first trip to Wyoming, spending a week with friends backpacking on the east side of the Wind River Range. Afterwards, we spent the night in Lander before heading back to the airport in Jackson the next day. That...

This trip began with a flight into Jackson Hole, which would normally be beyond my acceptable budget, but I lucked out being just late enough into the season that prices on airfare & car rental were about half of what they run during the peak. It was a nice clear day that I flew in, and the view from above really is spectacular. As we approached our final destination I found myself glued to the window, looking out over Yellowstone Lake and down into the Thorofare, reminiscing about my time...

The first nights I ever spent under the stars in Yellowstone's backcountry came on a three-day horsepack trip when I was fourteen. My dad and I had been roadtripping across the west the summer after I finished 8th grade - the first full summer after my parents had divorced - and we were set to effectively wrap said trip with this excursion into the park's northwest corner from somewhere just south of Big Sky. I didn't pay attention to which trailhead at the time. I didn't really pay too...

We'd talked about hiking Pebble Creek for a few years, even had a permit for it one year which was canceled due to the 2022 flood. After a pretty tough Bechler hike in 2024, I promised my wife we'd do something easy the following year. I set my sights on spreading this hike out over a few days, got a decent spot in the permit lottery, and was able to secure campsites for our August travel window. We flew into Idaho Falls, did our usual bear spray, camp fuel & grocery run, then made our way...

Photos to be added Far too long ago, during the golden years of parenting, we took a family road trip that included a through hike of the North Rainbow Trail. Glorious red rock framed by a snow covered Navajo Mountain and complete solitude. I thought it was the most beautiful trip I had ever been on. While camping in Owl Canyon I managed to find the moki steps referenced in an obscure article written by Greg Child about a first almost-decent of the remote Anasazi canyon (I could have...