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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...

I drove up to Bishop on the evening of the 31st hoping to get some time in the Sierra in my brief time back in CA. My ambitious plan was to hike out to South Lake on New Year Day and camp there overnight, do some skating on the lake if the ice was good on the morning of the 2nd (weather forecast showed it would be clear all day) and then hike out later that day. I didn't really have any beta about skating the lake and I settled on it because I could take my car pretty close to it and in...

My brother drew a pretty early lottery opportunity so in late July, I met up with my brother and a couple of old friends from the Ft Collins college days for a 5-night trek in Yellowstone. After camping in one of the commercial campsites in the Park, we headed to our trailhead and took off. I've hiked a short stretch of this trail before but wanted to hike it to at least this location. From the overlook we continued on a short way until this creek to water up. After crossing the creek...

After my 6-nighter in Yellowstone, I had a couple days to roam around. One hike I was interested in was where there was a lot of wolf activity the last couple of summers. On the drive in through the Park, I passed a suspicious vehicle likely associated with a crime wave in the Ice Lake area. Park Rangers are still trying to locate this owner of this vehicle. Law enforcement intel suggests he is faking surgery recovery in the greater Salt Lake area to gain sympathy from the locals. I also...

My oldest kid was in Utah doing a NOLS river trip and needed to be picked up eventually. I figured I would drive to Wyoming again and do some backpacking with my son who was going to be starting high school in the fall and then get my daughter. This timing ended up lining up with a trip that some friends had planned in the Salt River Range in western Wyoming, so my son and I would do a 5 or 6 nights and then meet up for 5 more nights with the fellas. It is almost exactly 24 hours of...

Part 2 begins as we are leaving Granite Creek and heading to Afton (see part 1 here - https://backcountrypost.com/threads/wyoming-2025-part-1-teton-wilderness.11823) Right up front, I want to thank "the fellas" Hugh aka @scatman, Bob aka @Bob and Gary aka @Chuckwalla for being patient with my son. He had just finished up a season of soccer and track so he killed us on the trails, but he was a lot slower on the off-trail parts which possibly mattered by the end of the trip. Thanks again...

In the last week of August of this year, @futurafree and myself did a 7 day loop in the Teton Wilderness. Chris messaged me about doing a backpacking trip and threw out the idea(among others) of hiking in the Teton Wilderness. Naturally, I was foolish enough to pick the longest and most remote option. We hiked roughly 70 miles from Turpin Meadow trailhead, with about 80 miles of that being uphill (this number grew as the trip was planned an then progressed). We had hoped to get over...

After 10 days hiking through Capitol Reef National Park, as I set up camp at the top of the Burr Trail Switchbacks on a calm evening, it appeared that the wet weather of the past few days might have finally passed through. However, soon after dark the wind began to quickly pick up, and I was being gently swayed and buffeted in my tent. Things then turned nasty rather quickly, with loud thunder claps, violent lightening, and torrential rain. Strong gusts of wind were now starting to fold my...

For our third week-long Wind River backpacking trip, we headed right into the middle of the range and did a loop around Pronghorn Peak. The fourth day of the forty-mile route took us off-trail from Bonneville Lake and Middle Fork Lake via Sentry Pass. There are several conflicting ways to do this, and we believe we took the best one, so I will detail it with topos from my watch app below. In 2006, we did a loop of the southern Winds from Big Sandy. We returned in 2018 and did a traverse...