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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...