My older kid (13) and I had a very short Winds trip, ending yesterday Aug 7. We parked at the Torrey Creek TH and headed up to Bomber Lake. It's a really stunning area up there! We had a bit of routefinding adventure in the swampy areas above Bomber Falls and wasted an hour or two thrashing through blown-down trees, ugh, and also an uncomfortably close encounter with a large brown bear -- we had no visibility in the tangle and weren't making as much noise as we should have been under those conditions. There were few bugs below 8000' but then somewhere above there the mosquitoes become really thick and aggressive. We deeted up but they were biting through hair, shirts, socks, etc. My kid is tastier than I am and got the worst of it, but I have sort of a problem with mosquitoes perhaps due to having lived in a house when I was younger where they would always be in my room at night. Anyhow I hate them hugely and irrationally. So we camped at Bomber Lake and then in the morning my kid had about 50 bites and the mosquitoes were already thick at dawn (after a surprisingly warm night, and with almost no wind) and since the rest of our planned route was near water at a similar elevation (route 42 in Pallister's book) so we just decided to bail. We thought it would be fun to bail upwards via "bomber gully" and hike down the Glacier trail but as we ascended we saw more and more snow filling the gullies around the 11500-12000' level so we turned around -- in sneakers and w/o axes we couldn't do steep snow safely. So we just walked out Bomber Canyon. I guess we'll try this again during a drier year, I really thought August would be ok. I know this makes me sound lame, but I've been in the Brooks Range and this was worse!
