Golden Girls

Rather than head out bright and early Saturday morning, I decided to do this week's hike right after work on Thursday.  There are many reasons for this:

1. The trail head parking lot fills up really early on Saturdays.
2. It's getting really cold in the mornings.
3. I really want to sleep in on Saturday to enjoy the nice cool sleeping weather.

I've wanted to hike to Lake Blanche since I found out it was there.  Annie and I made an attempt to hike the trail last year about 2 weeks after Titan was born.  We hauled him up about a mile before we realized it was really hot and we didn't think to bring any water

Of course, at the time we thought we were at least two miles into the 3 mile trail and felt really bad turning around so close to the end.  

The trail starts at the Mill B trail head, right at the bottom of the S-curve.  When I arrived, I got the last parking spot in the lot.  The trail starts out paved for a quarter mile, then the real trail branches off to the right (if you come to the bridge, you've gone too far).

The trail climbs a little bit and eventually crosses the river at a wooden bridge.  From the bridge, the trail heads up to the left for a bit, then switches back and goes pretty straight for a mile and a half or so.  The trail is steep in places, and flat in other places.  Up until the last mile it's really not all that bad.

There are a lot of trees on the trail.  Even though I hiked it in the evening, I was in the shade for a majority of the hike.  That wouldn't have been the case earlier in the day, but I was grateful to not be in direct sunlight.

About 2 miles in you start catching glimpses of Sundial Peak, the peak directly above Lake Blanche.  It's pretty impressive, even from far away.

At 3.38 miles or so I caught my first glimpse of the lake.  I was a little disappointed until I realized that it went around the hill to the right and was really pretty big. One really neat thing to see is the old dam (I guess that's what it is).  There's one just as you get to the lake, and the bigger one on the downhill side as you go to the west.

The lake was still enough that I was able to take a few good pictures of the reflection of Sundial Peak.  I wanted to get a good picture of both the peak and the reflection of the peak, but my hiking camera no longer has a working screen.  It's just like taking pictures in the olden days when you couldn't see the pictures until you brought the camera home.

One of the main reasons I wanted to do this hike was to be able to see 3 lakes all at once.  Lake Blanche drains into Lakes Florence and Lillian to the west.  It's a little strange to hike to the highest lake first, then hike down to the others, but it's kind of cool, too.  The picture below is Lake Florence (nearest) and Lake Lillian (behind Florence in the center of the picture).

I made an attempt to do a panoramic picture showing the relationship between Lake Blanche (on the left) and the other two.

Annie's always trying to convince me to take more pictures of myself, rather than just pictures of the scenery.  I think I might even be smiling in this one.

One last picture of the lake at Sunset before I had to head back down.

I started hiking at 4:40pm and made it to the lake by 6:45pm.  After playing around at the top I started heading back down about 7:15pm.  About halfway down it got too dark to see the trail anymore.  Fortunately I had my giant headlight.  The trail was pretty rocky and steep on the way down.  I even slipped and did a faceplant in the bushes, but just got a couple little scratches.

It took about 1 1/2 hours to make it back down to the car, making it a total of 4 hours for the whole hike.  I don't think I even passed a dozen people on the trail, and I had all three lakes to myself the whole time I was up there.  It was a great hike, but I think it'll be a couple years before I head back up there.