Day 3: Bench Valley Dayhike

The third day of our trip was dedicated to exploring Bench Valley.  The goal was to drink in the sights, and it turned out to be a lovely place to do that.



View Larger Map

 That morning, we took our time in camp and then headed out through the moraines north of Guest Lake.  A Sooty Grouse was booming in Guest Lake's valley, but we never made an effort to find him.  It was amazing, though, to hear him as we hiked through the basin.  You could hear him for at least a mile, and he sounded about the same distance away all the time.

These lakes are all very nice to look at, their sparkling blue waters framed by high altitude meadows spotted with vividly colored alpine wildflowers, fringed by whitebark, lodgepole, and limber pine forest, and rimmed by white granite cliffs, boulders, and the peaks of the Le Conte Divide.

Libby at Horsehead Lake

The lakes have fanciful cowboy names like Horsehead, Filly, Wah Hoo, and Six Shooter.  I carried my fishing pole and found fish in all of them easy to catch.  Most of them had Eastern Brook, but a few of them had Rainbows.  I found Rainbows in one of the Twin Buck Lakes and Bullet Lake.  I thought I saw Rainbows cruising amongst the Brookies in Schoolmarm, but didn't catch any.  The rest of the lakes I fished had small Brook trout.

Libby took some time practicing her casting, as well.  This is at Six Shooter Lake.

One highlight we were anticipating was checking out Schoolmarm Lake.  You know, since Libby is kind of a schoolmarm, herself.  So we took a picture of her doing her best schoolmarmy pose on the banks of the lake.  What do you think?

Schoolmarming at Schoolmarm

It's worth mentioning we wandered through a little meadow between Filly and Twin Buck Lakes that was absolutely choc-a-bloc with frogs.  I mean, it was hard to walk without stepping on them!  They were tiny little dark frogs, just newly not tadpoles.

From Schoolmarm, we looped east and up into the lakes draining into it.  We made it up to Bullet Lake, and then climbed the low ridge south of that lake for a view further up the drainage toward the divide, and then again back south at Filly and Horsehead Lake.  It was the rightmost notch in the picture below.

Bullet Lake and an unnamed peaklet

From the notch, we dropped down a steep fault full of mint, paintbrushes, bees, and butterflies.  It smelled fantastic, and was pretty cool.  The hike back to Guest Lake was lovely, and I stopped at Colt Lake to pick up some dinner on the way back.  That afternoon we went for a swim at the interface of the meadow and moraine at the base of Blackcap Peak, which invited us to jump straight into deep water.  It was deceptively deep because of how clear it was, and it was unnerving to drop deep into the cold blue and not be able to feel anything beneath your feet at the deepest point.  Of course, after getting out of the water we shivered like mad until we had sufficiently air dried.  No warm granite slabs above 10,000' like there were at 8,000' two nights before.

That evening after dinner, we hiked up to a little knob above our camp and sat and watched the sun set over the low mountains to the west while mosquitoes whined around outside of our head nets, and bit Libby through her socks.

Dogtooth Peak (far right) and the mountains of the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness area

There are more pictures on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rowleypics/sets/72157634834858133/with/9390813630/