Day 5: Blackcap Basin

I wish we could have spent more than one day in Blackcap Basin.  It's quite large, and there is a lot of it that we didn't have time to explore.  We focused on just the southernmost corner of the basin on this layover day.


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We got a lazy start in the morning, and were disappointed to wake up and see a pall of smoke had descended on the mountains while we were sleeping.  Eventually, the breeze did clear it out a bit, but it made the morning hazy and a bit smelly.

Libby in camp on the smoky morning.

Our dayhike was through an alpine wonderland of meadows, rocks, sand, and the occasional stand of limber or whitebark pine.  Most of the time, Finger Peak picturesquely framed our views.

Pearl Lake

We visited Pearl Lake, which is quite large and easy fishing for decent back-country rainbows, then hiked up a cross-country trail to Chapel Lake.  Chapel Lake was surrounded by little frogs, so we stopped to check those out for awhile before moving on across broken faultlines to Cathedral Lake.

Chapel Lake

Each lake brought us progressively closer to the foot of a spur of Finger Peak.  When we finally got there, we were right up against the mountain.  Cathedral Lake is right in the cirque of the divide and is beautifully deep and clear.  The country around it is quite broken, but it has sandy beaches, springy meadows as well as talus along its rim.

Cathedral Lake

We spent awhile fishing for rainbows there before heading off and away from the divide and down the outlet stream to Midway Lake.  Midway is in a shallow glacial scoop, so it's a less spectacular lake than Cathedral.  We then headed up a low rise to the south and looked down into Crown Basin.  While we were up on the ridge, we also found a cool marmot skull!

Crown Basin

From there, it was simply a matter of walking back to camp via Pearl Lake, again.  Libby and I fished our way along the east side of the lake that evening for dinner.  We then had a lazy evening watching the sunset.  I regret that a bit because I forgot that we had talked about making the short walk up to Regiment and Battalion Lakes.

More pictures at Flickr.

Day 4: Blackcap Traverse

On our fourth day, we hiked from Guest Lake to Blackcap Basin via a high traverse.  Secor has a route that stays at about 10,400', but we worked our way quite a bit higher.  In fact, we ended up climbing the mountain, dropping our packs maybe 500' below the summit.  Still, Secor's route is class two, and we stayed class one the whole time.


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One surprising feature of the traverse was that we would come across the occasional little meadow along the creeks hanging off the side of the mountain.  We took lunch in one that was right at the origin of the trickling stream seeping out of the rocks.

Libby in high meadow

From that meadow, we straight up the mountain after grabbing some cool water straight from the source.  Without packs, the walk up the will was fine, and the view from the top was rewarding.  We could see from the peaks around Whitney in the south to Ritter and Banner in the north (and beyond).

Ritter and Banner

After leaving the summit, we picked up our packs and headed for Blackcap Basin.  After traversing a few ridges, we headed straight down to Lightning Corral Meadow.  It was great cross-country hiking across dry grassy swards and granite ledges.  The meadow itself was very lovely.

Lightning Corral Meadow

From the meadow, we hiked up to Division Lake to camp for the night.  The path from the lake was interesting.  There were lots of shallow fault lines running across our route, a couple of which were filled with slow flowing creeks.  The view from our camp at Division Lake that night was very lovely.

Finger Peak from the shore of Division Lake

It was a very nice day, and you can see more pictures at Flickr.