It was exactly three weeks ago today that I blundered my way up the mountains that some wanted to make into a lake as they extracted some gold from the rocks that comprise it. It was not a "good" run in the sense that snow clogged many of the roads, and that led to two problems: 1) the footing was erratic, sometimes not firm enough to hold even my size 13s; and 2) it made the roads hard to follow, which caused more than the usual amount of wandering up dead ends and into bad situations.

Today, figuring that the snow would be just about gone, I tried it again. Good decision. It was clear, if steep, sailing all the way to the top. The shot above is looking west from near the top, essentially looking down (instead of across like I usually do) the Blackfoot Valley toward Lincoln, which is about five or six miles away.


In exploring a bit around the top, including a northerly circumnavigation on this road (that's Silver King Mountain in the distance), I still managed to get onto some snow on the north side and into a messy logged area on the east side, but mostly the roads were easy to follow and clear.

The vertical of this run was a couple of hundred feet more than my birthday run, and about the same (800 feet) as last Tuesday's run up the mountain overlooking the site of the Unabomber's land. I think if I do this or similar runs a couple of more times, interspersed with my normal rambles, I'll be ready to try the Continental Divide again. The snow up there should be about gone by now, except for one stretch about halfway to the ridge that's on a protected north slope.


The weather was again full of squalls, as this view — much different than my usual — of Stonewall Mountain from the east shows. The temp was high 20s and low 30s, but it was very windy. I had to put up my hood because the ragwool stocking cap didn't do enough to keep my bald pate warm. I'll call today's six miles (down from 6.5 last time up there because I did less wandering).

6; 11.5; 6; 208.3