Lake Margaret Loop

Our beautiful loop trip to Lake Margaret in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness.  The weather I would describe as “dynamic”, with soaking rain showers, hail, sun breaks, and rainbows.

Lake Margaret on our first morning out.  We got soaked the previous night, like a half-hour before reaching camp (we realized our rainpants were still sitting in our closet in San Diego).  We set up the tent quickly in a surprisingly dry spot near the lake.  We had one of those great cozy nights listening to the rain splatter against the tent as we drank coffee and ate cookies.  

We woke up that morning with mostly clear skies.  We knew that the nice weather may not last, but we figured we only had a few hours of hiking before our traverse of the ridge would end and we would begin our descent, so we decided to push on and hoped our nice weather window would last until we could get out of the high country.

Icicle Creek — from our first day out.  I love clear mountain streams 

Climbing above Lake Margaret with fresh hail/gropple/whatever on the peaks.

It may be time for a new pack cover, but a garbage bag works well in a pinch.

As we climbed, the clouds continued to build and were soon spilling over the mountains.

Above Lake Edna 

Lake Edna

 

It’s raining, and throwing frozen precipitation at us, but we don’t care, we’re having fun.

Time for breakfast!  We had planned to camp a second night somewhere in the Chatter Creek Drainage, but all of the suitable campsites were taken, so we ended up hiking all he way to the car.  It was ok, since it made for  longer mileage day and we ran into Leavenworth for a burger and beer.  We didn’t want to head back to responsibility just yet, and I wanted to spend some more time in the mountains, so we drove back out to the trailhead and set up camp in the back of the Durango.