Finishing the trip

Here's Karl crossing the proverbial finish line at the end of the trip. He looks fairly decent considering he's got big blisters on both feet!

Thankfully John let Karl borrow his trek poles.

Burn area re-growth

Much of the Lost Creek Wilderness was burned a few years ago after a love sick Forest Ranger burned up her love letters, thereby creating a huge forest fire that burned millions of acres of forest. Needless to say, she's spending alot of time thinking about her poor judgement in prison. As you can see, the re-growth is coming along well.

Wildflowers

The wildflowers were in bloom throughout the hike.

Can you have a fire in the rain?

We figured out a little trick to keep a fire going in a torrential downpour. We used bark to create a teepee like covering over the fire, which allowed us to keep it dry enough to stay lit through almost 2 hours of rain.

What do you do when it rains?

What do you do when it rains and you're hiking/camping...well, if you are us, you break out the hard liquor, setup a tarp, and drink heavily!

Here comes the rain

It rained almost every day. On the 3rd day, at Lake Park, the storms rolled in and dumped on us. Here's a pic of the storm just starting to roll in over some rock formations near our campsite.

Your water tastes like what?

Needless to say, the water quality in the Lost Creek wilderness, especially at Lake Park, was very poor. Here's a picture after we've filtered it...and after we added iodine to try to clean it further. Yep, it's still a wonderful pee yellow color. Needless to say, we drank alot less water after this campsite.

On top

Here's Mark and Karl at the top of one of the mountains we climbed in the Lost Creek wilderness.

Um, isn't that rock shaped like...

I'm sure you can guess what we named this rock formation.

Lost creek gets lost

Here's where Lost Creek goes underground and, er, gets lost????

View from the top

We did climb a few of the rock formations...here's Karl approaching the cliff at the top of one of the rock formations. Just a little push and...ah, just kidding ;-)

Big rock formations

There were lots of large rock formations throughout the hike such as this one...

Dinner and a fire

Here's John, Mark and Karl around the fire at the first campsite.

Turtle rock

One of my favorite rock formation was one I titled "Turtle Rock".

Grave

Along the way the trail led us to an old cabin that was used by the workers in the early 1900's who were planning on creating a damn on Lost Creek -- which was never completed. Next to the cabin was the unfortunate location of a grave for one of the workers.

Views of rock formations

Here's Karl and Eric checking out the views along the trail of the numerous rock formations in Lost Creek Wilderness.

Start of Hike

Here's Eric, Karl and John, with the big packs on, at the start of the hike into Lost Creek Wilderness. We took the Hankins Pass trail at Goose Creek Trailhead.