Wallowa Moutains

We set out for eight days of backpacking in the Wallowa Mountains in shorts and tee shirts.  We spent our first night at the popular lake basins area.  We left the parking lot a bit late so we got to camp near sun down and quickly set about to put up the tent and make dinner.  The area was gorgeous but a bit crowded for us, we did see three other groups.  The next morning we packed up and headed over Horton and Frazier passes and attempted to take a great short cut I scouted out on the map.  Unfortunately we didn't have a topo map of the area and a rather large drainage blocked my short cut, Alexis was mildly not amused.  We bush-whacked 1000 vertical feet down an avalanche path and made camp just as the sun was setting.



The following day we got up a bit late and headed up towards the lake I was trying to short cut us to, but this time by the trail route.  After hiking all day up a pass and back down the other side we found a camp by Cached Lake a mile or so short of our original goal but it was after all getting dark.  Day four found us a bit on the sore side (Alexis blamed the avalanche chute) and we decided to take a layover day.  We enjoyed the day hiking down to our original goal lake.  After returning to camp Alexis decided to enjoy the sun in camp while I hiked over another pass to a great little lake, Pop Lake.



We woke in the middle of the night to a heavy rain, which slowly relented to a drizzle.  That morning the rain stopped enough for us to make breakfast and pack up our camp.  As the weather turned again towards rain we hiked back over the pass and down to the Minam Valley; it was much easier hiking down.  We weren't quit sure which route we were going to take back to our truck, but we still had three days, and decided to head down valley.  We stopped, surprisingly enough, a couple of hours before darkness fell and had a great camp near the Minam River.  The weather was still not looking great but we had a camp fire and settled in for the night.



When we awoke the following day (after a full night of rain) the cloud ceiling was only a couple hundred feet above us.  As I was getting breakfast together the clouds broke and I noticed that the surrounding hills were a peculiar shade of white just a thousand feet above us.  The weather didn't seem to be improving so we decided that it would be prudent to move into the drainage that our truck was in, not the next one over as our other exit route was 35 miles of trail and about the same of hitch-hiking.  We first started up the Minam Valley, but a sun break convinced us to take the more direct route.  After the first hour of hiking the snow started falling, after another 20 minutes it started sticking on the ground.  We pressed on and reached the pass after another two hours of hiking, sometimes through knee-deep snow.  We reached our truck just before it was completely black and drove just down the hill to sleep.  Unfortunately a mouse and found its way into the back of the truck (we've been fearing this all year with all the food in the truck) and kept us up most of the night.  We are now recovering at a motel in Lewiston Idaho and are planning to head to the Seven Devils area for another backpacking trip.