Backpacking Trip to the Uintahs

Mike and I and Dave and Jenn went on a little backpacking trip over this past weekend to the Uintahs. Friday night, we hiked about 4 or 5 miles in on the Christmas Meadows trail toward Ryder, McPheters, and Kermsuh Lakes trails. Then the guys took us off trail, bushwhacking!, for about 10 minutes until we found a good area to set up camp.

On Saturday, we hiked toward Ryder Lake and McPheters Lake which ended up being about a 10 mile day hike. After visiting the frozen over McPheters Lake the guys wanted to follow the outlet to see if there were any waterfalls, and there were! But that meant more bushwhacking - a lot of it! I haven't crossed so many rivers, swamp lands, nor climbed under and over so many trees.

Sunday we hiked up to Kermsuh Lake which was a shorter hike although we did a lot more bush-whacking on that hike too. The guys wanted to fish along the creek on the hike up so Jenn and I headed on out ahead of them. However, Mike said the trail would be hard to follow once we got to the big meadow. Yeah. That was an understatement. We lost the trail entirely. Good thing Mike gave me his GPS with the lake flagged on it. We followed the GPS's straight line to the lake and that meant bush-whacking again. But we made it to the lake! Hung out there for a while waiting for the guys to show up and to fish at the lake for a while. Then we hiked out of the lake, packed up camp, and hiked out to the car. We didn't see any animals on our trip at all until we were driving on the highway back home - we saw several deer and a moose!