non-SIERRA INSPIRATION PHOTOTHON!

[SirBC]

This is from a trip to Denali in 2019. My wife and I spent the first night at Wonder Lake and then the next 5 days we backpacked up the Toklat River. We got an early start the first day after the bus dropped us off at our starting point and hiked in around 6-7 miles. We paralleled one of the branches of the Toklat on our left the entire time and had been looking for a place to cross as there wasn't much terrain to our right as we were up against a mountain range with not many places to camp. We found what looked like the most promising place to cross and gave it go. It didn't go well.

Anyways, we made our way to the other side of the river and setup camp and dried out all our gear that wasn't in a dry bag. There was no way we were going to cross back over that branch when we hiked out, so we decided that we needed to scout out an exit route so the next morning we hiked back to road to make sure we could actually reach the road for when we needed to exit. I left all of my camera gear at camp and we set off. It turned out that we could make it back to the road and near the road there were about 10 stream crossings, none of them difficult.

We reached the road and turned around to hike back to camp. After crossing the last of the streams we hiked up a bank and put on our shoes. I finished lacing up and turned around, saw this, and my jaw dropped. I couldn't believe how insanely gorgeous the view was. I remember blindly reaching for my camera that wasn't there. I may have swore just a little bit. But I made due with my cell phone

Divide Mountain.jpg

[wildhiker]

SirBC, that is truly a gorgeous photo! I'm especially impressed with the bits of blue sky :-). We spent four days at Denali (3 of them at Wonder Lake) in 2008 and saw nothing but leaden skies, with the cloud bases at about 4000 feet. They lightly rained and sometimes snowed on us on and off.
-Phil

[SirBC]

Thanks Phil, we really did luck out with the weather

[SirBC]

From a backpacking trip in the Coast Mountains, British Columbia.


Witness by David Young, on Flickr