Blue Lake ~ The Adventure That Changed the Course of My Life
I hadn't seen my best friend for 4 years after moving away from Michigan. By chance we found each other again and he invited me on a backpacking trip in the Colorado Rockies. I grew up car camping, which is very popular in Michigan, but multiday hiking trips wasn't something I'd done before. When Brian invited me out to his place in Wyoming for a backpacking trip, a yes was a no brainer.
Luckily, Brian had recently acquired some gear for both his family and himself. Since it was going to be just the two of us, he had some gear I could use. He planned out the whole trip out and I was simply along for the ride. Brian had never hiked seriously either, so his goal was to summit a mountain peak for the first time and for this trip the destination was Cameron Peak. Because we were novices, we overpacked our bags, which easily weighed 50 pounds a piece.
His planning fell a bit short though, because we started our trek from Chambers Lake, making our way along the shoreline until meeting a mountain stream to follow up into the mountains. This was not a maintained trail, because there was actually a designated trailhead many miles away that he was unaware of.
I often wondered how he missed this, but after our trip and multiple times throughout the years, I too looked for the trail using Google Maps to find the location of the trailhead and it wasn't listed. Of course, this was 13 years ago. Today as I write this account it is listed and I'll be showing you a screenshot of the trailhead and where we went in.
We officially found out about the trailhead after coming across other hikers on the trail, once we had reached the maintained trail. While there was a semblance of a trail along the stream, it was more a deer trail than a maintained trail for hiking. That being said, I don't remember the way we entered being any more difficult to navigate than the maintained trail.
The name of the trail is the Blue Lake Trail. We made our way to Blue Lake, which is roughly 5 miles from the trailhead and then to Cameron Peak, which I guesstimate to be about another 2 miles. We made a three day hike out of it.
We didn't quite make it to the lake on the first day, because of the rocky start by blazing our own trail and if you notice from the images, my buddy is a pretty large guy. After about 8.5 hours hiking, he was ready to set up camp for the night. The next day we found out that our intended camp site was a mere 45 minutes further up the trail. When finally reaching Blue Lake there was only one suitable area to set up our tents, which happened to be inside a small group of trees not to far from the shoreline of the lake.
When we finished setting up camp, Brian wanted to summit the mountain, so we went hiking around a bit more taking a ton of pictures. I'm only sharing a small fraction of them here. As we got close to the peak I was getting bored and my pup was tiring, so I turned back, while Brian continued on.
He was determined to summit his first mountain, which happens to top out at around 12k feet. I made my way back to camp where I found a kids fishing pole that someone left behind and got it working. After catching some grasshoppers that were all over the place, I had no problems catching 4 brown trout for supper.
The next morning we had a eerie yet magical moment as a fog rolled up through the valley filling the whole canyon. We woke in time to watch it roll through in slow motion. It was then time to leave unfortunately.
What took us around 9 hours to climb only took a 2.5 hour decent to make it back to our vehicle. Since our visit, there have been a few fires, which have devoured the area, specifically the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire. I do plan on returning to hike the trail properly from the trailhead one day.
It was this experience that inspired me to not only backpack more often, but to research about how to lighten my pack load. This blossomed into an interest in survival/bushcraft techniques and minimalizing my material needs for life in general. It was literally a life changing experience. Can you contribute one specific experience to the way you choose to live today? If so, please share it below or write up a blog about it and tag me, so I can read it.
As for Brian, he died in a car crash two years later and I'm so happy to have had this adventure with him that will be with me for the remainder of my life.
All Images are my own, except where sourced