Sylvan Lake

After a good night’s rest, we woke up to clear blue skies. It was only 37F at 6:30a … but the temp rose to 43F within an hour … faster than it has in the past few days.

Bundling up, I sat out for a bit to read. Good thing I did. Otherwise, I would have missed the mule deer that came charging out of nowhere, running through our campsite so fast that I had to wonder if there was a predator in hot pursuit. If there was, it was nowhere to be seen and the deer quickly disappeared.

We left the Cruiser around 9:30a. Our plan was to hike the Sneve Gulch Trail … 5.2 miles in/out … with about 1,600 feet of elevation gain.

When we got to the trailhead, however, we decided to save our energy for a meadow hike we had in mind for later and opted to follow along Forest Service Road 400 instead. It was closed to traffic. It was wide. The elevation gain was gradual … only about 300 feet to our turnaround point. And it had the one view we were really interested in seeing … an aerial look at Sylvan Lake.

We stopped to have a snack at the pond formed by the muddy headwaters for Sylvan Lake. Then, instead of retracing our steps, we found a narrow path through the forest … ¼-mile down to the inlet of the lake. The bug swarms were out in thick clouds again, so we didn’t dally once we got down to the Lake Shore Loop. We had our photos already … and had somewhere else to be as well.Read more