SUMMARY:  The early morning sun showed us lots of smoke. Bummer. We had hoped for blue skies at last, since we were hiking away from all the fires. But the smoke seems to have spread everywhere. Then, even with the GPS, we had a hard time finding the CDT trail and ended up hiking a bunch of extra miles.

The mountains around Brooks Lake, our first goal, are magnificent—the jagged Pinnacles, and another mountain that looks like a massive gray wall—but I could not get pictures of any of them in the gray smoke haze.

The trail did a huge “down” to the Buffalo River, which was wide but shallow—an easy ford. We are still working on the uphill climb from that—whew! Lots of views of deep, dramatic canyons. We hung our food bags from a tree for the first time in this entire hike. Don’t want grizz coming into our tent to get them!

DETAILS:   The early morning sun showed us…smoke!  Oh bother, it had spread out all over the place during the night, so instead of hiking off into blue skies, there was smoke haze enough that it was hard to see the mountains.  We got a great breakfast from the Lava Mtn. Lodge store and scarfed it up at the table in our cabin.

Then it was time to hike!  I had thought the Bear route for the trail went right near Lava Mtn. Lodge, but the Garmin as Fixit understood it said no–that the trail was further up the highway.  Fixit is having a hard time figuring out how to interpret all the numbers that show up on the Garmin screen.  (Note: later on, I decided to “learn” the Garmin and was able to make sense of all the numbers.  What Fixit hadn’t understood at that point was that it shows both the trail AHEAD of you and BEHIND you, and you have to find the waypoint number on your map, then you can spot it on the Garmin and head for it)

We walked and walked and walked–no sign of the trail.  Finally we reached the ROAD to Brooks Lake.  Oh no!  That meant we had totally missed the CDT and done a bunch of unneeded miles.  Oh well.  We walked the road to Brooks Lake, and it was a beautiful sight when we finally got there–surrounded by magnificent mountains, including one that looked like a giant wall, and others, called The Pinnacles, that were dramatically jagged.  Despite the smoke haze, there were people in the campground and people at the Brooks Lake Lodge.  I was bummed because the mountains and scenery were so magnificent, but I could not get a picture of them because of the smoke.  The camera just can’t see gray mountains against a gray sky.  So all I could do was LOOK.

We followed the trail past Brooks Lake and Upper Brooks Lake, meeting folks from the Lodge who were out horseback riding.  Once we were past the lakes, the rest of the day was basically big downs and big ups.  The biggest “down” was to the Buffalo River, which was wide, but very shallow and easy to ford.  After that we began a very long climb, which we are still sort of “on”.  It was interesting to watch the changes in the types of rocks along the trail–quite a variety.  And the forest was varied, too–everything from pretty and green to dead and burned.  And whenever we got to a brushy area, I would yell and make as much noise as I could so if there were any grizz, they would have time to get out of the way.  Fixit does not like yelling, so he leaves it up to me.  I don’t like yelling, either, but I much more don’t like the idea of having a run-in with a grizz.

Tonight we decided we’d better hang our food bags.  It is such a pain to have to do that, and it’s the first time we’ve done it on this hike.  But this is grizz country now, and especially after hearing what happened to poor Zorro, we are being careful.