Eight Lake Basin (with mom and sister)

After our last little day hike in to the Table Rock Wilderness. Mom and Jodie decided that they wanted to take on an easy weekend backpacking trip. Not having much time to look for and research any hikes. I kind of left it up to mom and Jodie. Mom ended up finding a 16 +/- mile hike in the Eight Lake Basin (between Mt. Jefferson and Three Finger Jack. So I mapped it out with a n easy 4 mile into Marion Lake for our first day, a moderate 6 mile day two up to Jorn and Blue Lakes, and another 6 miles for day three. The profile was a smooth 1000ft elevation gain the first two days and a smooth 1000ft loss for the last day.


We did the loop clockwise

As I suspected we were reaching camp by early afternoon. This gave time to wander around the lakes and take and experiment with pictures. It also gave us plenty of time to nap too.

Just a few hundred feet up the trail I spotted the tallest Pinedrop I have ever seen (not that I have seen all that many that I took note of). This one had to be pushing almost 4ft tall.


Jodie is barely if even 5ft herself. This time the Pinedrops were in a seed pod stage.
I wish I could have seen this Pinedrop before it was destroyed

As you can see the stem was the size of my thumb.

We soon reached Lake Ann

Lake Ann

As we continued up the trail we encountered a lot of Pinesap growing along the trail.





Pinesap


I'm not sure what this one is yet...





After getting situated in our camp, we cooled off by the lake for a while. I started getting creative with my pictures while we were sitting there. Playing with different settings that I have never really used. I learned a few things while playing around with my camera.


First playing with the black & white setting

Then trying other digital color filters


Three Finger Jack across the lake. (Which one has no filter?)

As mom and Jodie took a nap I wandered around the lake looking for other interesting things to photograph.






The morning we got up and everything was calm and quiet. Unlike during the night when I thought I was going to be trampled by the deer stampeding through camp. I don't know what the deal was, but the deer were liking our camp.


Three Finger Jack in the morning

We were soon on the trail again. With in an hour we found our selfs in the middle of a burned out forest that had burned back in 2003.






We had originally planned on camping at Blue Lake. About 3/4 of a mile passed Jorn Lake, but when we got to Blue lake there were already other campers there. Besides the other campers everything around Blue lake had been burnt out. So we turned back to camp at Jorn Lake, where the south side had not been burned in the 2003 fire. This turned out to be a much better campsite anyway. So we ended up adding an extra mile and a half to that day an and an extra 3/4 mile the next. Not a big deal, we had plenty of time.


This was the view from our camp of Mt Jefferson

Camping at Jorn Lake was nice, quiet, and peaceful. We were the only ones there, other than a few passing hikers on the trail above us and the Ranger that came through and checked our wilderness permit. I almost forgot we did have some large visitors in the middle of the night. I woke up to the sound of heavy hoofs stomping around our camp. I couldn't see what it was in the dark but looking at the prints in the dirt/mud it looked like we had an elk visit us that night.

We got kind of a late start the last day. I'm not exactly sure what time it was (we all forgot a watch) but if I had to guess I would say we hit the trail around 10:30am. Things got warm, dry, and dusty as we rounded the corner heading north through the burned out ridge just passed Blue lake.


Looking back through the burn at Three Finger Jack


Mom pushing over the ridge.


And down the other side.

Before we knew it we were back into green forests and to Marion Lake again.


Until next time....Keep exploring....