Hatcher Pass to Kashwitna River: Day 1

Kellie and I have this uncanny ability to not only buy the exact same clothing items, but wear them at the same exact time. It always starts my trips out with Kellie smiling, we're super cute and disgusting, awesome dichotomy. We got our idea for this trip from Roman Dial's blog post at http://packrafting.blogspot.com/2010/05/wilderness-classic-independent-sheep.html It looked like an ideal adventure for Kellie and I.

 

We may have been initially distracted by our cute matching outfits, but after four miles of hiking on the Craige Creek road/trail we were up in the clouds and forced to pay a lot of attention on where we were trying to go. It is very difficult to navigate in rocky mountains when you can only see 100 yards in front of yourself. We literally were following the contour lines on the GPS map, although mountains are never as straight!

Kellie Doing the Careful Step Down

 

We went up and over a couple of passes at the 4000-5000 foot level, all of it in the clouds. For me its very painful to travel in beautiful mountain country and not see the mountains, the whole time I'm out I think about having to come back. It was very typical of other things I've hiked in Hatcher pass, huge granite boulder fields peppered with tundra and alpine lakes.

 

We had left the car at 3:30ish and by 10 pm were over the wet oppressive mist and slippery ass rocks. There were so many amazing places to camp next to streams on soft flat tundra, we finally chose one and went to sleep with dreams of clearer days.

 

Short Slide Show