Rattlesnake Wilderness - cont.

Picking up from the last blog... we spent the 1st night at Carter Lake. Many of the lakes up there were enlarged through earthen dams many years ago. They act to delay runoff and serve along with Rattlesnake Cr as a backup to Missoula's drinking water supply. At Carter Lake, the only flat spot we found to camp on was the top of the dam. I tried fishing at Carter Lake, but it only had very small cutthroat trout. Their mouths were just barely big enough to fit over the hook, but they tried.

The biting flies (specifically the no-see-ums) were out in force along with the mosquitoes. We really haven't had to deal with these bugs (no-see-ums) much in Montana. The extra summer moisture and a cooler year has resulted in a pretty wildflower display and more bugs. We got fairly bit up before we began paying attention to the flies. They leave a bleeding hole in you, but you don't really feel the bite. In addition, we didnt' bring much bug spray (saving on weight) so we had to economize on applying the spray. As a result, we didn't spend as much time outside of our tent once we got to camp as we would have liked. However, the bugs didn't ruin our trip by any means, just added to our story :)

The next two days we packed up and hiked to Twin Lakes and Glacier Lake respectively. They were easy days, with only 2.5 - 3 hours of hiking each day to reach our destinations. On the way to Twin Lake we took a small side trip and climbed to the top of Stuart Peak. From the peak one can see Missoula and the valley floor as you may be able to tell in the photo below.

Glacier Lake is a pretty lake and a large one as lakes go up in the Rattlesnake. Below is a photo looking down on Glacier Lake from our lunch spot on the trail. I thought for sure that the lake would hold fish, but there wasn't a single fish in the lake. An old timer has told me that there were fish in it at one time, so I don't know where they went to.

There were many good spots to camp on Glacier Lake. We chose to camp near the shore since there wasn't any else around (we saw only 3 other people during our 4 days). It was a good spot, except that night a thunder storm rolled through. When the lightening was crackling, we didn't know if our exposed spot was so good after all, but we weren't going to get out in the poring rain to more the tent.

That night, the rain must have loosened the rock on the cliffs/avalanche gullies on the east side of the lake. We heard rock falling during the night and in the morning saw some rock fall actually make it into the lake. A good place for mountain goats or bighorn sheep, but we didn't see any during our trip.

We packed out from Glacier Lake on our last (4th) day. It was an easy hike back to our bikes (approx. 4 miles as a crow flies) and then the 18 miles on our mountain bikes back to our house. What a difference going downhill makes, it took us less than 2 hours to bike home, about 1/2 the time it took to pedal in.