Gothic Basin & Foggy Lake

We intended to go backpacking with Joshua's coworkers this weekend but we couldn't make it out on time on Friday, so he found us our own little trip. It was hard, and we both whined! The grade was probably the steepest we'd hiked, and we did it with backpacks, also there was a lot of scrambling over wet rocks and we were hungry. I may have complained that he picked the wrong trail but in the end I retracted that! We crossed 3-4 waterfalls that we could dip our fingers in and splash water on our faces as we hiked up through walls of fog and whiteness. At the top we were amongst at least 15-20 other backpacking tents, the most we'd ever seen (a backpacking hotel according to Josh). We found a sweet spot where we couldn't see any of the other tents and we had our own little stump filled pond of water to keep us company. We drank some wine and fell asleep reading Harry Potter.

 

 

 

The next morning we lazily trampsed around the rocks, coffee in hand, and watched as the whispy fog flowed through exposing parts of the mountains around us we couldn't see the day before. We found our way down to a beautiful waterfall and a view of a hidden turquoise lake and scrambled up bunches of rocks before packing up. Then we ditched our packs near a rockface and scrambled up to get to Foggy Lake. I dipped in my toes (and sadly my left boo,t oops) and we got a little sunburnt as we starred at the beautiful lake reflecting the changing mountainscape as the clouds opened up or cloaked different peaks. Then headed back to stare in the other direction at what had been surrounding us as we slept amongst the fog and made some lunch.

 

 

Since the hike up had been so steep we knew our knees couldn't take a slow hike down, so we ran! We jumped over rocks and ran past people who had started down while we were still eating, I think we scared them a bit, we also humbly discussed how we were like nimble agile elves from Lord of the Rings. We made it down in less than 2 hours and retreated to our favorite (closest) restaurant to home and shared a pepperoni pizza. It was the most relaxing backpacking trip we've taken and the slow morning and meandering around the top and the lake and fun run down the mountain felt oddly hopeful, bring it on week.