Epic Backpacking Adventure -- September 1977

Last month, I posted a description of a backpacking trip I took with Dan and Carl into a basin in the Three Sisters Wilderness. I noted in that post that I had first visited the area back in the seventies with some grade school friends. Well, I attended the wedding of my friend Phil last weekend, and he gave me a disc with some photos from the trip we took in 1977. Here are a few of them.

At left is Phil, John and me at the trailhead. Lawrence, Phil's dad, took the photo. I was 14 years old at the time. That was the first year the big trailhead parking lot was there -- the year before, the trailhead was right on Century Drive, and the parking area was nothing more than a pull-out on the side of the road.

That's Phil and me on the right. We climbed a cinder cone and John took that photo of us from higher up on the cone. I was an avid tree climber when I was younger -- don't do a lot of that these days.

On the left is a picture of me on the summit of the cinder cone with John. The picture at the very top of this post shows the little monument we built on the summit. We spent an entire week at this particular lake, so we had lots of time to explore the area while we were there.

But we still managed to find some time to fish. That's me on the right holding a 17-inch brook trout caught at the cliff area that I described in my earlier post (the CCC shelter is behind me). The lake used to be stocked with brook trout, but they stopped doing that in the 1990s when it was determined that the brookies were wiping out the local frog population by eating the frog eggs that were laid in shallow water. Now the lake is stocked with cutthroat and rainbow only.

We didn't bring any flotation devices with us, so we did our best to improvise while there (left). When we were up there the year before, we actually built a raft by tying logs together. The raft fell apart while we were in the middle of the lake, though. Our attempt to take the log out onto the lake had a similar ending.

The picture on the right was taken on our way back to the trailhead at the end of the trip (at the point where the Six Lakes Trail meets the Senoj Lake Trail, two miles east of the Pacific Crest). I have a specific memory of the taking of this photo, because the place where I put my hand on the tree was covered with pitch so I had pitch all over my hand for the rest of the hike out.

Thanks for the photos, Phil -- they brought back a lot of memories.