Steam Mill Lake Hike

I did this hike a couple times in July. The first was on The Fourth and was sort of a scouting trip I undertook on the premise that there has to be another reasonable overnighter destination in Logan Canyon other than just White Pine Lake every time. It was also a destination of considerable curiosity, given that no one I talked to in Logan had ever been there, and it’s hard to find a lot of info on it online. The second was an overnighter (!) with the kids from church.

So!:

The Summary

Scenery-to-Effort Ratio: 1.3? The first mile and half is uphill and ugly. The rest is pretty good.

Elevation Gain: IIRC, it’s around 1,200′, most of which you’re gaining during that first mile and a half. The rest of it is between the mill site and the lake.

Obstacles: A few creek crossings, a couple of which have logs (including the one right at the trailhead if you look hard enough); the trail up to the lake might be a little faint and/or look like a creek, depending on the time of year.

Popularity: Apparently low. Saw two other parties the first time I hiked it and maybe four the second time.

Distance: About 9.2 miles to the lake and back. Add another mile if you want to walk around the lake. (Probably. I didn’t do that.)

Location: Logan Canyon, just off Franklin Basin Road. Turn left on Franklin Basin, then go left on the first dirt road after the first bridge. The trailhead is off to the right somewhere.

Pros

• Really nice scenery once you get past the ridge.
• Beautiful creeks and a box canyon lake (although I’m guessing these are best seen as early in the season as possible).
• Some steam mill machinery.
• Not a lot of people.

Cons

• The first mile and a half is a long slog uphill through trees.
• No water on the bottom half of the hike.
• Kind of a difficult trailhead to locate.
• A lot of horse manure and cow pies.

The Rest

And then the first thing you do is cross a slow-moving stream, which is maybe more bog than spring. There’s a log there if you look for it, which I didn’t the first time out. OTOH, it was a good place to see if the dog could swim (she can).

Then you reach the creek and things get more interesting despite the relative lack of trailside snowmobiles.

Then you reach the steam mill site itself. I’m guessing it was a sawmill and not a place where steam was milled.

There are a lot of good campsites between the mill and the lake. Or, if you wanted, you could take a left at the Steam Mill and somehow end up at White Pine Lake. I didn’t do that.

There’s a small pond that comes before the lake. The small pond is not the lake. The lake looks like this:

And then, the way back looks a lot like the way there.

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Sigh: Hiking to Cherry Creek Falls

One day, I’ll look back on this post and be amazed at… I dunno. I can’t imagine what in this particular post is ever going to leave me thinking: yeah, that was a good use of a half-hour of my time or similar. Maybe I’m shooting too high.

Too highly? No.

This hike tl;dr –> Falls are nice, otherwise it’s kind of a steep tree prison with snakes. OTOH, lower starting elevation than a lot of the hikes around here, so it’s snow free when some other places aren’t. Also: what else did I have going on that day?

6 miles total (out-and-back), 2,000′ of elevation gain. Trail was a little overgrown with grass and weeds. Trailhead is at the Cherry Peak Ski Resort (there’s a parking lot just north of the base) near Richmond, Utah. Two creek crossings with narrow logs for bridges that the dog was too afraid of and so I had to wade across the creek both times while carrying her. Poor little dog. The water was high enough and fast enough that she made the right call.

So you spend the two miles or so in a steep tree prison. Can’t see anything but trees (sometimes the creek) and it’s pretty steep. Not my favorite kind of hiking. Eventually the trees get a little sparser and the scenery picks up.

^^ That might be Cherry Peak.

A lot of wildflowers if you’re into that sort of thing:

Sun was in the wrong place for most of the hike. Maybe it’s more of an afternoon hike than a morning one. Is that a thing? I guess it can be now.

Here we go. Eventually I turned around so the lighting wouldn’t be a problem.

And then, eventually, there’s the waterfall.

So you got that going for you.

Hard to get from the waterfall viewpoint down to the waterfall itself, so we didn’t do that. Actually Aela kind of wanted to, but I didn’t want to go down after her — it was kind of just a cliff heading down there.

And:

• Fine, it’s really just the first third of the hike that’s a chore, but still. You promise yourself things during that first third that are hard to take back later.
• The other two-thirds are mainly fine, particularly once you get out of the trees.
• I saw more snakes on the trail (two) than other humans (one).
• The trail continues up toward Cherry Peak and eventually you can get to Naomi Peak and Tony Grove this way, should you choose to do so.
• But: toward the end of June when I did this hike, there were still some serious snowfields just above this waterfall, so…
• Also: there are no campsites anywhere on the trail to these falls. Some reports online said “camping: yes”, but I have no idea what they were talking about. I think the first campsites you’d come to would be past Cherry Peak at that one lake, which is a good, I dunno, four more steep miles past this waterfall.
• Your clothes get dirty when you’re constantly having to carry a wet dog across creeks. They also get damp.

And then we got to the car and drove home.

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Another Local Hike: Jardine Juniper

This one was a few weeks ago at this point, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t deserve — nay, require — coverage on my important weblog.

This is a hike in Logan Canyon. It starts low enough that it wasn’t under snow at the time we did it. It runs about 10 miles total and ends at the famous Jardine Juniper, once thought to be the oldest tree in ALL OF UTAH, but later established to not, in fact, be as old as some other trees within the state. Still, it’s like 1,500+ years old, so: it’s old.

Point being: dogs.

Did this hike with Eric and his dog (hence the second dog). Once you get high enough, you start getting views that make Logan Canyon look like Switzerland.

I mean, a little bit. Fewer tunnels, cheaper restaurants (cheaper everything).

And then here’s a badly lit photo of the old tree.

And one other photo, just because I exported it and what the heck.

Thoughts:

• There were a couple places you could camp along the way. (These aren’t all deep thoughts.)
• A lot of mountain bikers — possibly a function of going up there on a Saturday.
• Eric’s dog ran away for a while. Mine was pretty good, although she seems to enjoy peeing on the trail more than I’d prefer.
• Steep in places.
• Took my new ABC watch, which did a good job of reporting the elevation gained, which I think was why I bought it?
• There’s eventually a choice to take either the “scenic route” or the “shady route”. We took the scenic to the tree, then the shady on the way back.
• The two routes are pretty equivalent in both scenery and shadiness. For the record.
• At one point it occurred to me to wonder what the tree would tell us about all it had seen if it could talk. It then occurred to me that it would probably say stupid things like: it was cold sometimes, but not other times, and then one time it was hot and later there were some birds and then they left and… And the whole conversation would probably be the worst and awkward to get out of.

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Turns Out Mid-June Was Too Early for White Pine Lake This Year

I was kind of worried it might be, but I was supposed to be going on an overnighter to White Pine next week with the church kids, and, as the responsible adult, I thought it might be wise to check it out and make sure that was going to be doable.

It probably wasn’t (isn’t?).

OTOH, I got some nice-looking photos during that .7 of a mile that I made it up the trail before hitting the snowfield (it’s a 4.5-mile hike with 1,200ish feet of elevation gain — there was still another 800 feet of elevation yet to gain though).

Photos, here:

^^ That’s where I stopped. The trail continues kind of that way, but it was located under the snow somewhere, and — yeah. It was really pretty like this, though. Too bad there’s nothing that’s ever been invented that could have helped me hike across that snow and achieve my (and the dog’s) objective.

So we turned around. This is what giving up looked like:

And then, once we were back to the parking lot, I made the curious decision to head around Tony Grove Lake on the nature trail, which was fine except that on the steep side of the lake the trail was completely under snow, but I kept going anyway. Survived it. Kind of a better workout that way. Got to watch the dog scale an almost vertical rock at one point. Brave little girl-dog, so proud of her.

Anyway. Here’s a sense of what all that looked like.

Not the vertical rock, just the nature trail (somewhere on the left side of that picture is where the trail is supposed to be). I’m way too slow with the camera to get photos of dogs spontaneously deciding to scale vertical surfaces. It’s a failing of mine.

• It’s kind of pretty up there though.
• Added bonus: since apparently it’s too early in the season to do anything at Tony Grove, parking/admission was free.
• Plus there weren’t a lot of people around. I mean, not zero, but only four cars in the parking lot has to be some sort of win.

I swear that one of these days I’ll post something that’s not a rehash of some hike no one cares about. TBH, though, I’m really my own target audience with all this, and I’m just not sure what I’ll eventually care about. Maybe this?

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Richards Hollow Falls: A Pleasant, Nearby Day Hike

For whatever it’s worth, I have within the last 12 months gone on a dayhike and not reported on it. OTOH, I’m reporting on this one apparently.

Richards Hollow Falls is in Richards Hollow (!!), just up the Left-Hand Fork Road in Blacksmith Fork Canyon. These are all places in Cache Valley, a little south of Logan.

Three miles round-trip, IIRC it was about 1,000′ vertical gain so steep-ish, and not all that crowded I guess. I dunno.

Yet another hike,
Ends at a small waterfall.
Some river crossings!

Even haikus can be disappointing. The hike was fine, though.

You have to go down a pretty steep little slide to get to the place where I took that last photo. There was a log that had fallen over the slide, though, which stymied the dog. Which, I mean, good. Her life is way to easy. OTOH, I had to lift her over the log and she has muddy paws and can be a little squirmy.

It came out in the wash.

I’d never been up Blacksmith Fork Canyon before. The drive in was very pretty. It’s been a wet winter and spring, so everything’s green, which I like. If the climate here has to change, I’d rather it becomes more like Seattle’s than like Arizona’s. Much rather.

Also, once you turn off the main road and onto Left-Hand Fork Road, both sides of the road were turned into makeshift campgrounds for people with toy haulers and large RVs. It was a scene, felt a little like I was in the south, which… yeah. The folks flying the confederate flag kind of added to that. People are special, I guess.

And then I went home and continued doing nothing of interest.

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Autumn Comes to Temple Fork

I think at some time I posted about a quick hike I took up to the Temple Fork sawmill site. Huh, looks like I did. Anyway, I hiked up to the same site yet again, only this time IN THE FALL. Crazy.

Colors were different and I got a couple photos I liked. Here:

So, fall’s not all that ugly here either.

Plus, I’m now only seven months behind on blog posts.

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Summiting Mt. Naomi

It’s also called Naomi Peak. It’s the highest peak in the entire Bear River Range (!). You know, if you sub-divide your mountain ranges thoroughly enough, every peak can be the highest peak in something.

So I had this one student last spring whom I saw at the dog park last summer and we talked about, hey, we should take our dogs hiking some time. And then he followed up, and then we ended up taking our dogs hiking up to Mt. Naomi Peak. I don’t know if Peak should be capitalized. Or included.

The hike was fun, a little steep, not much shade, and that’s most of the details. Was good to also have non-canid company on a hike for once.

A lot of the scenery looked like this:

Dog of Danger at the peak:

Pano from peak:

I think we might try to hit Jardine Juniper this summer before he moves back to Arizona. Hopefully the dogs get along okay in the car if so.

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Logan Canyon and Temple Fork Sawmill

Every time I talk to someone local about a hike I want to do that happens to not be in Logan Canyon, they get upset and tell me that there’s lots of good hikes in Logan Canyon. I mean, sure, and there are, but (a) there’s more than one canyon in the world worth exploring, (b) there are a ton of places within a four-hour drive of here that seem pretty cool, and (c) it’s really not that big a canyon, and people who live in THE VALLEY seem to have a hard time grasping that there’s a rest of the world that stretches beyond Sardine Canyon and Bear Lake, where sometimes things are also pretty good.

Anyway, it’s nice to have some worthwhile outings available for which the trailhead is within a half-hour of my house. Some time this summer (July? June? I dunno) I took this hike up to Temple Fork Sawmill, which some website over-hyped, but that was fine anyway. It was fine. The “Temple Fork” is a fork in the (Logan) river; the sawmill is a sawmill that doesn’t exist any more, but was used in the construction of the Logan Temple a while back. Guys apparently camped up there and worked in the sawmill while their wives were down in the valley tending to the livestock or something, then sometimes the guys would go down to the valley or their wives would come to the sawmill. And then the white salamander came, people started getting called to three-year missions in Russia, and someone else’s great aunt’s ward reduced the three-hour block to only two.

Heady days.

There’s a parking lot at the trailhead. Plenty of parking. It’s not a long hike, four miles maybe. There’s a lot to look at if you start the hike within a couple months of moving here from Oklahoma. Frex: there’s a river (!), green grass (!), some trees (!), and hills (mountains?) that, you know, exist (!).

Easy hike, could take kids on it. The sawmill isn’t there any more still though.

This was in June. June 7th, 2017.

This time, the unicorn’s horn does not point the way.

This is what’s left of the sawmill (man, my beard was so short back then):

But mostly just sort of this (although, relative to Oklahoma…):

This was a favorite:

And then I got to the trailhead, someone’s dog jumped out a truck window while the truck was still going about 20 mph, and I drove home, vowing (eventual) vengeance.

For the dog? For all of us.

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Hiking Logan Canyon: White Pine Lake

If you look up “best hike in northern Utah” in the dictionary, everyone agrees that that’s the High Creek Lake hike. I didn’t go on that one though.

White Pine Lake is a pretty great hike, particularly considering its trailhead is 30 minutes from my house, right next to Tony Grove Lake. It’s possibly #2.

View of Tony Grove Lake (and parking lot!). This is about a half-hour from my house.

~The Lake~

Heading back.

I don’t love the shirt.

<fishing-related story>I took my fishing pole up there with me. When I got to the lake, I went through the jam-knot marathon to tie my bubble  on behind the swivel, the leader to the swivel, then the fly to the leader. Went down to the lake side and filled up the bubble. Opened up the bail, cocked the rod behind my head, threw forward to cast, and my bubble, leader, and fly all went flying off into the water, detached from the rest of my line. I only brought the one swivel. My bad.</fishing-related story>

• It’s about an eight-mile round-trip.
• There are some decent-looking campsites at the lake.
• It’s a pretty well-used trail.
• The two mountains seen above are, I think, Mt. Gog and Mt. Magog. (Gog is the one seen most frequently above.)
• I don’t think there are actually all that many fish in that lake.

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