High Uintas High Jinx

For the 4th, we decided to forego the parades, pancake breakfasts, and pyrotechnics, for an overnight trip to the High Uintas with our favorite partner-in-hike, Murphy Brown.

Tuesday was a long day-before-a-holiday at work and so when 5:00 came along, I was only too happy to make a fast break for the door. Mark picked me up at the TRAX, we stopped at home to get Murph and our gear and off we were .... into the quiet cool forests beyond Kamas.

After making a few stops along the way, we got to the Highline trailhead some time after 8 and started walking. For what guidebooks claim is one of the trails that offers LESS solitude in the Uintas, it was amazingly deserted. We ran into maybe 3 groups leaving the trail and by about 9ish, we decided we'd stop for the night and camp at a nearby meadow.

Doused in DEET-free Natrapel, the skeeters weren't an issue really. But by the time we were setting up camp, they must have been getting extra hungry and that's when I decided to pull out:

THE COILS

The packaging said they would protect an 8-10' circumference but just to be safe, I lit up 3 around our perimeter. They worked! No bites while we were cooking! The "coil smoke" didn't really smell like anything ... but I have no doubt that the emissions had to be noxious. Oh well.

We shoveled down some sort of pre-made dehydrated insta-dinners and promptly snuggled into our sleeping bags. Murph was a bit confused .... why are we sleeping when there is a ton of sniffing and digging to be done outside? Several times throughout the night, he decided to slip through under the tent (we had a BetaMid) and go out and get to all that sniffing and digging. Ordinarily that wouldn't bother me much ... but with news of bears eating people at campsites recently, well ... I thought it might be worthwhile to get his appetizing meaty self back. He'd return only to leave again soon after. Oh well.

When we got up the following morning, it was amazingly cool and only got comfortable again when the sun came up. With the infamous coils ablaze again, we cooked up our next pre-made dehydrated insta-meal called "Bandito Scramble." Preparation instructions called for using cold water but, we figured why would anyone want cold eggs? Hot omelettes all the way! We boiled some water and heated ole Bandito a few minutes and sat down in the sun for breakfast.

BLECH!!!

The eggs tasted like a junkyard souffle! Somehow preparing the meal with heat must've transferred some of the titanium pot metallic taste to our precious Bandito. We had a few snack bars but ... faced with several hours of hiking ahead of us, we decided we had to choke down the souffle. Well, on the up side, we must have fulfilled our recommended daily allowance of rusted metals.

After quickly breaking down camp, we were off again. We ran into another group heading back down and were warned that a bear cub was up the trail about 0.5 miles. Hmm, well, maybe I wasn't just being paranoid, eh? We never saw any bear but we think maybe we saw signs of bear (that reminds me, I've got to google bear poop).

Aside from a 1-mile section, the rest of the trail was well supplied with babbling brooks and lakes galore. Murphy dipped his feet and swam in every single body of water, I kid you not. We made our way to Blue Lake, where we stopped for a PBJ, a drink, and a coil-chaser. The rest of this TR is best told by way of pics ....