Happy Anniversary

Cathy and I decided to celebrate our anniversary by taking a hike up in the mountains this weekend. I wanted to check out the high country above the Moffat Tunnel so we headed out for Heart Lake in the James Peak Wilderness near the continental divide. On the way up it was hard to miss all the residual fields of snow up on the peaks so the success of this expedition was definitely in question. There's nothing worse then "post-holing" through mushy drifts of snow on a spring hike.

Two and a half miles in, the snow drifts started to become more and more frequent along the trail until finally we were walking almost totally on snow. Water was running everywhere and the ground was completely saturated from run-off. Did I mention we got all of snow this winter?

On the way up we ran into a guy coming down. He mentioned that an elk had ventured out on the ice of Rogers lake and fallen through. Apparently it was still struggling while he was there. "Don't bother trying to fish", he says "the lakes are completely frozen over." After a bit of a debate we decided to press on. Did I mention what a hassle walking on mushy snow was? The last couple of miles were a struggle, but after another hour or so we finally made it to Rodgers. Sure enough, there was the elk.

This may be a bit hard to make out but look in the middle left and you can make out the antlers of a pretty big bull elk sticking out of the ice. Needless to say he wasn't struggling any more. Thin ice is a death trap for man and animal alike.

We were both pretty tired after the snow slog so we didn't try to make it the rest of the way up to Heart Lake. As for the fishing? Well let's just say the guy we met wasn't too observant. Despite the fact that most of the lake still had ice on it, there was a wee bit of open water about the size of your average back yard swimming pool just begging for a closer look. Sure enough the fish were coming out from under the ice and cruising the bottom in the open water. After choosing my go-to nymph pattern from the fly box it wasn't long before I was hooking up on some real nice cutthroat trout.

With the afternoon clouds starting to build over the mountains it was time to bail out. It was another long slog back through the snow fields and, after grinding out the last few miles with feet squishing noisily in the our soaked boots, we made it back down to the car.