Absolutely spectacular! Blow you mind unique. This is the High Uintas in Utah and my wife and I were lucky enough to spend a few days backpacking there recently.
Fishing Report
My fishing report, or anything I tell you about actually catching fish will be purely hearsay. I fished more than normal on this trip and did not do well. However, talking to several people we saw on the trail, it was obvious that these lakes yield a lot of fish.
From a technique standpoint, I think one of the real keys is to get into or up near the deep water. The best way to do this is to wade on in. These lakes tend to be very shallow around the edges and trees ring the lakes closely. This make them very difficult to fly fish from the shore. Oh, and incidently, notice that the babe in the above picture is packing a fly rod. What a turn on!
The Trip
We headed into the High Uintas Wilderness on Grandaddy Basin Trail 074. This was a fortunate guess for us in what felt like a game of pin the tail on the trail head. For whatever reason we had a tough time getting good advice regarding where to start. We were lucky enough to find a small sporting goods shop in Logan Utah that had a couple of BLM maps of this area and we picked one that had lakes that we could reach quickly. If you click on the map, it will expand to a size that makes it readable.
After a short time on the trail, we entered the High Uintas Wilderness.
The first 2.5 miles was a steady up hill trail to Hades Pass. The trailhead where we parked was at about 9700 feet and the summit of Hades Pass was 10,640. Just after the summit, we were rewarded with this first view of Grandaddy Lake.
We had left our car after 6 p.m. and I was feeling sick to my stomach and Corina had a sore throat. We were quite a crew keeping up a near sprint pace so we could find a camping spot before dark. We made it and found a spot next to Grandaddy Lake that was just perfect.
In the morning, we woke up to this terrific view.
Take a good look. I was struck by how if you took out the mountain background, this could be a scene from NW Ontario. We were on our way into an area of mountain lakes like I have never seen before. Again, if you go back and click on the trail map above, you can get an idea of how many lakes there are. And that map is only one small piece of the High Uintas.
And this next one is our view from camp two. Again, spectacular. This was just one of the 5 lakes we visited on our short 15 mile round trip.
The general area is more or less like a flat top mountain. After climbing 900 feet up and over Hades Pass, the area we hiked was only + or - 300 feet in total. Very easy hiking that would allow for covering some major miles if you had the time. I would love to take a 5 day trip into the heart of this territory sometime. As it was, Corina and I entered on Monday night at 6 p.m and we were back out at the trail head Wednesday at noon.
Before leaving, the cow moose below lazily worked its way out into the middle of this small pond. Very cool and worth the trip in itself!
As you can tell from this write up, I would highly recommend this trip. One warning is that the Grandaddy Basin was obviously a heavily used area. So for us, Monday - Wednesday was a perfect time to be there. I would recommend an early morning departure if heading into this basin on the weekend and a good strong first day hike to get you away from the crowd. There are of course many other trail heads to enter at and I would be happy to help you find a map of the larger High Uintas area if you contact me.
What a magnificent nature!
Posted by: Instant Performer | November 23, 2010 at 01:55 PM
Very easy hiking that would allow for covering some major miles if you had the time. From a technique standpoint, I think one of the real keys is to get into or up near the deep water. T
Posted by: triactol | September 24, 2011 at 01:16 PM