Today we hiked up to White Pine Lake. The trail begins about six miles from the entrance to Little Cottonwood Canyon - about one mile after the Tanners Flats Campground. The trail is actually an old pioneer mining road that hasn't been used for many years but is in pretty good shape and with the exception of a few areas wasn't too steep. The wild flowers were out in force which made the hike even more enjoyable.
We started up the trail about 7:00 a.m. and both of us were a little cold - mom was even wearing a long sleeved tee shirt. After one mile we came to a fork in the trail - a bridge crossed a small stream going right and what looked like the main trail went to the left. There was also a smaller trail that continued straight ahead. Unfortunately someone had removed the sign saying which way to go (great).
Not knowing where to go we decided the best course of action was to continue on the trail that went straight. The path soon became very small and difficult to travel - we had to sidestep a big muddy bog and bushwhack through several low hanging branches and bushes. We both soon realized we were definately not on any kind of a well traveled trail. However we saw that it did go up to a giant waterfall that was very pretty. After looking at the falls we backtracked to the junction to start over again.
Back at the fork in the trail we had to make a decision which way we wanted to go. We knew that one trail went to White Pine Lake and the other went to Red Pine Lake (which was actually our original destination). We finally decided that since we wanted to see both lakes it really didn't matter which way we went so we choose to go left - which turned out to be the trail to White Pine Lake.
The distance from the trailhead to White Pine Lake was 4 miles. The hike was beautiful - we saw meadows full of wildflowers, bustling brooks and unbelievable views of the Wasatch mountains. The elevation at White Pine Lake is a little over 11,000 feet making it almost as high as the top of the tram at Snowbird - so even though it didn't seem like it we had made a significant climb. The lake is in a large bowl surrounded by an old glacier field of boulders and rocks above the timberline - directly below White Baldy and Red Baldy Peaks. The lake was beautiful and very peaceful. We spent about 1/2 hour enjoying the beauty and serenity before we started back down the mountain.
The round trip of 8 miles took us five hours to complete - almost three hours to go up and only half that time to come back down with lots of stops to take pictures and enjoy the scenery. We decided we want to go back again in the winter on our snowshoes - then we noticed a sign on the road as we left the parking lot - "White Pine Slide Area - no parking or stopping from Dec to April". Maybe that isn't a good area to hike in the winter after all. We'll check it out before we slap on the snowshoes.
Enjoy the photos.
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