Wasatch Rebel
06-05-2009, 04:31 AM
I will post some pics later, but here's my report. In previous years, I had actually never been too far up the Mill B North Fork trail, so this was a new one for me. I found it to be a challenging hike up to the saddle to the west of Mt. Raymond, and there were places where the trail vanished entirely for short spans. The weather was cooperative though and we never needed a jacket, but there was cloud cover, so we didn't get extremely hot either. Once we got up to the top, we couldn't find the trail to the other side, having never been up there before, and the northern face was still buried in a lot of snow, so that's probably where the trail was. There were no recent tracks that we could find indicating a possible direction. We followed the ridge to the west for maybe half a mile toward Thayne's Canyon, hoping we'd see a trail somewhere going down into the Porter's drainage, but no, just steep walls and six feet thick patches of snow.
The bottom line is, we ended up returning the same way we went up. Still had a good time though.
And the weasel we saw on the way up was way cool too. We found a freshly killed rat or some kind of rodent at least in the middle of the trail. I picked it up by the tail and moved it off to the side. A second later, the weasel that had killed it came back looking for it from the trail ahead of us. I tossed it up there, but my motion scared the weasel back into the brush, but the fearless little creature came back out, and circled around back to the original spot where the rodent had been. Not finding it, he searched around and finally spied it on the trail ahead, raced up there, and carted it off. I tried to get pics of that, but my stupid camera with the two second delay wasn't very helpful with this darting action. When I look through the pics, I'll see if I even have one where you can tell there's a weasel in it.
The bottom line is, we ended up returning the same way we went up. Still had a good time though.
And the weasel we saw on the way up was way cool too. We found a freshly killed rat or some kind of rodent at least in the middle of the trail. I picked it up by the tail and moved it off to the side. A second later, the weasel that had killed it came back looking for it from the trail ahead of us. I tossed it up there, but my motion scared the weasel back into the brush, but the fearless little creature came back out, and circled around back to the original spot where the rodent had been. Not finding it, he searched around and finally spied it on the trail ahead, raced up there, and carted it off. I tried to get pics of that, but my stupid camera with the two second delay wasn't very helpful with this darting action. When I look through the pics, I'll see if I even have one where you can tell there's a weasel in it.