It had been a few years since we'd done Englestead and then we ended up doing it last year but Brian got left out. Since he's 60 something and likely to die soon we decided to do it again this year.
Jason went and got permits friday morning and was unable to get orderville permits since he sucks.
We stayed up on the north fork road near the road that heads down. The road has become quite bushy since I was there last and we didn't even see the old logging equipment I was going to show the noobies. It was pretty cloudy and looked to threaten rain but I figured it wouldn't raint ill early afternoon at which point we would be in Orderville.
We left a shuttle vehicle at the upper orderville TH. We figured, correctly, that the climb out would be rough if it did indeed rain. We got back to the top of englstead and started at around 8 (all references to time are in vegas time since I refuse to switch) and finished around 4. We had a total time of 8hrs and 17 min.
All raps look good, though I'd swear that the long piece of brown webbing at the top of rap 3 is the same webbing that was there 7 years ago. We did find several nice sized chunks of snow in the section right after the long hike and before the few exit raps. The chunks were about 8-9' long and about 4-5' wide. You could see that the ground was super wet with tons of dirt and leaves on the walls which points to it recently melting out.
We reached orderville around 1. Still no rain but it had been overcast for an hour or so. About 20 minutes after we started to hike up orderville it started to rain. It rained pretty lightly for about 10-15 minutes then stopped. About 10 minutes below Birch we encountered a couple of rangers. The attractive girl rangette happened to be the same one that issued jason the permit and she seemed very surprised that we were actually hiking out. I grumbled under my breath that I would have gone down orderville if not for the threatening rain.
The rangers were talking on the walkie with someone who was telling them the flash flood danger so they decided to turn around and hike out. At this point it was thundering and raining consistently. As we continued to hike it began to rain harder and harder. Eventually water was running in Orderville. When we reached the Ordeville entrance and started going up it was raining super hard and quite chilly. Climbing up the steep wet mud was a motha fooker. When we reached the top of the little ridge you could hear water running in Orderville and every stream crossing on the hike out across the meadow had running water. Not alot of pics of the rain or running water since we were kind of tense and moving quickly.
It was cool on the hike out to see the tracks of a truck that had gone up. They looked like they had a couple of close calls and a couple of back-ups and restarts. The north fork road turned into a mess. We were in 4low and sliding everywhere. We came across the rangers on the side of the road. They said their ranger buddy was too scared to come in and get them, so we gave them a ride in tha back.
Eventually we got out and cleaned off all the mud. On our way down we saw that keyhole was flowing as well as pine creek. When we came out of the tunnel we saw a helicopter bank in and hover right above the last two raps in the spry canyon proper. We didn't see any water coming over the lambs tongue rap but figured it must have flashed. We watched the helicopter hover the entire time we drove down the switchbacks. When we drove over the virign it was flowing pretty hard as well.
Good times. Sorry for the pic quality, it wasn't till I pulled the pics off and saw they were blurry that I relaized there was a substantial smear on the lense.
