Trip Report Uintas 24th of July Weekend (Ibantik, Castle, Echo, Butterfly)

WHAT A CRAZY WEEKEND!!!!

Lets just start this out by saying that I have never seen that many people in the Uinta Mountains EVER!!! Then again, I have avoided holiday weekends every year too.

I put up a fairly short version of our trip up on my blog too but I will try to give a better "Meat and Potatoes" version of the trip here.

I made the mistake of bringing my best friend with me who is a newbie fisher and a newbie to the Uintas. This was his second time EVER fishing and he out caught me 5 to 1 while fishing.... At every lake we went to :facepalm1: But I guess that is suppose to happen, now he wants to go again.

We camped at Butterfly (since we could only have a fire in an improved site) and started the fishing off Thursday evening with only a few others camping in the C.G. Friday morning/day however there were tons of people there. And by Friday night every site was full and you could barely find a decent spot to fish. My friend and I hiked the super short trail-less hike to Castle lake and caught a few Cut-throats (actually, I caught 1 and he caught SEVERAL) but we only kept 3. We returned to the campsite and my wife and son had driven up with her parents to fish for the day and eat dinner. We cooked up several fish and some dutch oven stuff. We drove to Pass lake and fished some more before sending them on their way and driving to Kamas to pick up my brother from Cedar City.

Saturday we got a late start but decided to hike to Ibantik Lake. The hike started out poorly because we accidentally took the wrong trail and ended up at Watson Lake. We decided to hike straight over the hill to the East and drop down onto Wall Lake. We threw a few lines out with no success and then caught the correct trail and headed over the Notch. It was a fun hike although just below The Notch we started getting some light sprinkles of rain. We decided to keep on truckin' and ran into several people hiking out, none of which had been all the way to Ibantik but had said they were catching lots of small brookies. (We also ran into one very unfriendly guy who didn't seem to like that we were asking him how his day was).

Over the top we took a few photos with our phones to prove to our wives that we weren't in Vegas or something ha ha. As we descended the North side it started raining a bit heavier and we tried to hide here and there while trying to catch the short five minute breaks in the clouds.

As soon as we were just about there (within a couple hundred yards) we got hit pretty hard with Hail. I attached a couple small videos on my blog but I didn't put them on youtube so I can't attach them here (I don't think).

http://ryanfreakingwood.blogspot.com...9-22-2012.html

After the rain and Hail finally quit we decided to hurry and fish for a few minutes but were unsuccessful. Since there had been so much lightning we decided to hurry and hike back over The Notch before it started lightning again. On the hike out I made another small error and hiked down to Trial from Wall. It didn't take me long to realize that we had hiked the wrong way yet again. Once we got to Trial we hiked up the road to the Crystal Lake Trail Head. It was a pretty good hike although we were completely soaked to the bone by the time we got back to the truck.

We bought some dry firewood from a camp host and headed back to Butterfly to warm up and get dry. After dinner the rain had slowed down to nothing and we cooked a pretty awesome cobler (cherry-apricot cake over peaches) then we fished few more minutes before it was too dark.

Sunday was pack up and leave day so we slowly mulled while realizing that it was time to go. We packed up the truck and headed over to the secret lake with Golden Trout.... Once we got there we fished for about 30 minutes before we started getting hammered by rain yet again. I caught one trout that was about 4 inches long... but at least I out caught my newbie friend and brother :cool2:.

Then it was back to Kamas for Lunch and we headed home.

Thanks for reading my wall of Text :) Here are a couple of the pictures from the trip:

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