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TR: Green River Lakes - canoeing, camping, hiking
Headed to the Green River Lakes area in the Wind River Range this past weekend. August is usually great in my past experience because days are still relatively warm and mosquito start to die down. You can drive right up to the lower lake where there is an established campground. I visited this area last in 2007 and it seems the bark beetle has done a lot of damage since then. The campground was clearcut as they removed the dead trees for safety reasons, leaving only baby pines.
This one of my favorite canoe camping trips. Relatively low crowds, beautiful scenery, easy water. All the water we covered could be done as an out and back in one day, but we camped out two nights above both lakes. You paddle up through the first lake - about 1.8 miles; have lunch on the shores.
Canoe camping is awesome because you can bring so much stuff! My birthday present from last year: http://www.coleman.com/coleman/colemancom/detail.asp?product_id=2794-490&categoryid=10020&brand=. Plus pillows!
Then there is about 1 mile of stream connecting the two lakes. We usually pull the canoe upstream while walking on the banks. The banks are flat, easy meadows. Adding a rope to the back helps to "kick out" the canoe so it doesn't nose dive into the shore. The entire river is very wadeable so you could even walk in the river and pull the canoe if needed. Flows were low.
Paddle up through the second lake (about 1 mile) which is a lovely teal color. From here you can pull the canoe up the main channel however far you want. We ended up paddling upstream via one of the side channels because the current was slow enough. It ended up getting kind of narrow so we found camp.
Initially we picked a tent spot in the meadow. My logic was to have 360 views of grizzlies coming at me. But after some lobbying, my boyfriend convinced me we'd be better off in the trees with a steep mountain side and lots of downed wood that bears probably don't want to climb over. We found some scat in the meadows we that we assumed was grizzly - verdict is still out. In mid July a grizzly was getting into some food of some campers and the FS closed all overnight camping within 5 miles of the trailhead for a week as a precaution. We later learned from the outdoor shop owner in Pinedale that these people camped only 50 feet off the trail right in a meadow and didn't hang their food or bear box it. I felt much better because we did bear box the food and toiletries, and camped in the trees where there was lots of downed logs. We also carried bear spray. My dog did not come with us which was good as I was already worried about bears as is.
The goal of the trip was to hike the backside of Square Top. We used the Finis Mitchell book (really old!) and the Kelsey climbing book which has hikes in it too to help us figure out how to get there. There is no established trail so there was some route finding. We ended up not figuring it out and didn't feel up for straight uphill bushwhacking either, so we just did a 12 mile hike instead near the headwaters of the Green River instead. The third day we had planned to hike up to Slide Lake, but the skies were looking ominous.
We were 1/3 of the way back to the car on the lower lake and winds were picking up and skies were darkening. Waves were nearly pouring over into the boat. It was quite exciting! We hunkered down under a rock wall and waited out the rain, thunder and lightening for about 1.5 hours. Then it finally let up enough that we hightailed it as fast as we could back to the car.
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