Joe and I left Brigham City and headed towards the mountains around 3 p.m. Thursday. We set up camp at Butterfly Lake and decided to just fish there for the evening. Generally I catch TONS of fish at Butterfly but wasn't really having much luck. Joe was out-catching me 4 to 1 (which sucks because he is the newby ha ha).
Friday we played around some more at Butterfly and decided to hike the short trail-less hike to Castle Lake. Again, Joe caught all the fish at Castle. We decided to head back to Butterfly and my wife, son, and my in-laws were fishing and waiting for us at Butterfly. We drove down to Pass Lake and played around a little before returning to camp to cook some dinner. After dinner they went home and Joe and I drove down to Kamas to meet my brother and bring him up to camp.
Saturday is where the story gets good. We decided to go for another small hike to Ibantik Lake. Trying to find a place to park was pretty ridiculous but after a while we finally were able to. What a crazy packed weekend. We got a pretty late start but the hike started out really well.... until we realized we took the wrong trail. We ended up at Watson Lake and realized we took the wrong trail so we hiked straight over over the "mountain" next to us and dropped down to Wall Lake. We fished there for a few minutes but decided to get on our way to Ibantik. The clouds were coming in at this point but we didn't really think it would be too horrible so we trucked on. We ran into several people that were hiking out, none of which had been all the way to Ibantik. Most of the people we talked to said they were catching lots of little bitty brookies but nothing big. We finally made it over The Notch and it had been lightly sprinkling on and off.
We hiked down passed Lovenia and the several other small lakes right there and the rain started to pick up pretty good. We started seeing lightning and hearing lots of thunder and were going to head back but decided that hiking back over The Notch wouldn't be a good idea with the lightning, not to mention we were so close to Ibantik that we decided to try our luck with some fishing.... but just before we got to the lake THIS HAPPENED:
After the hail stopped we went down to the lake (there were several tents at the lake) and we threw in some flies and some lures, none of which proved to be productive (with the rain and all we didn't think the fishing was going to be good anyways). With a break in the storm we decided to hurry and head back over The Notch. We got hit with rain pretty hard on the way out and decided to just hit it hard, needless to say we were completely soaked by the time we even got to back to Wall. From wall I made another small error and we headed down towards Trial Lake (which was the best error of the trip). We had to hike back up to the Crystal Lake Trail Head from Trial. We finally got back to the truck and drove to a camp host site and purchased a few bundles of DRY firewood. We headed back to camp and ate some dinner and cooked a sweet cobler (Cherry Apricot Cake over peaches) it was fantastic. It took us a while to get warm since we were all soaked straight to our bones, but it was completely worth it. Ibantik was quite beautiful, even if we got completely hammered by hail and rain.
Needless to say I was trying to ruin the Uintas for the two brothers with me that were first timers in the Uintas. However, they were already planning next years trip so I don't think it was completely ruined for them.
Aside from Joe catching all the fish (JERK), my constant lack of correct trail picking, and the horrible weather.... It was a great trip.
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