5 Day Uinta Trip Post 2 - Let it Rain, Let it Hail

Thursday July 7, 2011

To start off this post lets just say that rain and hail shouldn't be an excuse to have a terrible week but we were getting a little frustrated with the amount of rain and hail. We woke up Thursday and cooked some sweet french toast and sausage for breakfast. About half way through cooking I realized that I forgot to pack syrup. I don't know about all of you but I hate eating warm breakfasts without syrup. The first thing we did was drive down to Kamas to get a bottle of syrup. That was an emergency.

Lets get on with the fun times....

We decided to head to Echo Lake since we had never been there and also wanted to catch... well, lets not talk about what we wanted to catch... Shhhhh, its a secret ;)

anyway, The road to Echo was fairly rough but nothing that my truck couldn't handle. There were only a few small snow drifts on the road but quite a few large puddles. When we arrived at Echo the entire surrounding flat area (which really isn't that much flat area) was completely wet. It was nearly impossible to walk anywhere without getting your shoes wet. The weather quickly turned nasty and started pouring rain. Coincidentally we grabbed my boys mini tent for him to chill in while we had to hang out under trees to try and keep dry. We had walked quite a ways around the lake and didn't want to head back until we had caught a prize. Since it was raining I decided to go for a quick run/hike up the mountain. After about 20 minutes the rain turned into giant hail. And by hail I don't mean little girly pebbles of hail.

After I quit hiding under a few trees I finally decided to take a few pictures of the lake. Quite beautiful if you ask me. And also, I now know why they call it Echo Lake. When there is thunder, it definitely leaves you in awe.

There was water pouring in from everywhere and there was still a good amount of giant snow piles all around the lake. Aside from the hail and rain this was a great little detour from our original plan in the Uintas. We caught a nice little Brooke Trout but with such bad weather it was pretty hard to do much. Not to mention we took advantage of a nice break in the weather and high-tailed it out of there since we had my 18 month old with us. Lucky for us that the weather stayed terrible so its a good thing that we left when we did. Oh well, I guess we now have an excuse to go back to this lake later on in the year.

With such bad weather we really didn't do much the rest of the day.

Friday July 8, 2011

With my wives' family arriving at our camp on Thursday we were able to fish with them on Friday. We decided to be a little lazy and just fish Trial Lake. We caught a few fish (that were tasty) but nothing to blow away a record book. I had fish chasing my lures all the way to shore but I was having a hard time getting them to bite. My father-in-law was having some great success with flies (particularly wooly buggers). Most of the fishing around the crowded lake was being done with power bate. Let me just interject right there and say that I absolutely hate fishing with power bate. I HATE IT. Anyways, we caught a few nice looking rainbows and what I am very certain was a tiger trout but everyone had their own opinions. And again, nothing to really brag about except that I was eating heaven....MMMMMMM

Saturday July 9, 2011

We decided to pack up and head home a day early. We were all sunburned and couldn't reach most of the lakes that we had planned on hitting. We couldn't get to the Crystal Lake trailhead with the truck so we missed out on most of the hiking that we had planned. We could have just hiked to the trailhead first but with my little man we decided to just save it for later on in the season. My favorite "drive-to" lake in the Uintas which is Butterfly Lake was still about 50% ice covered (maybe a bit less).

We had a great week even though we didn't attempt several things with my little man since he is still so young. We didn't catch a ton of fish either but with the amount of people that were up there and the terrible weather I guess we have a couple excuses. Overall it was great to get away for a while and the sweet mountain air had me already excited for our next visit. Maybe next time we will get to fish some of the more distant and exciting lakes.

5 day Uinta Trip turned into 4.