Rock Creek | High Uintas Wilderness, Utah - Part I

Well, hello. It is September, and for the mountain wanderers, that means it is time for the fall campout. Back in Utah, heading into the High Uintas. We're here at the Rock Creek Trailhead. As usual, going in for seven days. Let's get it going. It's the 27th fall campout. We were in Utah, but our original plan was to go into the Wind Rivers. There were a number of fires burning near our route, so at the 11th hour, we moved it to Utah because it had some of the cleanest air in the west. In our haste to find a route, we didn't research this one as much as we usually do. All right, well, took a break back there. Now we're just making the final push to camp, and I think we're about to drop down to Rock Creek. We'll definitely be camping somewhere in there tonight. Classic Uinta fall day. Love it. It is official. Hopefully, we made it to the junction here. Time to get serious about finding a camp. We kicked off the campout with a few games and a little whiskey. The celebration was underway. It's always a special feeling on the first night once you're in camp, and it sets in that you're going to be out there for a week, and it just started. Well, good morning. Morning day two here from Rock Creek in the high Uintas wilderness. Great first day. We only got in a few miles, but that's, you know, that's the way we like to start it. So today, we're going to try to make a bigger push and make it up to the highline. Got a pretty loose itinerary for this trip. Loving it though. Loving it. Yeah. Big push today. See if we can do it. Had a couple of pups on this trip that were wondering if they even wanted to be backpackers. Okay, just heading out. Guessing hopefully less than 10 mile hike today. Getting a pretty late start, so we'll see how she goes. Right off the bat, we walked out of the living trees and into a burn. We had hiked in the burn all day. I've never been through a section where everything was just so completely destroyed. There was no shade, and as the day wore on, it was wearing me down. When we came to Fall Creek, there were a few live trees, so we stopped for a break. I scouted up ahead a little bit to see if there was any chance of getting out of the burn, but it was just more of the same. No one liked the spot because there were leaning trees everywhere, but somehow it was better than anything else we could do that night, and somehow we all found a spot to hang, and we went to bed that night hoping there wouldn't be any wind overnight. Well, good morning. Morning day three. We are just leaving this, I'll call it a camp because it did the job. We definitely camped in a dangerous spot last night. There's nowhere else to go, and there's burn as far as, farther than we could make it yesterday, but we got away with it. I think this is the sketchiest campsite I've ever stayed in, and somehow we got six people in here with five hammocks. We did it, but now, today we got the big push. We're changing our original route. We're going to get off Rock Creek, and we're going to take the next junction here and go up to Finney Lake, at least to the junction up there at Finney Lake, or near Finney Lake, and then we'll decide what we do from there. Been thundering on us all morning. Sun's just starting to come out. Let's go. We were right back into the burn. Today, we knew was all about climbing. We were hoping that we might climb out of the burn at some point, and as we started out it was sunny, but more dark clouds moved in shortly after that, and in the middle of the burn, there would be no place to hide if the skies opened up on us. We stopped for a break near a creek, and not a moment too soon. Brandon busted out his tarp as the storm caught us. Eventually, we got settled, and like we do, we made the best of it, and there were the normal shenanigans. I don't know! I was helping. The storm kept us down for a couple hours, but when it broke, we made a push for the top. Oh, it's a slog up this hill. So, I'm guessing I'm probably a half mile from the lake. Not sure how much more I gotta go up. It's been a day. It's been a trip so far. Looking like we could climb out of the burn here, which would boost my morale greatly. Slow going up this hill. Let's knock the rest of this out. Alright, I have made it to the junction here. I'm a little bit ahead of the group. We'll wait for them to catch up. Finney Lake doesn't look like it's very far at all, so as soon as they get here, we should be at the lake. We had made it to camp, and not only that, tomorrow was a zero. It's a different kind of relief knowing that you're not packing up and hiking out the next day. We were up near the spine of the Uintas, and we had just made it out of the burn. We were feeling pretty good.