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Sunday, September 1, 2013

Upper Lena Lake = Owie, Owie, Owie

When you hike every week and snowshoe through the winter a couple of years in a row you start to feel like you can do anything. If you need to be brought back to earth and get a hell of a workout put Upper Lena Lake on your to do list.

That was the case Saturday as Pam and I were joined by Lisa, Garry and Chris for the 14.2 mile 4390 feet of elevation gain day hike. We were at Lower Lena Lake - just under 3 miles - in just over an hour. We took a food break and headed up the Upper trail. You get lulled to sleep on the lower trail and woken right back up on the upper trail.















 


The trail gets more - shall we say - rustic as you head up. You have done 1200 feet of elevation by Lower Lena, but you have another 3200 waiting. You spend a bit of time dragging your butt up the steeper sections thinking about how much harder they will be to descend.

After you reach the lake you are greeted by unusual serenity found only in a place as remote as Upper Lena Lake. It truly is a pretty place. We had more food at the lake, used my Platypus filter to make some water to refresh our stores and headed back down.

There is no rushing the descent and we made the 4+ miles to the lower trail in 2:15. The rest of the descent is perfect for a speed descent and we took less than an hour for the final 3 miles. All in all we had a 14.2 mile hike that we hit the trail at 8 AM and were driving away at 4 PM so we felt pretty good about it.

Sadly, none of us are smart enough to keep this off of the list so we will be back for another beating in the future. Maybe another winter route? We'll see.

Be very well and more soon.....

1 comment:

  1. thanks for the heads up. my brother and nephew are heading up to upper lena lake this weekend, nov. 2nd 3rd overnight the ranger says theres no heavy snow yet but weather says rain all weekend so i'm fearing snow! My brother is hard core and fortunately we have great winter gear I hope it's worth it. So again thanks for the report I wish more people would report more with pictures like you have done.

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