Blog

With the end of fire season and cool weather in the forecast it was time to hit the road for a week off.  Off to the high country of Idaho.  Your vision of Idaho may be from I-84 passing through the southern part of the state.  If so you may equate Idaho with a weedy wasteland of dairy cows and junk cars.  And that is what is it.  Trust me.  Disregard the rest of this post and stay home.

We were Stanley bound, but we decided to take a day getting there and made our way up into the Payette River country and stayed overnight on the way.  The river, mountains and forests were beautiful and call for a visit of their own.

We enjoyed an evening around the fire and were up the next day for the short drive the rest of the way to Stanley Lake.

The inlet campground at Stanley Lake is about how I left it last time I was there, which seems like quite a few years back.  There’s a few less trees, and a few more dead ones, and the infrastructure is wearing out without much maintenance, but the mountains and lake don’t change.  Beautiful as ever.

There are lots of memories at this lake.  It is always good to be back.

We found that the fish still bit on the same old formula.  How many would you like?

We took a tour of some of the other lakes in the Sawtooth foothills including Alturas, Pettit, Little Redfish and Redfish.  It was pretty quiet compared to the crowds of summer.  We also enjoyed sunny days, although the nights were on the cold side with one low around 15 and the rest in the 20’s.  It has been colder.

Sawtooth Mountains

Little Redfish Lake

‘Closed’ was the theme of the trip.  I guess it helped cut the crowds down a bit.  More squirrels than people, I like those demographics.

The previous night we enjoyed the milky way over the mountains and then right before bed an amazing moonrise over the lake.  Tonight it was my chance to try to capture them.

The next day we ventured down to the Yankee Fork to view some of the historic gold mining activities.  The Yankee Fork Dredge is quite an impressive feat of engineering and destruction for relatively little profit.

We enjoyed one more night at the lake with a dutch oven dinner and yet another stellar sunset.

It always brings a bit of a tear when leaving a place you love when you don’t know when you will be back.

We headed south towards the second half of our trip with view of the Sawtooths leaving us at Galena Pass.