Day 22 – Paradise to Longmire

     Today was an interesting day. I was scheduled to work both lunch and dinner today, but after lunch. The assistant manager Kyle told me I was getting to close to overtime so he gave me dinner off. I talking to the new busser, Anna, and she was looking for someone to hike with and somewhere to hike.

     Since I now had all this free time, we decide to go hiking. The next step was to pick a trail. One of the trails runs from Paradise to Longmire and the bottom half of the trail is part of Wonderland, so it was high on my must hike list. I suggested it and we went over to the Jackson Visitor Center (JVC), to talk to the rangers about the trail conditions. She told us that we definitely need snowshoes if we didn’t want to posthole the first half of the trail. (Potholing is taking a step and sinking knee deep or more into the snow) So Anna and I borrowed snowshoes from the JVC and went on our way down the mountain for a 5 mile trek. The trail could really be divided into three sections: Above Canyon Road, Below Canyon Road, and Wonderland.

     The above canyon road section was a little tricky due to the fresh snow and the inexperience using snowshoes on both mine and Anna’s part. We followed this creek down. The creek was really intresting because it was flowing though a 5 foot canyon of snow.

     We made it too canyon road, and stopped to take picture of us on top of the snow bank before starting the Below Canyon Road section.

     There was only one problem. We couldn’t find the trail head for the next leg of our journey. The Above section had been marked with poles but not the below. Since the creek had gotten bigger, we didn’t want to just wing it down the mountain because knowing my luck we would end up on the wrong side of the creek. So we hiked down the road, instead of the trail to the Narada Fall, which was the starting point for the section of Wonderland we were going to hike.

    We made it to Narada, and started down the mountain. As we got below the falls, we had some gorgeous views if the falls. Since this trail is less traveled finding the trail at points was hard and sometimes we came to forks in the foot prints we were fallowing and had to pick a direction. We both decided that bridges were a good sign we were going the right way. On the other hand some bridges presented a challenge on how to cross them. The snow was 5 feet deep in places and was melting of the bridges so sometimes we had a 5 foot vertical drop to get down to the bridges. On those, we walked down to the creek and rock hopped across it was safer. On another bridge, we walked across the snow so we were about 10 feet up from the creek bed.

     From the bridge the snow started to disappear, which was really nice. The trail then passed through one of the large glacier fed stream bed (I wish I had pictures but we were in a hurry because we were running out of time to make a shuttle back up the mountain). The last section of the trail was though the a grove of old growth forest, but this wasn’t my favorite part. Anna and I were chatting away when we came across a Black-Tailed Dear about 15 feet away from us. This was cool, but my favorite part was the deer tracks we came across. First we saw the deer tracks, the deer was simply walking down the trail, and a little while later there were cougar tracks on top of the deer. As we continued to walk we could watch the tracks spread out as the cougar chased the deer. No, we did not see the cougar, though I wish we had.

With a 1 minute to spare we made it to Longmire and out shuttle back up the mountain.

Here are the rest of the pictures from this hike, click here

Wonderland Progress