About the time of the first picture on this page, we got ourselves off the track a bit. We were finally back into shade, and the track just sort of petered out wandering through the rocks and the pine trees. Not to matter, we just needed to stay near the creek and we hit it again soon enough. The track often had a lot of snowmelt water on it here, and we were seeing quite a few patches of it. There'd been patches of it all weekend everywhere we looked really, but it was now even more prevalent. We got to a fork in the track, with a sign pointing up to Steelhead Lake, which was where we'd planned on camping for the night. I was by now pretty shagged, and most perturbed, I still hadn't clicked to the effects of altitude and lack of water. Wasn't worried about getting back or anything, just couldn't understand why I was so tired. Anyway, Jess and I bravely crossed the creek and headed up the track, postholing up to the middle of our shins in snow. We crossed the first field, and went through some trees, and found the track basically dissappeared into a snow pile going all the way up the hillside and in most directions as far as the eye could see.

Enough of that for a joke. We came back across the creek, wondered on up a little bit, sighed as we passed up our plans of swimming in the presumably frigid lake, and continued on up the hill. After a short while we decided to set up camp, and have a rest. Then maybe walk on up to maybe Little McGee Lake later in the afternoon. After a wonderful rest, and some serious water swilling I was feeling much better. Probably still a bit foolish to attempt to get up to Little McGee Lake however, it's even higher than Steelhead Lake. We ended up playing in the snow, and playing cards. Fun and relaxing. Not a soul in sight. Presumably all the cars in the carpark were from fishermen on the creek itself somewhere.

2002-r7-25.jpg	2002-r7-26.jpg	2002-r8-01.jpg
2002-r8-03.jpg The first part of "track" we came up attempting to get to Steelhead Lake	2002-r8-05.jpg Snowwoman!	2002-r8-07.jpg
2002-r8-08.jpg	2002-r8-10.jpg The creek crossing and the track to Steelhead, looking up	2002-r8-11.jpg Looking back down over the meadows, feat. Jess.