While on the trail, I came up with lots of cool sounding titles for this post… most of which were not that good seeing that I was in a lot of pain (my knee decided to go on vacation halfway through the loop) and that the names “Hells Canyon” and “Seven Devils” make unpolite words polite.
- “Fighting Seven Devils In Hell”
- “Going Through Hells (Canyon)”
- “Trying to Find Heaven in Hells” – this only works if know that ‘Horse Heaven’ is the name of the half way point on the loop…
- “Overcoming the Devils”
- (did I mention I was in pain?)
yeah… it was brutal 30 miles….
Tons of deadfalls (i.e. large dead trees laying on top of the trail making one either climb over, under or around – not easy when you are on a narrow cliff side trail), creeks running through the trail, rocks (lots and lots of rocks!!! I mean, it was the HELLS Canyon Wilderness after all), snow drifts (more on that later) and, well, everything else you would think to find in the middle of the wilderness.
It a nutshell (hmm…how many megabits could you fit into an acorn shell?) we should have given ourselves four to five days to complete the Seven Devils loop instead of just three days (note to self, 10 mile a day walks with a 40-lb backpack is NOT a good idea!).
But, on the good side, I got some great pictures! (238 of them in fact..) 
Continue reading Backpacking the Seven Devils
Courtesy of Wikipedia
I finally decided on a trail for next weekend’s backpacking trip: Seven Devils Loop.
It is a 26.7 mile trail around the Seven Devils Mountain near Hells Canyon (west central Idaho). At 9,393 feet, He Devil Mountain is the highest point in the area….only thing is that the mountain plunges [...]
Not one to sit still too long, I'm off to the Frank Church Wilderness for a three day 22-mile loop through the Solider, Cut-Troat and Helldiver Lakes (all of which should have lots of trout…we shall if I catch any…)
If we are lucky, we might even have time to hike to the top [...]
One of the coolest parts about hiking through the Wilderness is the wildlife one sees.
There are mule deeres and mountain squirrel:
[@more@]
The small rock mice.
And, of course, there are the occasional black bears:
(same bear – just a different picture.)
Note [...]
Not one to give up too easy, I tried my hand a fishing the South Fork of the Payette River Wednesday morning near Grandjean. This was after the 20 mile hike – so I was pretty tired, but since I was having a hard time sleeping, I decided to try my luck.
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It may sound crazy – but I carried my fly pole with me on the hike across the Sawtooth Mountains. Some folks had told me that there were fish in there hills – and I aimed to find a few.
The first lake I tried was Alpine Lake (see pervious post for picture) – [...]
As promised, here are a few pictures from my latest adventure – a 20 mile walk from Redfish Lake to Grandjean over the Sawtooth Mountains.
Even though I'm posting this picture first, it was actually taken at the end of the trip…[@more@] We left on our adventure right after [...]
By the time you read this, I will be about 10 miles into the backcountry of the Sawtooth Wilderness.
The crazy thing is that I will also have about 10 more miles of trail ahead of me before the return to civilization. Yelp – I’m attempting a 20 mile backpacking trip across the [...]
You have to have danger in order to have an adventure. If you don't…then it's just a walk in the park (granted, not Central Park as that can be dangerous).
Of course, some would say that going backpacking in the Sawtooth wilderness is not dangerous. Well… we didn't have a map? ok… [...]
After years of fighting cheap or used backpacks, I finally bit the bullet and brought a "real" backpack. It help that REI was having a huge anniversary sale.
I original went into REI to get a travel backpack as I thought that it would fit all my needs. A travel backpack is a [...]
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