Heart Lake to Shoshone Lake
A long hike ahead today so we were up and out early. Our reward was a beautiful sunrise.
The valley leading up and out of the Heart Lake basin was lined with hot springs and bubblers all the way up to its head. We stopped and admired each one for the unique and interesting creation that it is.
Dark clouds rolled in and threatened, but never got up the gumption to actually storm. A few cool downdrafts and sprinkles were all we experienced as we walked through a pleasant but unmemorable forest.
It is 7.5 miles from Heart Lake to its trailhead on US191, the main road into Yellowstone coming up from Grand Teton NP. We could hear its roar a good mile and a half away.
We’d hoped for some picnic tables at the trailhead – and even fantasized about picnickers wanting to share cold drinks with hikers – but it was just a parking lot and a pit toilet. We walked up the highway half a mile to the Shoshone Lake trailhead (also just a parking lot), walked a hundred yards into the woods and had a break there.
We had driven in on this highway. If we had been thinking ahead we could have stashed some sodas or beers there. Definitely a failure of planning.
The forest walk continued on to the west end of Shoshone Lake. The boggy inlet there provides excellent mosquito habitat and we did not linger.
Shoshone is another very large lake in Yellowstone that you likely have never heard of. At 13 square miles, it is the largest lake in the lower 48 that cannot be reached by road.
Our route took us up the east side, then across the north side, with our campsite a few miles away from the geyser basin at the lake’s west end.
On the map the trail looks easy, as it hugs the lakeshore and lakes are well-known to be flat. But the east side of the lake is hemmed in by cliffs and bluffs. The trail was a succession of steep 100- and 200- foot climbs up from the water, over a hill and back down again. A few of these is no big deal but 15 or 20 in succession begins to take a toll. It’s not just the climb but the pointlessness of it: you climb up a steep hill not to get over a pass or to a lake, but just so you can climb back down to the lake you were already at.
But as we rounded the northeast corner of the lake and headed west we entered gentler terrain and had another beach walk for a while.
The lake is a wonder. It is vast and beautiful and completely unknown, stuck out in a wilderness where you have to want to go to it. It looks like Canada. A road here would completely destroy it. There would be cabins, strip malls, jet skis, the whole ugly rotten deal. Instead it is wild and pristine and we have it all to ourselves because we were willing to walk a few miles.
Or not quite all to ourselves. About an hour after we arrived at our camp, a somewhat bedraggled couple walked in and asked if they could camp with us. They said they had a permit at a site a mile or so away, but it was already occupied and the current occupants put up a fuss.
There was plenty of room at our site, so we said it was no problem. Also, they were the first hikers we’d seen that did not have enormous packs and we felt a certain kinship with them. The woman is a long-distance hiker – she had hiked the Colorado Trail in 2015, about a week behind me, as it turns out.
Her boyfriend was on his first backpack trip and was saying he thought the trail was seven miles, not seventeen. But it looked like he would live, and perhaps even profit from his experience. Seventeen miles seems like a long hike until you do it, and then it really doesn’t seem so bad.
We’d hiked some 21 miles today and got in a little late for swimming as our beach was in shade and the breeze was up. But we washed up a bit, enjoyed a sip or two of whisky and had a fine supper (Asian sesame peanut sauce with noodles and veggies) before turning in.
