Hiking the Snowy Range, Father's Day Weekend 2011

Over Father's Day Weekend, Dad came out to the ranch to see what I have been up to.  Since I had most of the weekend off we drove up into the Snowy Range and found some hikes.  The pass is still very much under snow, so we found some hikes just outside of Centennial, Wyoming before you get up high into the mountains.  As part of my job at the ranch I will be leading guests on hikes, so we decided to go scope it out so that I know where I'm going when I get up there.  We had a great time.  Here are some pictures from our cameras.

The trail.

Dad with beautiful aspens.

This is Corner Mountain Trail.  Somebody built a teepee up here.  There is no shortage of wood up here; there are downed trees everywhere.

Corner Mountain Trail has several small loops so that you can make this hike as long or as short as you want.

Me in front of Corner Mountain.  It was hard to see very far as the trail is covered in trees.

We found lots of cacti on Corner Mountain trail.  They are very small, so it is easy to accidentally step on them.

Moose tracks are everywhere, but where are the moose?

These are fallen all over the ground.  Mom, I think you would think these are pretty cool.

This is the top of a natural spring.  Where is the water coming from?

This is one of thousands of dying trees.  You can see all of its bark has fallen onto the ground.  These trees are being killed by beatles.

Dad at the beginning of the hike.  "How beautiful is this?"

Happy Father's Day!

Prime Moose country, however, we never saw one.

This water comes from the same spring.  This is just a little further down stream.  That is a lot of water from one little spring.

This is the clearest water I have ever seen.  We found this natural spring coming right out of the ground.  It must be snow melt, but we could not tell where is was coming from.  The ground around it was very soft.

It turned out to be a beautiful day, Happy Father's Day!

We came across this pond on the Meadow Trail of the Little Laramie Trails system.  I am sure that most of this is from snow melt, but it was littered with aspens and very beautiful.

On the trail...

This trail crossed the river several times, not to mention half of the trail was water itself from all of the snow melt.  The river is raging right now.

Another of several ponds that we encountered on our all day hiking extravaganza.  I cannot believe we spent two days in this wilderness and we didn't even see any moose.  The probably knew we were hunting them.  This entire area seemed very suitable for moose as there was tons of marshy areas surrounded by willows.  We saw a lot of moose poop and tracks, so I know they are out there somewhere.