For today’s adventure, John and I thought we needed to complete the Hee, Haw, Ho, and Hum Lakes quadfecta! See John’s trip report here: http://www.splattski.com/2019/ho/index.html If you have been following our adventures over the last 10 days or so, you will see that we had recently visited the other three and need Ho Lake to fill our dance card!
It was a beautiful fall morning and we started our adventure parked on Lick Creek Road at about 5300 feet of elevation. It was chilly in the shade but the colors and views were amazing! As we headed up the mountain a ways, the sun popped out over the ridge and things warmed up quickly. However we were hiking our way into the snow.
The gully we climbed had a relatively uniform grade, straight up the mountain for a total elevation gain of about 2500 feet. As you can see here, Rich, in honor of hunting season, was wearing his spike antler backpack! I guess he figured since it was cow elk season, he would be safe.
The view up the gully looked about the same but with more snow!
About 2 plus hours later, here is the top of the ridge, an elevation of over 7800 feet. The rest of the journey until our decent back home felt like winter!
Ho Lake is beautiful!
It wasn’t long before Rich was doing his thing!
And shortly after that, success!
I caught several fish then moved on to the Photography portion of the adventure.
Ruby, as always, served as my model. Here she is posing in front of South Loon Mountain which we climbed last week.
John, my art director, summoned me over to shoot this picture of the Ho Lake with Hum Peak #2 in the background. After setting up my shot and snapping a couple of images, here it came, the proposal which I already knew was on the way: “You know Dave, if we leave Ho Lake 30 minutes early, we can bag Hum #2 before Rich and Pam get to the saddle…..”
And…. about 45 minutes later, here I am shooting John doing the summit pose on Hum Peak #2. For clarification, the Hum Ridge has several high points, 5 total I believe, so each one gets a number designation based on it’s location on the ridge. John has of course been to all of them but this was my first climb of Hum #2. (elevation 8380)
A view back down to Ho Lake.
Finally, an image taken near the first shot in this blog with much different light of the late afternoon. It was a grand adventure with something for everyone!
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