Today it was time to hike back to the airstrip at the Flying B Ranch. However, we were camped about 400 vertical feet below Bear Creek Point and I did not want to miss the opportunity to watch the sunrise on top of a peak. I woke up at about 5:00 am, it was cold and extremely hard to get out of my warm sleeping bag but when I crawled out of my tent, there was Brian, ready to go.
After about a 15 minute hike in the dark, (we were later joined by Art) we took in the beautiful predawn glow.
As you can see, the smoke from far off fires had filtered in over night and made for beautiful layers.
The moment of sunrise at nearly 9000′! Words and photographs just can’t convey the peaceful easy feeling.
After sunrise, we shot an ussie and headed back down to break camp.
One last sunrise shot.
Back in camp, we had breakfast and waited a bit for the tents to dry off.
Time to head back down.
Remember our water situation, 40 gallons for the week? To show you the experience of this team, not only was 40 gallons enough, we left 10 gallons unused….. now granted, nobody had a bath for a week so what we made up for in water conservation, we lost in BO!
Further down the mountain, flowers!
My crew started to get tired of me staging flower shots…… I didn’t care.
About 11:00, we ran into Marg and Lauren headed up to retrive our base camp gear.
They warned us about severe erosion on the trail below which was a result of the recent storms.
Down, down, down!
Definite erosion below.
It was not all a downhill, we had to climb out of the Sheep Creek Drainage to get over to the Brush Creek Drainage and the Flying B Ranch.
The Flying B!
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