Steps in the Right Direction: 7/17/16 RMNP Black lake to Frozen Lake

Okay time to turn on some music and dig up your soundtrack to the of the movie Frozen. Today we're going to hike up past Black Lake and get to the top of the Glacier George Basin. Then we are going to see if we can find the lake called Frozen lake. This lake is tucked up to the right of a large mountain called Spearhead. To get there and back you are going to have a +2,338' net elevation gain (+3,011' total roundtrip elevation gain) and 13.5 miles on your boots by the time you get back to the car. Remember to start early because it's going to be a long day.

We started hiking at 9:30 from Glacier Gorge. Silly us, we had tried to drive up and find a parking spot at the Glacier Gorge parking lot, but it was already full. (Where have all of these people come from?) Eleven minutes later we were back down at the park and ride lot. Lucky for us we scored a spot to park the car in the second parking spot which was nice and close to the bus shuttle. Once we arrived at Glacier Gorge trailhead we get going right away. On our way we bumped into a volunteer Ranger that we stopped and asked some questions to see if she had ever hiked out to Shelf Lake, which is another off trail location we are thinking about hiking to. She didn't really know what we were talking about, but she knew an awful lot about ground squirrels. This is not really very helpful information for us at the time. We thanked her for her time and hiked on. While we are taking some pictures of Alberta Falls, the volunteer ranger caught up with us again and told us that she had talked to another gentleman about Shelf lake. He had been up to it a couple weeks ago. She pointed him out to us and we went up and talked with him to gain any knowledge he might like to share about the trail. He was very helpful and did some drawing on our map to try to tell us where we should be looking to find the the un-maintained trail. He talked about a few pink ribbons hanging from the trees to sort of lead the way and then we would have to do some scrambling over some branches and such. We thanked him for his time and got back to heading on our way. Today our destination is to head out to Black Lake, head up the inlet stream bed to the upper basin, then we hope to find Frozen Lake. There is no trail to Frozen lake, just some general points to head towards. You need to hike up towards Spearhead Mountain and then veer to the right side of it to find Frozen Lake. Kids at school would never get away with writing so little supporting details.

While we are hiking out to Black Lake, we think that we can look for the turn off to Shelf Lake. Thinking of course that a trip to Shelf Lake on a different day would be a nice adventure. We were unsuccessful in locating the trail to Shelf lake on our way out. We tried very hard to try to find that trail but failed to locate it. We were looking for a sort of game trial headed off to our right after we entered a meadow area about a mile past Jewel Lake, but we never found it. Hundreds of trees had been blown over, along this area and the trees were cut and moved off of the trail. Apparently RMNP has very high winds and straight line wind sheers that come through in the winter and it took out all of the trees in this area. Good thing for us some lucky trail maintenance person was assigned to cut and drag off all of the downed trees. We did make it back to Black lake without too much trouble. It's a gorgeous gorgeous lake tucked back into what looks like a cirque, but really you have to head back up and around the lake to find the real secret gem of the hike. As you head up the inlet river ravine you arrive at the upper glacier basin. Wow, Wow, Wow! Big huge and amazing.

We made it to the top and met a few people along the way and asked them if they had been to Frozen Lake. We found one person who pulled out her phone and dialed up a couple of pictures we should look at to use as reference points. We thanked her and continued up to the end of the trail. Yes,Yes, Yes, the trail does in fact end. From here we got out the directions from Pro trails and read those and put some GPS coordinates into our GPS and headed out towards Spearhead. At this point we are less than a mile away from Frozen lake. The problem in getting there was that we had to climb up, around, over and through small krumholtz, long slabs of granite, navigate a waterfall, cross surprise ravines and just keep moving towards the right of Spearhead while looking at the GPS for directional guidance. During this whole time we could hear people talking, but could not see them. This little "less than a mile" took us about an hour and a half as it was pretty labor intensive but at last we found Frozen lake. A really good Gutsy Girl Hike! (OK, Im reading this book called Gutsy Girl, and it was a very gustsy girl hike today!) It was beautiful. We hopped around there for a little bit, took some pictures, and then sat down to have some lunch while watching two peole mountain climb way high up on Spearhead mountain. We took a really great photo of one person standing between a cut slab and the mountain. At 1:45 in the afternoon we decided we better get heading down. For the return trip back across the large basin we used our GPS and followed the "backtrack" option. We basically followed our every foot step back across the very large Basin. The whole return trip back to the "end of the trail" or in this case the "beginning of the trail" was all within 20 feet or less of what we came in on. As we got back to where the trail started up again we were greeted by a herd of female and baby elk that were sitting down in the snow or in the shade trying to cool themselves. They were very close to the trail and it was very tight in there so we got some nice pictures of the elk.

The hike back is always long. Going down hill is never a favorite of ours as it is hard on the feet and knees. We made pretty good time down to Black Lake where we sat down for a quick snack and a little work on a blister. Then we tightened up the boots for the remaining 4.5 mile trip back down to the bus.

On the way down we located the trail to Shelf Lake and walked out to the point where you have to cross the river. It was not really by anything that I would call a meadow, like the guy told us. We noticed the trail had lots of downed trees laying all over the place. Since no guy with a chainsaw would have cleared the trail, we decide while standing there we really didn’t need to do that Gutsy Girl hike.

For the day it was a very succesful gusty girl hiking adventure using the GPS to find Frozen lake and then to find our way back across the upper basin back to the inlet stream for Black lake. A very long day of 13.5 miles of hiking. Long day! Nine hours!!!