Wright’s Lake to Scott’s Lake

Today we have eight people in our meet up group headed from wrights Lake to Smith Lake. We received a small sprinkler rain on our drive here and in the parking lot as we got ready to set out we do have heavy cloud cover today with cooler temperatures.

Right from the beginning of the trail, we have a beautiful greenery that we’re walking through. We have the smell of fresh rain and a calmness in the air.

I’ve spoken often before of my love for the granite rocks and features. The section of trail begins going up large granite slabs along the way you see many boulders that have been deposited by glacier movement. You look closely this one large granite rock as a single boulder sitting right on top.

We’ve reached the boundary of the Desolation Wilderness and take our obligatory group photo before continuing on

Susan and Ryan are to of our group today. I’m trying to get more people pictures 

We open back up to more granite with expense views, looking back and see the ominous rain clouds, but with a blue sky behind it.

Our trail begins to climb steeply up a rock strewn trail.

There are huge granite slabs again around us, many of them covered with bright green moss fields

We reached a rock outcropping that has phenomenal views of the Wright’s lake behind us, as well as what I believe to be Union Valley Reservoir farther back.

Just beside us is a beautiful stream that we walk along as the sound of the water cascading over the rocks fills the air

The stream is surrounded by incredibly colorful wildflowers

We pop up over the saddle and are rewarded with Grouse Lake absolutely a beautiful high Alpine lake, surrounded by granite slabs and pine trees

Once again, we do another someway steep, rocky uphill and arrive at Hemlock Lake the second of our three lakes on our path today

Leaving Hemlock Lake we get one more final granite covered Rocky ascent.  Looking back over the valley provides more astonishing views.

Once again, we pop up to our final lake. Scotts Lake provides a great place for lunch however, it starting to rainy fairly heavy about halfway through lunch, so we quickly picked up and headed back down the trail.

As we continued down the rain stopped, we had some rays of sunshine come out and the trail dried up. I got a couple more people, shots of David and Ryan. 

 We arrived back at our cars with 6.1 miles hiked, 1744 vertical feet of elevation gain. The weather was good for the most part, a little overcast and cool at the beginning warm towards the middle before a heavy rain shower, transitioning back to clouds and warmth.