January 30, 2001
Today was beautiful...and cold. At breakfast we decided "hey, we haven't been to Walker Lake yet this year." So off we went.
Now Walker Lake is above the old goldmining community of Porcupine, now worse than a ghost town, It is across the river and up an old logging road.
Usually you do not get into walker lake until spring when the sun warms and melts the powder snow, then re-freezes at night, creating a surface hard enough to get traction in so that you can climb the steep hills and maneuver the trees.
But this is an unusual winter and the snow is as hard as solid ice, so we decided to go.
This first picture is part way there, looking back.
Although we were only maybe 1000 feet higher than the river, the snow was a few feet of very nice powder.
We decided there are better things to do than getting your snowmachine "unstuck"
So we headed down.
Nobody likes to retrace his tracks, so when we got to the base of the Mt. we decided to take the Big Salmon river down to our trapping territory.
Here is Sean at "the Devils Elbow" and we are looking for a way across. At this particular place the water runs swift and deep around 2 rocky outcrops. This creates high Ice walls after the water recedes, leaveing no way to cross the river.
So we are forced to navigate through the timber around this elbow.
This is usually not a real problem, but this year with such little snowfall, the scrub brush is not covered, and what snow there is is very hard and not giving! This makes for a really enjoyable hunt trying to find a way through and around!
As Sean went to go up over a log, and I was close behind, He suddenly realized this was not a good choice, so he stopped on the log and I swerved to go around but ran head onto a pile of brush and a stump between my skis...
And there we were. Stuck!
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