Red Castle

To celebrate our last weekend of summer we went backpacking to Red Castle in the Uintah Mountains with just me, Marc and my Dad. It was beautiful! We left Wednesday night, slept at the trail head and started hiking early Thursday morning. Dad hadn't been to Red Castle for 18 years and thought he would remember it better, well some things have changed in the last 18 years! We followed the trail till it split and then the trail soon diminished. We could see our destination - Red Castle Mountain - so we bush whacked through the meadow, forest, and swamp until we finally reached the lake, 11 hours later! I was so sore and tired by this point. I've done quite a bit of backpacking and my pack was much too heavy. We took lots of breaks towards the end of the day. We even stopped on the trail, laid out our sleeping pads, and took a nice 30 minute nap while Marc fished in a frog pond nearby. Needless to say, he didn't catch any fish in the frog pond :) The lake we camped next to was beautiful! We were at the tree line elevation so all the trees around us were really stunted. We fished Thursday night and Friday morning. Friday we caught a good number of fish. Most of them were tiger trout, which I'd never seen before, really pretty with the tiger stripes. They were sure good eatin' too for lunch! We packed up Friday and started hiking out at 2:00. We got back to the truck around 8:30. Oh yeah, we found the trail and learned that it doesn't split where it used to. The trail is a really good one, which was helpful because of the distance. We drove home Friday night and were in bed shortly after midnight.