Trip Report: Dorothy Lake (Bear Lake) -- July 30-31
Bear Lake
This past weekend, Ellen and I ventured out to Dorothy Lake in search of Huckleberries. In an effort to maximize our time picking berries, we decided to backpack instead of doing a simple day hike. This enabled us to spend time drinking up every view, and hike far enough to escape the masses of people. Dorothy Lake is a heavily used trail, but if you hike far enough, the masses dwindle to just a couple of people. What's funny is half the people didn't even know there were huckleberries on this trail, though one look at my purple tongue would have been a good indicator. The berries were ripe and definitely plentiful.
Anyway, after about 2 miles we had arrived with the masses of people at Dorothy Lake. All the campsites were occupied at this very large lake, but we didn't care. We wanted to get the hell away from people. We hiked south along the lake for a couple more miles and ate lunch. At this point the flies decided it was time for lunch too, and they started agressively attacking Ellen and I. Ugh! We both put on a ton of DEET but it didn't do any good, I think the flies are immune to it. At one point when we were applying the DEET (it was in a cream form), the flies actually landed on the open bottle.
After lunch, I found salmonberries growing as well, though they were not as ripe as the huckleberries. The trail leaves Dorothy Lake after 4 miles and heads up a ridge to Bear Lake. Contrary to what the maps might read, the hike up the ridge is longer than 1.3 miles and it includes about 700 feet of elevation gain. This made for a nice little workout for the end of the hike. Finally, we reached Bear Lake and I set up camp. As luck would have it we were the only ones at the lake!. We had tons of time on our hands, so we picked a few more berries, read by the water, went skinny dipping at nearby Deer Lake, and cooked a bitchin spaghetti dinner. Ellen was nice enought to sneak in a bottle of Waterbrook Cabernet (sans bottle, she just poured it all in a Nalgene bottle) for us to enjoy with our dinner. YUM!. The bugs got to us after dinner and we headed to the tranquility of the tent. As we fell asleep, the only noises you could hear were the bugs and a few fish jumping. The silence was deafening and refreshing.
In the morning, we ate breakfast and quickly packed up camp to get an early start on the bugs. The hike back felt long, but it was littered with huckleberries. By the time we reached the car, we had 4 nalgene bottles filled with huckleberries. Looks like we'll be eating these delicious berries for some time to come!