Hike From Hell: Alexander Basin

It's taken me two weeks to recover from the PTSD of this hike and be able to write about it. It was a lovely Sunday morning and I decided that I wanted to go for a hike up Millcreek Canyon. Ban was game to go along and we decided to do a hike we hadn't done before. We decided to do Dog Lake and made our way to the top of Millcreek. Approximately, a thousand other people had the same idea. The parking lot was crawling with cars, people, dogs, and cyclists (yeah, cyclists get their own category because they were particularly obnoxious on this morning). We went back down the canyon to the overflow parking and it too was packed.

So, Plan B. We decided to head down the canyon to find a trail head with an available parking lot. Alexander Basin trail was the first one we found. It was steep. I mean really, really steep. Steep like my glutes ached for days afterward. Once we finally stopped climbing and the trail flattened out a bit we were treated to a beautiful display of wild flowers. We only passed a couple of people during the whole hike. Seriously, it was so steep, did I mention that? As we neared the top, we did run into a girl that Ban and I had gone to school with and neither of us had since since. Random. All the photos posted here were taken prior to this part of the hike.

Once we reached the basin, we could see that Gobbler's Knob was just a little bit further. Note to self: it always seems 'just a little bit further' when in fact it was a long way off. We climbed up a rock slide and as we made it nearly to the top we heard a loud clap of thunder that seemingly came from nowhere. Ban says 'How do you feel about that?'. I didn't feel good about that at all! I started hauling ass back down the trail. Suddenly, we felt a smattering of rain drops accompanied by more thunder and lightening. But, the worst was yet to come, pea-sized hail started pelting us and the rain and hail made the very steep trail super slick and muddy. It took us over an hour to decent. I'm sorry that I didn't get any pictures of what we looked like by the time we reached our car.

No need to lecture about all the things we did wrong. We know. But, all's well that ends well, right?