Roosevelt National Forest, Big Elk Meadows Backpacking
Our planned route.
Conor and I came up with a last minute plan to backpack out to Big Elk Meadows, stay the night, then hike back out through the Button Rock Reservoir and Hall Ranch. It would be a total of roughly 15 miles of hiking but it being broken up over two days, and that it would all basically be downhill, made it do-able for me.
If you look closely, you can see the reservoir from this ridge. We bushwhacked from here.
Sunday afternoon we dropped my van off at the Hall Ranch trail head and got a ride up the mountain to the Big Elk Meadows trail head. We got started on our hike at 6 pm, late by any standard, but only had the short 3 mile hike to the meadow to do that evening. Leave it to us to make a short hike into a much more difficult one though, as we tried out a shortcut that did not work out for us. Instead, we ended up bushwhacking across miles of dense forest using terrain navigation to reach our goal.
With our camp setup, we watched the sun set and ate a dehydrated dinner.
Hiking along an established trail with an extra 35-40 pounds on your back is hard enough, but doing it across untouched forest is many times more difficult, and dangerous. Every log or rock is a potential ankle injury, and the risk of getting turned around and lost is there as well. Luckily we did start off with a great view of where we were heading and we both carried compasses along with Conor’s GPS.
Elk bones litter the meadow floor… one of many we found along the way.
It took a few hours, but we made our goal just before sunset, where we setup camp, got a fire going, and ate a quick meal before settling in our tent to try to get some sleep. As has become the norm for me, I can not sleep in a tent. I tossed an turned all night, finally and only getting an hour or two of sleep just before the alarm went off at 5am. I had even taken some sleeping pills to ensure some sleep, but my body’s reaction to tent-sleep over rode the pills and kept me up all night.
The final approach into the Button Rock Reservoir
After a quick breakfast, we packed up again and began the short hike to the Button Rock Reservoir where we quickly ran into our first barrier; a rock wall preventing us from going around the North banks of the reservoir. We were forced to turn around and backtrack to the beginning of the reservoir where we attempted to make it around the south side. This too proved to be a problem. While we could have made it either way if we did more bushwhacking, neither of us felt we could do the amount of mileage needed before the end of the day. Our only hope of making it out of the forest before our “call in the helicopters” cut-off time was to return to the Big Elk Meadows trail head (4 miles the way we just came, and all uphill) and hitchhike back to town.
A glance at the Big Elk Meadow
With our will gone, we turned to begin the long uphill climb back to the trail head. Along the way we continued to check for any cell coverage to call in a pickup request so we would not have to rely on hitchhiking. As we came to the top of a ridge, and only if I extended my arm and the phone all the way out, did we come up with enough of a signal to call in for a pickup. Another hour of hiking and we were finally out of the forest and on our way back down the mountain in a comfortable car.
Although our original plan was not achieved, we did get in some great backpacking and found some nice areas that we both want to revisit (via the proper trails) later. We even learned a bit about cross-country hiking.
