Red Castle Lakes

The date is Wednesday August 11, 2010. The time is 5:00 a.m. The location is Tremonton, Utah. Here is a picture to depict the situation.

Me, Robin, and Trenton began our man weekend up in the Uinta Mountains. We left bright and early in the morning and drove 3.5 hours to the trailhead. Once at the trailhead we had a little pre-hike hydration

Followed by a little pre-hike stretching

And finally one last picture before the hike began.

The trailhead is called the China Meadows trailhead and is about 8500 feet above sea level. We drove through Evanston, Wyoming to get there. We began our 10 mile hike to the Red Castle Lakes at approximately 8:30 a.m. We did a little research on the trail before hand and most people said the trail wasn't too hard until the very end when the trail turned into switchbacks up the side of the mountain. Overall we expected about a 1200 foot rise in elevation from the beginning of the trail to the end. Here are some action photos of us on the hike in.

We also had to stop and take a few short breaks

After hiking for 8.5 miles Red Castle Peak finally came into view and was absolutely spectacular

We got to our camp at about 2 p.m. so we were on the trail for a little less than 6 hours. Even after wearing 2 pairs of socks and putting on some mole skin I still earned one heck of a war wound on the hike in.

We figured we made pretty good time considered we were carrying 40 pound packs on our backs. We found a few surprises in the campsite that we had chosen and some turned out to be quite useful. Here is a picture of the most useful item we found that we dubbed the "shit" shovel. I will let you figure out why we bestowed that name upon it.

We ended up camping at Lower Red Castle lake and on Thursday and Friday we hiked up to Red Castle Lake and spent both days fishing up there. The original plan was to fish this lake on Thursday and hike to some other lakes Friday but the fishing here was just to good to pass up so we spent both days there. Here are some pictures of the fish we caught.

Up at Red Castle lake the views were absolutely amazing. We got some awesome pictures. The lake you can see down below on the right hand side is Lower Red Castle Lake, this is where we camped.

Saturday definitely came way to fast. The 10 mile hike out sucked big time and we were all glad to see the truck at the trailhead. When we didn't have a backpack on our backs the trip was an absolute blast and we can't wait to do it again next year.