Day 2 was a lot more exiting than our first day. It began with the navigation across the second avalanche debris and then the easy to follow, but not well marked trail up the Elk River. We have a few exciting river crossings, one where Roger almost managed to fully fall into the river, but danced across in a way Mark and I wanted to avoid. Another river crossing gave us the choice of walking over a thin snow bridge, or under a think snow bridge. We walked under and got a few good pictures.
After a nice rest at a lake at the top of the Elk River, we went up a long snow-field to the actual Pass itself where we took another break at the simple campground established there by past travelers. After we reached the top, the snow ends, and you immediately begin dropping down towards a large lake. At first there is an easy to follow route, but about 1/2 down, it degenerates into may alternative paths formed by previous hikers making bad choices. Though some miracle we manage to mostly choose the correct forks in the road and were amazed to find a few red flags just before we came out into the open from the dense forest.
Rather than stop, we looked at the map and saw it was fairly close to the circle lake and decided to push on. It was all nice and wonderful as we walked across the open area, and to the right of a short narrow lake. It was then that we noticed the little topo lines before the lake. What this means on the surface is a STEEP drop down to the lake holding branches to keep from falling. We could see that others came down the same "route" but it looks like there were several different strategies on how to descend, so we got to choose which route to follow.
We finally arrived at the side of the lake, and again, underestimated the challenge of walking around the lake. Unlike the nice thin lake we walked around higher up, this lake had a steep, lots of growth shoreline. Those 400m took MUCH longer than we estimated and we arrived at Camp #2 after almost 10 hours of hiking and were very tired.
Camp #2 was not the best, finding water was harder than most of our camps, and the spot we selected wasn't too good for the tent. However, few bugs so we couldn't complain.
