Saturday July 19, 18.1mi/29.1km

Gateway Campground (581.2/2105 ft) to Ridge above Rhoda Creek (563.1/6410ft) (ID)

I was up at 5am with the sun, and my watch gave me a nice birthday message.

The lodge insists on using Mountain time, even though they are actually in Pacific time. This confuses basically everybody there, the restaurant opened at 7am for breakfast, but which 7am was it? The bikers I was camping with decided to go over at 6am, which the lodge was calling 7am, so they got served breakfast and brought me back half of a waffle and some bacon. Sweet. I went back out to the road to hitch, it took me about an hour and a half before a nice guy named Randy picked me up and drove me all the way to the Wilderness Gateway campground. It was a 45-minute drive so I didn’t start hiking until 10:30. I crossed over the massive Lochsa River, and then entered the campground.

The trailhead was at the back of the campground so I had to walk 15 minutes along various paved roads. The trailhead had one of those neat carved wooden signs, that showed the entire wilderness.

For the first 5 miles the trail was very nice.

After about an hour, I officially entered the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. I love seeing these Wilderness signs, and it’s a little surprising that I’ve already hiked 420 miles of the Idaho Centennial Trail before seeing my first such sign. The nice trail continued…

… All the way to the Stanley hot springs.

There were six or seven different pools, all created by stacked rocks. Three of the pools were large and very clean looking so I used one of those to soak in for a little while, while I also enjoyed lunch.

It’s also surprising to me that I’ve hiked 420 miles from the Canadian border on the ICT / Hot Springs Trail, and this is the first Hot Spring I’ve come to. It was a very nice hot spring and eventually I pulled myself away from it and continued on up the mountain. Immediately after leaving the hot springs, the trail became much less maintained.

Towards the top of the big 4000-ft climb, it entered a burn area which was annoying to step over all the fallen trees.

But I could tell this was still a popular trail, as each of the fallen trees had all of its branches broken off so it was easy to step over, or it had a well-worn herdpath going around it. At the top of the climb, I came around the corner of a ridge and then I was in lake territory. Lottie Lake:

And less than a mile later, Little Lottie Lake.

Where there’s water, there are snakes.

Every mile or so I hit another lake, this was one of the Seven lakes.

And then I had another thousand-foot climb up to the top of Stanley Butte.

Pretty sweet views from the top. The mountains to the South still had a little bit of snow on their shadowy North faces.

Up at 7,300 ft. elevation I could see in every direction.

I descended down to Shasta Lake, where there were forms of wildlife blocking my path.

I passed by several trail junctions, and most of them had the signs on the ground. Can the Clearwater National Forest not afford posts?

Even though I had more daylight and more miles I could cover, after I looked at my watch I decided to stop and camp in a little little saddle above Rhoda Creek.

My watch showed almost 7,000 vertical feet ascended today… oops.

That was definitely not my intent, but I’m going to sleep well tonight.