Saturday July 26, 26.7mi/43.0km

Stonebraker Ranch (428.0/5610ft) to WF Crooked Creek (401.3/5830ft) (ID)

Camping at the ranch was convenient, but the resident deer kept coming by the night and loudly munching grass near my tent. They let me charge my powerbank overnight so I went into one of the cabins to grab it, it was so cozy inside.

For most of the day the trail was immaculately maintained and I was again pleasantly surprised.

A mile later I came to the Chamberlain airstrip, which was a confusing mess of trails, buildings and a couple of airstrips.

It was pretty cool though to see a woman just hanging out at her campsite making breakfast having arrived in her plane.

There are lots of airstrips scattered around the Frank Church Wilderness, having been grandfathered in before the Wilderness was created. This is one of the larger ones, it has two airstrips and each is about 2,500 ft long.

Much of the rest of the day was hiking on surprisingly nice trails through burned areas.

And the wind must have shifted today because the smoke from the Big Bear fire has traveled over this direction.

There wasn’t much distant scenery today, just dense pine forests or burn areas.

The one viewpoint I got was from the top of Moose Point looking down into Moose meadow.

I had an early lunch on top of Moose point, enjoying the breeze which kept the flies away but also brought the wildfire smoke. I descended into Moose Meadow and topped off my water, since I would be on a dry ridge most of the afternoon. I was reminded how increasingly dry Idaho was becoming as I hike South, since I saw sagebrush for the first time since leaving Nevada. Weird.

Even when hiking through these massive dead forests, pretty much all the blowdown had been cut away. Impressive.

The ridge tops actually had some decent views since their trees were all burned away, but I felt a little exposed when there was a thunderstorm coming.

The contrast of this photo is simply stunning, young and old trees.

Yep, a storm is definitely coming, time to get off the ridge.

I was three switchbacks down off the ridge, and the thunderstorm swooped over, dumping rain for about 20 minutes. Good timing, and the umbrella saved the day. I continued down a drainage for Sliver Creek, which eventually became Crooked Creek, looking for a campsite. For much of its length, the trail was benched into the hillside or directly in the swampy bottom, but after an hour I found a flat and dry spot to camp, amongst trees that were not dead. Some days it’s hard to align all those circles of the Venn diagram. It was like 3 more miles than I had planned to hike, but at least it was easy downhill hiking.