10 miles, 14 lakes.  The Crooked Lakes Basin in the Tahoe National Forest a great place for a child’s first backpacking trip.  And so my daughter (almost 9) and I did a three days/two nights backpacking trip last week.

I took over 250 pictures (teaser at left), of which about a third are now posted in the flickr set Crooked Lakes Basin.  Three of them required some sectional adjustment in Photoshop, the rest are quickly tuned in Picasa.  More on my experience with panorama stitching later.

Details of our route: park at the Carr Lake trailhead, and ramble along it’s shores, and gently upward past Feely, Delhany, and Island Lakes.  I’d come this far on day hikes with the kids before, but didn’t realize the beautiful 7000-foot alpine-granite ecosystem really doesn’t start until Island Lake.  We continued on the Crooked Lakes trail, camping at a small marshy lake which seems to be known only as one of the Crooked Lakes.  We found a great spot on a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by marsh grasses.  Despite this, we had zero mosquitoes at any of the lakes, and only a couple during snack breaks in rather unlikely spots.  Both sunrise and sunset provided incredible lighting for my photographs.

The second day we left our tent and set out cross-country, following the dry outflows of each of the Crooked Lakes, which are strung out every few hundred yards, making it pretty hard to get lost!  Each of these lakes is a lush alpine oasis of grasses, alpine lily pads, and dragonflys, surrounded by granite, manzanita clumps, and the late summer wild flowers.  In between are mixed stands of lodgepole pines, various firs, ponderosa pines, and junipers (bristlecones?), many in shapes indicating the stress of snow pack on the saplings, and the force of storms on the adults.  Many dead snags bleaching and gradually turning to powder in the high altitude sun.

Leaving the final Crooked Lake, we struck out due east to catch the Grouse Ridge trail (for another cool outing, check out the scale series of geocaches centered on the Grouse Ridge Lookout and arranged as a scale model of the solar system.)  We descended past Middle Lake (which we somehow missed completely - it must be farther off the trail than the maps would indicate - and down past Shotgun Lake, which really isn’t much of a lake at all - simply a grassy marsh on it’s way to being a meadow (still attractive though!).

From there we descended further to the Lindsay Lakes trail, back up to Penner Lake.  This was the greatest elevation gain of our trip (1000 feet?) but reaching Penner Lake at the top made it all worth it!  It’s a beautiful lake hemmed in by granite walls all around, just warm enough to plunge into (though the breeze which dries you off is pretty brisk!)  We sat in the sun on a rock in the shallows enjoying the warm sun and I even got a thorough hair combing from my little hairdressing apprentice.  What luxury!

The descent back down to Crooked Lakes affords awesome views, and is just about my favorite part of the trail.  We moved our camp from the first Crooked Lake to the second (or third, depending on how you count) - which is the biggest of the series.  The dawn on the granite hill opposite was spectacular.

The hike out is short, sweet, and slightly downhill (500 feet or less).  We stopped for a long time on the shores of Feely lake to construct fairy mansions out of the shore gravel.

I learned a few things about packing this trip, like: no matter what you pack for lunch the last day, you’re better off saving the weight because you end up picking an eatery on the way home that sounds way better than whatever you’ve packed in, and out again.  Tuna fish in foil packages is the greatest invention ever.  Vienna sausages don’t taste all that great when you grow up.  Leaking DEET (air pressure from the elevation gain?) is pretty nasty stuff - double bag it if it’s near your toothbrush.  And, girls require way more toiled paper than guys, pack a generous amount ;-).  I look forward to putting this newfound wisdom into practice again very soon.

Resources: A snippet of the map at the trailhead is at left.  I found a partial scan of a topo here.  I chose the hike based on 100 Classic Hikes in Northern California; you can read an excerpt of an overlapping hike here.

[Sorry this is a week late, I had to upgrade Flickr to a pro account to get them all up there and organized into a set, and using paypal it took days and days...]