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pictures that begin with "IMG" were provided by Elaine.
Finally, we went up to Brighton.
With the recent, hot weather, there is no longer any real concern about any of our usual haunts being snowed in: To be sure, Dale and Bryan had been in the area recently and had empirically verified this. Plus, as hot as it was in the valley, achieving a high altitude at the start seemed like a good idea! As we left the parking lot, we let Chris as well as Anne and Mike (who were coming from Park City) know our destination and they were only minutes behind us.
Arriving at the Brighton parking lot, we piled out of our vehicles (and Bryan, off his motorcycle), donned our gear and got ready to go - at about the same time that Mike and Anne showed up. As we started up the trail, we could not help but notice the large number of fat chipmunks scurrying about - the numbers of which seemed to thin out greatly as we continued up the trail: We wondered if their numbers were in proportion to the number of people that passed their way, willing to give free handouts.
As we wound along the trail in front of the Lake Mary dam, we were surprised at the amount of water coming out - much of it seeming to be pouring out from places other than where we expected the dam's penstock to be. As we topped the hill and we got our view of Lake Mary, we also noticed that it was more-or-less at full pool capacity: In great contrast to the last time we'd hiked past Lake Mary, the large rock island was only barely visible above the water, and all evidence of the smaller Lake Phoebe was completely submerged.
It was at Lake Mary that we'd decided to take our obligatory group photo as Elaine wasn't anticipating going all of the way to Catherine Pass. As usual, I took several photos, but just as I was taking the second one, someone said "Hey, there's Chris" who ran past the camera just as the shutter snapped: Of course, we took a third one.
Leaving the shore of Lake Mary, we convinced Elaine that it would be an easy jaunt up to Lake Martha, so she continued along, past the lake and to the top of the first switchback. At that point, there is a junction: One way continues up toward Lake Catherine and Catherine pass while the less-obvious trail followed a the ridge that separated Lakes Mary and Dog. The latter was a steeper, rockier route, but significantly shorter that the way that we'd come up - plus it gave one different scenery on the way back. Elaine, who had plenty of daylight and time to take this second route - and had never been there before - decided to follow it, keeping in constant touch via radio.
As the rest of the group continued up the trail, we couldn't help but notice something that we'd also noticed at Lake Mary: Thick clouds of mosquitoes. When we'd stopped earlier to take the group photo, they had been bad enough that we'd already slathered ourselves with DEET. Now, at the higher elevation, it seemed that the broods were more active and that the clouds were getting thicker, despite our having "DEETed" ourselves. When we got to Catherine Pass, it seemed that everyone was standing around, either waving the bugs away or applying more DEET. Soon after we arrived, Mike C. and Anne did what was probably the sensible thing and kept moving - starting back down, presumably before being dessicated by the little bloodsuckers!
On the last bit of the trail towards Catherine Pass, I'd posed a question to Ron, Dale and Mike M. that was worthy of our nerdiness: How would one build a circuit that would flash an LED with just one resistor (1k), one capacitor (220uF), one transistor (a 2N2222) and an LED? (The power supply - 12 volts - is assumed to be a given.) After letting them puzzle over this for a while, I drew the schematic in the dirt and let them in on the secret. (Look for a link that answers this at the bottom of this page...)
Soon after Gordon arrived at the pass, but before too much of our blood had been drained to survive the return trip, we decided to head back down in the gloaming. It turned out that Ron, Gordon and I decided to leave a couple minutes after the rest of the group, so they were sighted leaving the Lake Catherine cirque before we'd dropped off the ridge. Making our way down the trail at a somewhat leisurely pace (allowing Gordon, who was still nursing a knee that was bothering him from the Beartrap Fork hike a few weeks ago, to catch up before we left him again...) we soon got to the junction where we'd last seen Elaine. By this time, she'd gotten most of the way down to the car, but had her progress impeded by a pair of meese - a cow and bull - who decided that the hiking trail was a nice grazing area. Elaine, who wasn't really in any sort of hurry, waited until they sauntered off the trail (taking a picture or two while doing so.)
We, too, decided to return via the Lake Dog trail: We were unsure where the rest of the group had gone, just knowing that if they'd returned via the "normal" route, we'd likely get back to the car at about the same time. Just a few feet down from the junction, however, I caught a fairly strong whiff of what smelled like nutmeg - something that I'd not noticed before in the Wasatch. Curious, we stopped and started sniffing flowers and crushing leaves, trying to figure out the smell's source. Finally, we determined that it was coming from a cluster Englemann Spruce trees: We'd already known that Ponderosa Pines smelled of Vanilla, but had no idea that Englemanns had a nutmeg smell!
Sometime, after rejoining the main trail just below Lake Dog, we realized that Gordon was still a bit behind us - but still making progress - so we continued down at a fairly slow pace. At about that time, Elaine reported that the rest of the group had arrived and that yes, they'd also taken the Lake Dog trail that everyone else in our group had followed. Just below the horizontal traverse at the top of the ski run, we noticed two large, black shapes off the trail: Looking more carefully, we could see that the one nearest us (perhaps, 60-100 feet away) was a cow moose and another 100 feet or so beyond it seemed to be a larger, dark shape lumbering about in the darkness: We figured that these were the same cow-bull moose pair that Elaine had waited for earlier.
By the time we got down to the trailhead, Mike C. and Anne had already headed down canyon - no doubt avoiding the scourge of mosquitoes (which weren't nearly as bad at the car, anyway - either that, or we just couldn't see them buzzing about...) We waited for a few more minutes for Gordon to arrive and then, after yet another couple of minutes watching the various stars and planets in the sky - and talking about Iridium Flares - we piled back into our vehicles and headed down-canyon, where we parted ways for the evening.
The Lake Mary dam was constructed in about 1914 (with final completion in 1915) at a cost of $69,000 and is owned by the City of Salt Lake: Although originally scheduled for completion in 1914, considerably more excavation was required at the dam site to reach suitable bedrock, causing delays in its final completion. Materials for the dam were first taken to Park City via rail, then transported by wagon to Brighton, and then by light wagon and pack animal up to the construction site.
Lake Mary is part of a protected watershed with a capacity of approximately 600 acre-feet (about 196 million gallons) - about 2/3 that of Twin Lakes. Lake Mary is actually two lakes, but the smaller one (Lake Phoebe) is normally merged with Lake Mary and is only visible during very low water years - as happened at the end of the summer of 2007.
Lake Mary, originally called "Granite Lake," gets its name from New York artist Hartwig Borneman naming it after his wife in 1872. Lake Martha was named by Alfred Lambourne, after his mother, while Lake Catherine got its name from William Brighton (yes, that Brighton) who named it after his wife, but it wasn't until after 1890 that this name came into common use.
Much of the above information is from the book "The Lady in the Ore Bucket" by Charles Keller.
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About that resistor-capacitor-transistor-LED flasher circuit? Look
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