How fitting we would encounter a mountain goat on Shakespeare’s birthday, as one of his great insults (from Henry V) is: “Thou damned and luxurious mountain goat….”
We saw the goat on the way down. He kept moving around to get a better view of us so we decided to leave him to his own devices.
It was a great day to hike, perfect weather and views to begin with:
McClellan Butte has some very steep sections and we were not hiking fast:
We saw a really cool little lake that is shaped like a salmon:
The trail has many very nice sections:
We did not do the famous “scramble” at the top. The scramble is a final rock pile of 200 or 300 feet that looks like it would be very doable except for one thing, namely, if you slip you die. We skipped it:
But we got close and the view from here is amazing:
All in all, this is a very steep and very tough hike and we loved every minute. We will definitely do it again when the snow is gone to see if we can improve upon our round-trip time of 6 hours.
We have hikes scheduled for this Sunday, the 26th and Wednesday the 29th. Should be fun!