Signboard at the trail junction just below the Lake Mary dam.  Click in image for full-sized version.

Images (.JPG format):

• IMG03996 - The last vestiges of sunlight on Sunset and Pioneer peaks - and this was about the only evidence of the sun that we saw!
• IMG04000 - Lake Mary and Sunset/Pioneer Peak.  Another view of the lake and dam is #4001.
  
• IMG04005 - Lake Mary, from the north shore.
  
• IMG04006 - Mike, in a depression in the ground that we thought might often fill with water and could  have been Lake Annette:  We soon ruled this site out as a possibility.
• IMG04007 - Ron, with Dale standing in Lake Annette - or at least in the mud near the only open water to be seen.  #4011 shows Ron standing in the middle of the lake.
• IMG04023 - The obligatory group picture with everyone standing on the shore of Lake Annette:  L->R:  Clint, Dale, Mike, Ron, Tim and Gordon.  (I am slightly blurred because I had to run down from the rocky ridge on which the camera was perched - and there was barely enough time to get there before the long exposure was snapped.)
  

Here is a USGS aerial photograph showing the northern end of Lake Mary and the area encompassing Lake Annette.  Lake Annette itself is difficult to see and is slightly highlighted in this photograph to make it more obvious.  (Note:  I tried to find online a color aerial photograph of the same area, but I could find nothing of similar resolution.)

• The elevation profile of the hike - This shows the ups and downs of the trail. 
  
• A detailed map with the GPS track of the hike (plus surrounding landmarks, 523k)
  

This are composites of smaller pictures.  Please note that due to size, they may not display properly on some browsers and you may need to use an image viewer like Irfanview to view them properly and zoom in on some of the details.  Note that details (exposure, time, location, etc.) are noted in file's EXIF "Comments" field.

• Lake Mary Pano- A wide-angle shot from near the cabin.  (1312k, .JPG)
  
• Lake Annette Pano- A wide-angle shot from a rocky ridge along the northeast side of Lake Annette:  The shore is outlined by the tall grasses growing in the wet mud.  It is suspected that in the spring near the height of the runoff, that this would actually look like a lake as the water would be much higher grasses in the bottom would not yet have grown up.  (This is a half-sized version:  1000k .JPG. )  Here is the full-sized version:  (3229k .JPG)
  

We'd been saving one of the late-season hikes for an opportunity to try to find Lake Annette.

Lake Annette is one of Lake Mary's siblings, but is little-known, mostly because it doesn't appear on maps of the area and it cannot be seen from the trail that goes between Lakes Mary and Twin, but also because it is quite small.

The first that I'd heard of Lake Annette was a description in Charles Keller's book, The Lady in the Ore Bucket, a history of Millcreek and Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons.  In this book Keller states:

"Lake Annette, a little-known body of water almost too small to be called a lake, doesn't even appear on the USGS map of the area.  [Alfred] Lambourne called it a lakelet or a pool.  It was named by Henry Culmer after his wife-to-be, Annette Wells, in 1875.  Culmer wrote that he and Lambourne once spend a whole day in a vain search for this elusive body of water.  It rests on a shelf below and to the north of Lake Mary, not far from the trail between Lake Mary and Twin Lakes.  In recent years it has gathered a mass of downed trees and is filling with silt, giving it a rather cluttered and unkempt appearance.  Not too many years ago, however, while those trees were still standing, the pool was a beautiful, clean, quiet haven from the hustle and bustle of the outside world, probably looking very much as it did when Culmer gave it its name."

Armed only with this passage (or, more accurately, my recollection of it) we started searching for this "elusive body of water."  Fortunately, it didn't take too long to find it once we'd followed the Lake Mary-Twin Lakes trail slightly to the north.  Having gotten off the trail a bit (partly in looking for the lake, and also partly because some of the group temporarily lost the trail) a possible suspect was spotted by Ron and Tim a little ways down a steep hill.  On the way over to meet them, Gordon and I stumbled on another likely area - a depression in the ground, perhaps 20 feet across and 40 feet long, that looked as though it was frequently water-filled.  Being somewhat disappointed at this find, we went over to look at what Ron was describing and Ron, Dale and I descended onto the shelf.

At the bottom of this shelf we found a somewhat swampy area, the bottom heavily grown-up with water-loving plants in some fairly wet mud - a much more promising prospect than the earlier find.  Carefully stepping through the mud, nearly halfway across the lake, Dale spotted a good sign:  Open water.  Not much water - it was, perhaps, a small pool 4 or 5 feet in diameter from what could be seen amongst the plants, but water nonetheless.  The fact that the entire area was very muddy was certain indication of the presence of a lot of water.  It would be interesting to revisit this place during the peak of the spring runoff:  It is likely that this water body would be more "lake-like" at that time:  Not only would there probably be much more water, but the plants now on the bottom  would not have re-grown.  It is also likely that the area would be heavily populated with mosquitoes as well.  Alas, it is likely that in a few more decades (and barring a large avalanche to "scrub" it clean) Lake Annette will cease to look like a lake at all, having turned into just a bog...

Although somewhat vague, Keller's description was fairly apt pertaining to its location.   More specifically, it is about 600 feet North of the northern-most tip of Lake Mary (a bearing of 4 degrees, True, actually.)  Even more specifically, its GPS location is 40° 35' 33" North, 111° 35' 21" West (WGS84 datum;  18" West with NAD27 datum) with a GPS- recorded altitude of 9430 feet (9460-9480 on the USGS map as it shows the presence of a slope in that area.)  Although Lake Annette is not shown on the USGS map, it does show a small stream (one that eventually joins with the stream along the west side of the ski run, paralleling the old hiking trail) originating at that location.   Although difficult to judge precisely, it would appear that the North-South dimension of Lake Annette is about 65 feet with the East-West dimension being about 35 feet.

Having found Lake Annette, we posed for the obligatory group picture and then continued on our way along the trail to Twin Lakes.  Farther down the trail - almost to the first of the rocky slide areas - we spotted another water-filled pool, very much smaller than Lake Annette, just off the trail to the left.  I'd remembered having seen this pool in years past, but it just didn't fit Keller's description, being too far away from Lake Mary.  Upon arrival at Twin Lakes, it was getting to be quite dark:  All we could really tell about Twin Lakes was that it had been drained even more since we were there several weeks ago with several previously-submerged rocky outcrops now being visible.

For our descent, we took the service road rather than the Twin Lakes trail from Silver Fork as it was a more direct return path to the Brighton parking lot.  Several years ago - probably at the time of the dam's refurbishment in 1997 - new gravel was laid down on the base of this service road.  We quickly discovered that this made for a miserable descent as this gravel seemed to function more as bearings than as a friction surface:  Where we could, we walked along the side of the road.  While much of this gravel has been broken down and/or been stratified by use and isn't quite as hazardous, it seemed that everyone had a near-spill because of it.

Upon return to the vehicles, we piled in and returned to the bottom of the canyon where all of us (except Mike) converged on Rocky Mountain Pizza company for dinner and some live Bluegrass music.

Comments:

• Because all of the images were originally taken stored in raw binary format, they have been down-processed to .JPG for web posting:  If requested, different color/contrast/brightness may be applied and/or higher-quality uncompressed versions may be available for most of these image.
• If you want one (or more) of these images and wish some sort of adjustment (color, brightness, exposure, etc.) please let me know:  All of these image have been processed in some way.
• These images are in chronological order.
• No-one ever said that all of these images (or any of them) were good.  Some of them may have definite focus/exposure "issues."
• EXIF data is present for most of the images, showing time, date, and precise exposure conditions.  Recent versions of Irfanview will show this in the "View->Image Information->EXIF" tab.  Note that cropping/noise reduction required the use of another program which may have removed some/most of this EXIF data.
• Images suffixed with "h" (if any) are half-size.  This was done for images that were somewhat out of focus (due to misfocus or camera/subject movement associated with long shutter times) or those that required some extra noise reduction and had lost some detail anyway.
• All images taken using a Sigma SD-10 camera and were taken using the 18-50mm zoom lens, except as noted in the EXIF data.

Go to the 2006 Wednesday Night Hike page, or main Wednesday Night Hike index page.

Historical info about Lake Annette was taken from "The Lady in the Ore Bucket" by Charles Keller