The informational sign past the bottom the Butler Fork trailhead.
Click on the image for a larger version.

Images (.JPG format):

• IMG05276 - A look toward the east, up the canyon.
• IMG05280 - From atop Circle-All Peak, looking up the canyon just after sunset.
• IMG05283 - Some of the cloud-laced ridges, across the canyon from Circle-All peak.
• IMG05284 - A view toward the mouth of Big Cottonwood canyon from the peak.
• IMG05288 - The obligatory group picture.  L->R:  Gordon, Ron, and Clint.
• IMG05289 - The last vestiges of sunset over Gobbler's Knob.
  

None this week.

• A detailed map with the GPS track of the hike (plus surrounding landmarks, 804 kB)
• The elevation profile of the hike - This shows the ups and downs of the trail.  There were two problems with this week's GPS plot:  On the way up, the receiver's batteries died, hence the elevation discontinuity on the ascent.  Secondly, throughout the narrow canyon forks, the GPS lock was somewhat erratic, causing elevation data to be missed in several places.
  

Gordon arrived at the parking lot first - and was about the only car present.  This could only mean one thing:  Either the weather had scared people off, leaving them thinking that the hiking conditions would be terrible, or they had more sense that we did.  (Ok, that's two things.)

As I've said before, we've never managed to let common sense get in the way of our determination to do the Wednesday Night Hike, so we pored over the list of late-season hikes that we hadn't yet done, piled into Gordon's vehicle, and headed off to the trailhead of Butler fork.  The destination?  Circle-All Peak.

This peak is almost directly across the canyon from Kessler Peak (one of several so-named peaks in the area) and it justs out partway into the canyon at about the same point that it makes a turn toward the southeast.  Because of this quirk of geography, from this peak one can see both the mouth of the canyon and most of the way up towards Brighton.

When we got to the trail, it was still overcast, but there was no obvious sign of rain earlier in the day, as the leaves on the plants were dry, but the trail did show very recent evidence of heavy rainfall - probably from yesterday's deluge.  In ascending the trail, we were passed by two different people - both of the athletic sort - running down the trail:  We were hoping that they were of the type that just liked to run for the health of it and that there wasn't some vicious and hungry creature in pursuit.

Ron and I soon left Gordon far behind, but we stopped intermittently to wait for him to catch up again before we started again.  Before too long, we attained the ridge that divides Butler Fork from Mill-A fork and started heading south along this ridge.  After few more minutes of hiking and a hundred feet or so of climbing, we found ourselves atop Circle-All Peak, along with its commanding view.  Occasionally, we saw a very distant flash of lightning and a faint rumble, but there was clearly nothing nearby that appeared to be threatening.

Having gotten to the peak a few minutes before sunset, we managed to catch a few glimpses of aplenglow as the setting sun occasionally poked a finger of light through the clouds, and this sight was juxtaposed with some of the higher peaks being obscured by clinging clouds.  After a few minutes of looking around and taking pictures, we decided that it was only going to get darker, so we retrieved our flashlights from our packs and started down.

Not unexpectedly, the humidity was quite high - and as it was getting cooler after sunset, the humidity was even higher:  I noticed that, wearing a headlamp, my view of the trail was somewhat obscured by the fog from my own breath being lighted by my headlamp - but this was mitigated somewhat by moving the lamp as far up to the top of my head as it would go without flipping off:  This also had the side-effect of lighting up the trail ahead more distantly.

After leaving the switchback portion below the ridge, we were again paralleling the stream, which was "creeking" noisily, despite its fairly low flow.  All at once, I noticed, ahead, a pair of eyes ahead of me, more or less in the middle of the trail, about 50 feet ahead of me.  Stopping, I also noticed that they were about 5 feet above the ground and occasionally blinking.  Hmmm...  Allowing our eyes to adjust, we saw that it was a moose, standing in the trail, but it didn't seem to be in any particular hurry to move, even as we cautiously inched ahead.  As we got a bit closer, making a bit more noise and shouting, the moose decided that we were probably just like everyone else and it started lumbering off the the trail and into a stand of trees.  As we approached this stand, we could still see the eyes staring at us from the dark - and I believe that I caught a glimpse of a second pair of eyes as we walked past.

The rest of the descent was pretty much uneventful, in spite of the occasional stumbling over a tree root in the trail, and all of the party managed to make it back to the car in pretty good time.  Once at the trailhead, we had a few minutes of fun shooting the green Laser at distant roadsigns and into the misty air.  Eventually, we had enough of this, piled into Gordon's car, and headed down the canyon.

Upon arriving at the parking lot, we noticed that it was still empty.  As Gordon pulled alongside my car, I noticed that Ron's car wasn't exactly where he'd parked it:  It seemed to have moved backwards, halfway into the parking space behind it - which, like pretty much the rest of the lot, was empty.  After a brief bit of investigation, we determined that Ron had parked it in 3rd gear without the parking brake and it didn't take much of a push to cause it to lurch backwards a couple inches at a time.

After this, Ron went home and Gordon and I wandered over to Rocky Mountain Pizza for salad and pizza, along with the sounds from a slightly smaller-than-usual bluegrass music gathering.

Comments about pictures taken by Clint:

• 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.
• 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 images.
• 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 numbered 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.
• If you took some pictures of the hike and send them to me, I'll post them - and give you the blame!
  

Go to the 2007 Wednesday Night Hike page, or main Wednesday Night Hike page or the Wednesday Night Hike Cross-Index page