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On this trip, Ted Ehrlich drove up from Colorado and we hit the Winds for a 2 night backpacking trip over the Fourth of July Weekend.

We’d originally planned a point to point hike from the Scab Creek Trailhead on the southwest side of the Winds back to Lander, but logistics were a bit of a concern as well as the driving that would take time away from a weekend Winds trip. In the end, we weren’t too fast getting ready the morning of our start day either, so we quickly scanned the map and created a loop on the spot.
The Loop
A 50 mile loop was quickly created, and Ted made the suggestion of heading counter-clockwise. This would keep us lower in elevation on day 1, when afternoon thunderstorms were forecast; with the higher elevation days coming on days 2 and 3 where the forecast was more favorable. With a plan in place, we made the short drive from Lander to Worthen Meadows Trailhead, which sits just under 9000 feet. Arriving shortly after 10 AM might not have been the early start we planned, but it was early enough. Quickly we made our way over Sheep Bridge, crossed over the wilderness boundary and then back out as we headed up towards Shoshone Lake. The lake remains outside the boundary, so it’s a popular spot with 4 wheel drive and ATV enthusiasts alike. It was the 4th of July, and we spotted a few parties camped along the lake shore with their vehicles, but overall the area still felt fairly remote.

We quickly crossed the outlet of the lake, were bombarded with mosquitoes, briefly lost the trail, then made our way towards Dickinson Park. It was an easy trail, and we’d even managed to keep our feet dry thus far. Then came the realization of that soon ending. The trail stopped perpendicular to the North Fork of the Popo Agie River, with remnants of an old, washed out bridge on both the near and far sides. Only rushing water flowed between. We’d be wading this one.




The first day would come to a close with an amazing sunset, no fireworks, some rain, and more mosquitoes. Or so we thought. After dark, I began hearing bells. Lots of bells. In the distance they could be heard towards the creek below us, where we’d filtered water earlier. I’d already settled into my tent, and Ted into his bivy sack 50 feet away. “Hey Aaron”, I heard Ted shout out. “Yeah?” I replied. “Do you hear bells?” Ted asked. Briefly I considered replying that I heard nothing, only the normal sounds of the night, but I replied with a couple guesses. “Yeah, goats, llamas maybe?” The bells continued throughout the night, their source hidden by the darkness. As the night wore on the sound only got closer, and at 3 AM I looked out from under the vestibule of my tent and could see shapes moving perhaps 50 yards away, some light, some dark, but I dared not shine my headlamp. I didn’t want whatever they were nosing around my tent as I tried to score 2 or 3 hours of sleep between the relentless ringing.
Daybreak of day 2, bells long gone. We packed up and made our way to the Bears Ears Trailhead, then aggressively climbed over 11,000 feet and closer to 12, as the first snow of the trip made an appearance. At the top of the climb, a huge plateau with amazing views to the west. Cameras remained at the ready, as did the map in an attempt to identify everything in sight.




Travel on the plateau was easier and lasted for miles, as we connected with the Lizard Head Trail and made our way over or around a few snowfields, and just a touch of talus. Descending past Lizard Head Peak, we caught a glimpse into the Cirque of the Towers, the valley still well covered in snow. We made camp for the night along the North Fork of the Popo Agie River, now far upstream of our crossing the day prior.





Trail signage in the Wind River Range
The Last Day
Day 3 and out. About 17 miles left. Another river crossing – this time it was flowing deep and fast enough to require our full attention, so no pictures. Ted needed to be at work back in Denver the next day and I had responsibilities at home, so we hiked fast. Just a couple miles from the car, Ted and I split up. Ted followed a longer, downhill route to Popo Agie Falls and a water slide just above that was quite a tempting option after 2 and a half days of hiking.

I went uphill, though a shorter route and back to the car. The hike nearing completion, I dumped water and hiked with a light pack, though by the time I arrived at car I questioned that decision in the hot afternoon sun. I’d pick Ted up at the Middle Fork Trailhead an hour later, with a ~55 mile, weekend loop in the Wind River Range now complete.
Information
This area typically begins to open for hiking and backpacking sometime in June depending on the year. No permits are required. Snowpack can linger at higher elevations well into summer and mosquitoes are typically prevalent. Water crossings may be hazardous. Proper food storage is required. Find more on Wind River hikes in Hiking Wyoming's Wind River Range, and the Beartooth Publishing Wind River South map, as well as the National Geographic Wind River Range maps cover this area.

It is doubtful that T.S. Eliot had backpackers in mind when he wrote that “April is the cruellest month”. Literary context aside, I’ve found this observation to be unpleasantly accurate in regard to outdoor recreation in Montana. After the short days and cold nights of winter, April tantalizes eager hikers with longer days, blue skies and mild temperatures in the valleys. The skis are put away, but the trails are either too snowy or too muddy to provide much enjoyment. Conditions on most rivers, not to mention the combined water and air temperature, are lacking in the eyes of all but the brave and the bold.

Trails offer hikers quaint, but rugged terrain in the Welcome Creek Wilderness.
Backpacking in the Welcome Creek Wilderness
Even though snowline is only a few miles from the mouths of most canyons in the mountains of the Northern Rockies, the temptation to get out and backpack is difficult to resist. I yielded to such temptation on a recent April weekend and headed over to the east side of the Sapphire Mountains to a low-elevation trailhead for the Welcome Creek Wilderness. Unlike Glacier National Park or the Beartooth Mountains, the landscape of Welcome Creek Wilderness does not draw visitors from far and wide – or even many visitors from nearby. Without lakes, waterfalls, or much in the way of alpine scenery, Welcome Creek Wilderness comes up short in the scenery department when compared to its neighbors.
Despite its lack of scenic highlights, this wilderness offered me a decent place to stretch my legs fairly early in the season and solitude was guaranteed almost as surely as sunset. As long as asphalt isn’t involved, I’ve never been overly critical of most landscapes, opting instead to simply enjoy the subtleties of nature when the superlatives weren’t available. I planned to hike about five miles up Welcome Creek to Carron Cabin, a shelter built during the mining days of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that I’d visited two years prior on an equally ill-advised early season outing.

I arrived mid-day at an empty trailhead, strolled across Rock Creek on a nifty suspension bridge, crossed the swollen channel of Welcome Creek on a downed tree, and a few steps later passed the wilderness boundary sign. Things would go figuratively downhill from here, although the trail gradually gained around 1,000 feet of elevation in the five miles to the cabin. Perhaps a mile in I hit the first of many snowdrifts, each with their own charm, at the base of talus slopes. The snow was packed down in places by previous visitors and didn’t provide much difficulty (that would come later, when the snow deepened), but it did require that I slow my pace a bit. I continued on at a decent stride, with the soundtrack of rushing water, chattering squirrels, and chirping birds distracting me from the inconveniences of the footpath.

After crossing Welcome Creek on a well-built and rustic log bridge, roughly the halfway point of my trip to the cabin, I took a break to drink some water and have a snack before starting a section of trail which I had found to be especially pleasant on my prior trip. Traversing the hillside about 100 feet above Welcome Creek, this section of trail was less brushy than the creek-bottom trail that preceded it and afforded more expansive views of the steep canyon. No more than a quarter-mile into this stretch of trail I hit snow and could see where wiser but less determined hikers had turned back. Short on wisdom and overflowing with determination, I started a slog to the cabin that saw me postholing in knee-deep snowdrifts, scrambling over and under downfall, enjoying a few hundred feet of snow-free trail, then repeating the order with limited variation for the next two miles.

The workout of postholing through snow with a backpack, climbing over a downed tree, then postholing some more is one that no machine in a gym can emulate. A combination of exertion and anticipation led me to see mirages of the cabin after about an hour, with every dark spot and cluster of downed trees manifesting itself as the outline of the linear needle in the organic haystack. Just as I started to wonder if this trip had been a good idea after all, I reached the cabin and set down my pack.

Dilapidated but still retaining its basic structural elements, the Carron Cabin has an intriguing presence. A quintessential “relic of a bygone era”, the cabin seems to embody a simultaneously charming and haunting corner of Americana that is worthy of a more eloquent and thoughtful description than I can provide in this humble narrative. While not exceedingly well-documented, a collection of papers at the University of Montana Archives (the Bud Moore Papers; Moore was a trapper, forester and general outdoorsman in Montana for much of the second half of the 20th century) contains several journals from a person who spent a significant amount of time trapping, hunting and hiking in the area – with the permission of the optimistically named mining claimant Lucky Hancock – prior to it becoming a designated wilderness area. Additionally, there are several digitized photographs of the cabin from the 1970s available online as part of the Montana Memory Project.
While the cabin would provide some shelter to an exceedingly desperate hiker, an absolutely ideal campsite is situated beneath a stately Ponderosa pine behind the cabin. Sheltered from the snow, this spot was bone dry in many places and only slightly damp in others – a much more preferable alternative to setting up camp on snow or taking my chances trying to get cozy in the cabin.
Camping in a “rustic” miners cabin has a certain charm to it, but my sober analysis of the situation dissuaded me from doing this based on the following points: I didn’t have enough Ibuprofen to deal with the headaches I would have from hitting my head on the low doorframe when going in and out, I couldn’t remember if my tetanus shot was up to date (the cabin could be included as an outlier on the Rust Belt due to the abundance of rusting tools, nails, and other artifacts), and I didn’t want to take my chances with getting hantavirus from its resident rodents. I set up camp quickly, stretched, and then leaned back against the pine and watched the black shadows of trees stretch out onto the perfectly white canvas created by lingering snow on the steep talus slope on the opposite side of Welcome Creek.

As twilight settled into the canyon I did some of my final stretches for the evening and cooked dinner, enjoying pasta and tuna with spinach and mushrooms. I didn’t feel like struggling to start a fire, or struggling in general, so I wound the evening down with a few sips of scotch, some music, and some tea candles. The photocopied pages of the guidebook I brought along contained a few paragraphs titled “Lawlessness on Welcome Creek” which described the bust of the nearby gold boomtown of Quigley, the resulting horse thievery, and an outlaw named Frank Brady who was killed by sheriffs near Welcome Creek in 1904. Watching gray clouds float through the dark sky while “Jack Straw” by the Grateful Dead drifted through my ears allowed me to ponder how the song paired perfectly with the history of the area. The lyrics about crime and desperation in the West seemed to almost come from the mouths of the ghosts of the men who had lived, worked, thieved, and died in the thousands of places in the West with rugged landscapes and rugged histories, of which Welcome Creek Wilderness was just one:
We used to play for silver, now we play for life
One’s for sport and one’s for blood at the point of a knife
Now the die is shaken, now the die must fall . . .
Leaving Texas, fourth day of July
Sun so hot, clouds so low
The eagles filled the sky
Catch the Detroit Lightning out of Santa Fe
Great Northern out of Cheyenne, from sea to shining sea
Gotta get to Tulsa, first train we can ride
Got to settle one old score, and one small point of pride. . .
Jack Straw from Wichita cut his buddy down
Dug for him a shallow grave and laid his body down
Half a mile from Tucson by the morning light
One man gone and another to go, my old buddy you’re moving much too slow
This Trip's Final Chapter
I entered my tent to go to sleep just as a crescent moon rose above the mountainside and slept the type of deep sleep that is a luxury any time, but especially so when backpacking. I felt fortunate to awake feeling well-rested, as I wanted to start hiking before the sun came out and warmed the snow up too much. I enjoyed some coffee, read a chapter or two in the paperback Western novel I’d brought along, and generally just enjoyed being alive and breathing in fresh mountain air for a few minutes before packing up.

Other than the distinct pleasure of putting my warm feet into damp, cold boots the hike out was relatively unremarkable. I was able to get into a good rhythm hiking through the tracks I’d made on my way in and made decent time. As is always the case with backpacking trips, I arrived back at the trailhead in greater spirits then when I had left and without an ounce of regret. However, the postholing and sloppy conditions of the trail did remind me that there is such a thing as "too early" in the season for backpacking in certain landscapes. Whether or not I will remember this lesson next April is anyone's guess.
Information
The Welcome Creek Wilderness is located in western Montana in the Lolo National Forest. The National Forest offers some maps of the area, and the Delorme Montana Gazetteer and Atlas and / or the Benchmark Montana Atlas offer maps that can help hikers get to and from recreation destinations in the area. For more hiking and backpacking opportunities in the state, see Hiking Montana as well as 100 Classic Hikes: Montana.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben (Greystone Books, 2015) is an approachable book of bite-sized chapters explaining the mysteries of trees. Ever wondered if trees can talk to each other? How they know when to drop their leaves in the fall (and why)? That they can lower the blood pressure of hikers beneath them? Wohlleben answers all these questions – and brings up fascinating others – in this easily-digestible book that’s sure to make a tree-hugger out of anyone.

Full of questions and answers, The Hidden Life of Trees is sure to be an interesting read for anyone with an interest in nature.
Reading The Hidden Life of Trees
Wohlleben spent his career managing a forest in the Eifel mountains of Germany, and his passion for trees is contagious. The heart of his essays revolve around the fact that while trees grow slowly and live much, much longer than humans do, they share a remarkable amount of things in common with humans. For instance, tree roots connect with the roots of other trees in forests – even other tree species – to share nutrients, water, and even share signals about predators. While trees have countless ways to compete with each other for available sunlight, they’re surprisingly social creatures whose well-being depends on their community. And not just forest communities – but also communities of fungi, insects, birds, lichen, and plants, too. Wohlleben’s true gift lies not just in his lifetime of knowledge and devotion to forests, but his uncanny ability to spark wonder in the reader.
I most enjoyed learning about how trees differ from one another in strategizing how to eek out a living. It’s stiff competition in forests, after all! Some trees are extremely good at soaking up all the sunlight they possibly can, like beeches, which catch 97 percent of sunlight (that’s not good news if you’re a tree that needs lots of sunlight and you happen to grow beneath a beech). Oaks create lots of tannins in their bark to discourage and slow down fungi from feeding on their tree bark. Spruce store essential oils in their needles and bark, which acts like antifreeze to keep them healthy during very cold winters. Quaking aspen get their name from their leaves, which – thanks to their triangular stem - blow in even the slightest wind; this helps quaking aspen generate more energy, because both sides of their unique leaves are able to photosynthesize. Wohlleben shares a great depth of knowledge of trees in “revealing even more of their secrets” throughout the book, and since chapters are usually 5-10 pages long, readers can take in these facts in bite-size chunks.

The book also discusses the importance – and disappearance – of old-growth forests and forest preserves. Take the Great Bear Rainforest in northern British Columbia, which covers a whopping 25,000 square miles along the Pacific Coast. Over one-third of this area is covered in old-growth trees, which provides much-needed habitat for the rare spirit bear, a black bear with white fur. Old-growth forests in particular have soft, moist soil rich in nutrients — and soil health is essential to healthy ecosystems. Conserving undisturbed forests isn’t just good for ecosystems — it can also provide new sources of income for humans, too. Consider the Adirondack and Catskill parks in New York State, forest preserves that initially curbed excessive logging, soil erosion, and the silting-up of the Erie Canal; today, they’re also a vital source of tourism to the area. The Hidden Life of Trees shares many of the ways that countries around the world aren’t just understanding the importance of conserving forests — but finding out new ways to monetize them as well, through tourism, education, and more.
Conclusion
Explaining complex scientific systems is no easy feat, and doing so succinctly is admirable. My main issue with the book, however, is his tendency to anthropomorphize the trees – to make them seem like they have thoughts and behaviors as humans do. He talks of trees that live in urban areas as “street kids” and the upper canopies of trees being the “executive offices.” I’m sure Wohlleben does so to make his writing more clear and relatable to the audience, but it also makes it sentimental, patronizing, and, well, unfitting for a book with a number of scientific citations. Nevertheless, The Hidden Life of Trees is a book I’ll keep suggesting to my outdoorsy and non-outdoorsy friends alike for a long time to come.
You can find The Hidden Life of Trees here at Amazon.com.

No matter if it’s a low snow year or not and even during summer drought conditions, mosquitoes tend to maintain a strong foothold here high in the mountains of Wyoming. As I’ve migrated from DEET to Picaridin to natural insect repellents over the years, I’m always on the lookout for products that either work better or have better ingredients. While I’ve been using Herbal Armor for several years, the best version of their product – the pressurized continuous spray has recently become hard to find. Thus in regards to natural insect repellents, this leveled the playing field and I decided to give another product a try recently – Buzz Away Extreme from Quantum Health.

Buzz Away offers a DEET-free insect repellent with decent ingredients.
Buzz Away Extreme
While Buzz Away has a fairly standard set of natural oils that are known to discourage biting insects (citronella, cedarwood, lemongrass, etc.) what makes this product stand out is its inactive ingredient list, which is hard to beat: purified water, coconut oil, glycerin, lecithin, sodium bicarbonate, citric acid, vitamin E, and wintergreen oil. With no questionable ingredients (at least from my point of view) on either the active or inactive ingredient list Buzz Away is one insect repellent that you can use and / or use for the entire family without worry about what you’re actually putting on your skin and clothes.

While pump spray insect repellents work well enough, they can make getting areas like your legs covered a bit difficult since they don’t work on their side or upside down. When upright however I did find Buzz Away dispenses better than other products, which I presume is due to the thinner liquid nature of the product. While some people can be put off by the strong smell of some herbal / natural insect repellents, Buzz Away has a similar smell but of a more muted nature. In my experience this translated into a product that is more of what I’d call a mosquito discourager, though it did provide some relief and got me through dinner until I could retreat to my tent.
Testing the product was admittedly performed at the height of mosquito season, where swarms of dozens to hundreds of mosquitoes showed up as uninvited guests for dinner time in the wilderness. In these types of situations you usually want the most repellency you can get. The product does help however – noticeably – and made the situation tolerable, although frequent reapplication was needed for the best effect.
Final Thoughts
For me, that strong citronella smell of natural insect repellents never bothered me, and out in the field I did find myself wishing that Buzz Away Extreme was just a bit more on the extreme side. However, if you’re a person that prefers natural insect repellents but is also sensitive to the smell of some stronger natural insect repellents that are out there, or are looking for something to repel mosquitoes early or late in the season where they’re a little more lazy, this might be a great option that comes with a great ingredient list as well.
You can find Buzz Away Extreme here at Amazon. You can also check out REI’s selection of DEET-free insect repellents, and for more on overall hiking strategy during bug season, see our Hiking During Mosquito and Tick Season Guide.

Like most backpackers, my cook kit usually consists of a stove, pot, spork, and mug. Sometimes I even forego the mug in a quest for simplicity and weight savings and just drink my tea and coffee out of the pot. And, inadvertently, I’ve left my spork behind once or twice and enjoyed extremely minimal and inconvenient weight savings.

However, under certain conditions, I’ve been known to expand my cook kit to include a non-stick skillet and cook up meals normally reserved for car camping or the kitchen at home. Scrambled eggs, veggie quesadillas, ground beef for tacos, and chocolate chip pancakes have all been cooked up at one time or another on backpacking trips – meals that would’ve been virtually impossible to make without a skillet. The MSR Quick Skillet has been my skillet of choice for nearly ten years of backpacking and if you’re looking to expand your cooking options beyond dehydrated or freeze-dried options or simple one-pot meals, this skillet is an excellent choice.
The MSR Quick Skillet
Weighing in at 5.9 ounces, this additional piece of cookware isn’t horribly noticeable when added to a backpack for an overnight or short multi-day trip. The handle is removable, which makes it easy to pack up. I use this skillet in conjunction with the MSR Alpine Spatula (given the non-stick coating, only plastic utensils are advisable), which folds up conveniently and weighs less than an ounce. Although this a review of the skillet, it is worth noting that the tip of the spatula is prone to melting when placed in contact with the heated pan for more than a few seconds, so use appropriate diligence to avoid unpleasant consequences. Aside from that, I have found this pairing of utensils to be all that is needed to cook delicious and creative meals in the backcountry.

Cleaning this skillet is a breeze and only needs a minimum of water (be sure wash this and other cookware in compliance with Leave No Trace principles and pack out food scraps). For the most part, after removing any food particles, a quick wipe with a damp paper towel and some water to rinse is all I’ve found is required. The non-stick coating has remained largely intact, although the rim is starting to lose some of its coating – likely from being packed with other cookware items that rub against it.
I’ve used this skillet on MSR Whisperlite and upright canister stoves, and on a woodstove in a fire lookout. Although the skillet is made from aluminum, one notable limitation of this skillet is that it tends to hotspot in the middle and not evenly distribute heat throughout the pan. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with cooking in the backcountry, but it is something to be aware of when using this skillet. I’ve been able to get around this by simply moving the skillet around in a circular motion when cooking and making sure it doesn’t sit directly on the burner for too long. This “babysitting” is a bit tedious, but I’ve found the results are worth the extra attention you have to pay when cooking with it.
One of my favorite meals to cook in this skillet is veggie quesadillas. Two 10-inch tortillas (folded in half) fit in this skillet with a little squeezing (its 7.75 inches wide) so you can cook two at once. Mexican rice, your choice of backpacking spices, and jerky tossed in the skillet is a great entrée that I've found makes for a great group meal as well. When staying at lookouts or backcountry cabins, another easy and tasty meal is tacos. I cook the ground beef or turkey at home and simply re-heat it on the skillet. With none of the other ingredients typically requiring cooking, this meal cooks up quickly and with little clean up or other preparation.

Pancakes with chocolate chips, fresh huckleberries, or banana slices tossed in are a great morning dish to make using this skillet. I use a fair amount of butter to prevent sticking and make sure the pan is moved in a slow circle over the stove so the pancake doesn’t end up burned in the middle and uncooked on the outer edges. Scrambled eggs are also easy to make using the same strategy and, if you have extra cheese and tortillas handy, can result in a tasty burrito for breakfast.
Conclusion
Overall, I’d recommend this skillet to anyone looking to add some flexibility to their backpacking (or car camping) cooking options. At a reasonable price and modest weight, it isn’t a major investment after you’ve acquired your initial backpacking kit (and likely gotten tired of freeze-dried meals, or oatmeal breakfasts). Eating tasty, fresh food in beautiful locations can be a memorable experience and this skillet is a great tool to help you experience that.
The MSR Quick Skillet retails for $40 – find in here at REI and on Amazon.com.