Amethyst Basin High Uintas Wilderness, Utah

All right, we're at Steelwater Trailhead. We're gonna head up through Christmas Meadows to Amethyst Lake. This here is Trayson. It's his first time. See how he likes it. We're both pretty excited. It's gonna be a bit of a hike, but not real hard. A little climbing. I think it's six miles to the lake. Hopefully the fishing's good. It's been quite a few years since I've been here and fishing was great last time we were here. So we're kind of relying on fish a little bit for some food. I mean, we got a little bit, but if we don't catch some fish, we might be a little hungry. For his first time on trail, I wanted to take him somewhere both beautiful, but not too difficult to get to. At the same time, I didn't want it to be too easy either. So we decided on Amethyst Lake Basin. So we're about to make it official. We're at the wilderness boundary. We're about to enter the highland wilderness. It's about to get real. So it's starting to look like we might have some weather coming. At least getting a little dark over there. See what happens. Forward and onward. It is a bit of a climb after the junction getting into Amethyst Basin, but with Osler Fork next to the trail, the views are pretty incredible. One waterfall after another. So I think we're getting close to where we want to leave the trail. I think we're going to camp at Osler Lake. We're starting to get our first views and they are quite spectacular. Once we got into Amethyst Basin, we decided to take a little break and do a little fishing in Osler Fork. Fishing was good for pan-sized brookies, so we stayed a while. But eventually, it's time to push on to the lake. All right, so an interesting turn of events. Tracyn packed his hammock and has some hammock gear. It's just not a hammock. Looks like it's straps and some tie downs. So he does not have a hammock. He does have a little air mattress, so we're going to go try and find a flat spot we can set that up. But I do not envy him tonight. I'm going to be real campy. If that's what he wants to call it, I'm fine with that. I'll be in a hammock sleeping like a baby. A bit of elk steak going on tonight. Good morning. It's morning day two. Tracyn somehow is still sleeping. He's sleeping on the ground. You want to use the air mattress, but that's his prerogative. I just got out of bed, got the dogs fed, and I think I'm going to go get some stuff, start a fire, make a little coffee, get the day rolling. Apparently, the day's rolling for some already. We had no luck at Osler so far. I can see them rising. We just can't figure out what they're biting on. So we're going to hike over to Amethyst and try our luck there. Hopefully we get something. We just brought some ramen. That's about the extent of our food at this point, so some fish would be very welcomed. So we just pulled into Amethyst. It's a beautiful place. Hopefully the fishing is a little better. And it was. Tracyn and I both landed quite a few pan-sized brook and cutthroat trout. But we both agreed we were probably too far from camp to really take any back. So it looked like it was going to be ramen noodles for the night. Well, here we are. We've already packed up. Probably should have shot this in camp. We're only a few hundred yards outside of camp, bushwhacking back to the main trail. Not in a huge hurry to get back. We're going to stop and do a little more fishing along one of these little meadow streams. They're not real big fish, but there are just thousands of them. So probably hang out there for a minute. While it was going home day, with scenery this beautiful, neither one of us was in any hurry to get back to the truck. Took our time just fishing and taking it all in. It'd been a good trip. Tracyn enjoyed it and so did I. We're already working on plans for the next one.