Today’s objective was to sleep in, work on John’s new camera photos, and hike the Lewis Lake Channel Trail to, hopefully, see a loon. The Lewis Lake Channel Trail is the trail we tried to hike on Day 10 but stopped around 0.9 miles in due to the trail being a swamp and having to log balance.

The trail still had a few water-laden areas, but much better than before. We felt like it would be well worth it, if we saw a loon.

I can only hike one portion of the trail because the other half, going to Shoshone Lake, is closed due to Loon Nesting. John measured the distance using google maps and thought it would be 2.5 miles one way (5 miles roundtrip). Our GPS said that it was actually 3.2 miles to the farthest we could go on the trail and a little over 6 miles roundtrip.

See the blue circled area for our hiking path.

We still had to find a way to cross a stream that was wider than I could jump. John pulled a log over for walk across. John did remove the log bridge when we left because he did not want those loon scaring bastards to have the bridge benefit.

Along the path, I saw a yellow wildflower that I haven’t taken a picture of yet.

Probably a mile before the target point was a marsh area that had various birds but no loons. We saw a Sand Hill Crane near the trees.

I loved the view of the mountains across from the lake.

Once we made it close to the destination we heard other people. This was the first time we saw anybody since we started the trail. The folks were fishing and not being quiet. They left as soon as we arrived.

We setup to eat a granola bar and look for loons. Unfortunately, no we could not see any loons. We are not sure if the other folks scared the animals away or if we need to go further down the trail to see loons.

We stayed in the area for about 30 minutes hoping to see a loon and then decided to go back and console ourselves with Brownies and Chicken Fajitas. The fishermen probably scared them away.