Day 4: Eagle Cap: 6.5 miles

It was the day to summit Eagle Cap. Eagle Cap is, not surprisingly, the highlight of the Eagle Cap Wilderness. It isn’t the tallest peak (Sacajawea Peak and the Matterhorn are both about 250 feet higher) but it is the central peak with eight valleys radiating in all directions from it and features a 360 degree view. We headed once again towards Mirror Lake. Along the way we met some folks who let us know about the helicopter. It seems that there was a fire which started at one of the campsites. The story was that some people reported showing up at a campsite and seeing a fire smoldering when they got there. They thought they put it out but it flared up again. Fortunately, the forest ranger was nearby and he and other campers in the area started a bucket brigade to put it out. The fire was built right next to a log and apparently got quite big before they got it put out. Fires are generally allowed in the Eagle Cap Wilderness but not within a quarter mile of the most popular lakes so someone not only built an illegal fire, they also built it near a dry log and didn’t make sure it was out.

We headed further down the trail past the turn off for the East Lostine Trail and onward to the junction for Horton Pass and Eagle Cap. We passed Upper Lake, not surprisingly, the highest lake in the Lakes Basin. It is the headwaters of the East Lostine River. From Upper Lake it is about a 25% grade up to Eagle Cap so we were glad to be day packing again. The day was nice and we were running into quite a few people also on the way up. We rested a while and talked to some folks at a trail junction with a choice for Horton Pass or the Eagle Cap summit. We met some folks there and told them about our campsite. They were jealous but we kept the location secret. We would run into them several times going up to the summit. Eventually we talked about having wine and they told us they had Jack Daniels with them. Deciding they were cool enough, we gave them directions to our campsite if they wanted to join us.

At the summit there a crowd was lounging around enjoying the view. It was incredible. We identifed the lakes in the Lakes Basin and we took untold number of pictures. We spied our campsite with Karen’s binoculars – it was tough to find it, without my orange rain fly we probably wouldn’t have been able to. One side of the summit looked almost straight down into Glacier Lake. The view down the East Lostine Valley was incredible; pictures don’t do it justice. It seemed we had just gotten to the top when I looked down at my watch and noticed that an hour had gone by!

We discovered that the summit log was missing so we weren’t sure what to do with the letterbox. We spied around to see if anyone up to might have a container we could beg from them but we didn’t see anything suitable. We eventually decided to just hide it in baggies and hope for the best.
We took a slightly different and longer route down to visit Horton Pass. As we were heading down to the pass I spotted a bighorn sheep on the slope below us. I excitedly pointed it out to Karen but then saw some people on the trail near it and decided that it must be their pack animal and said, “It’s just a donkey.” Karen laughed at me since 1) I should have said mule and 2) it was indeed a bighorn sheep. She though started calling it a bighorn goat and since then we’ve renamed them “donkey goats.” We watched it for quite a while – and it was keeping an eye on us. We took pictures, even trying to take some though the binoculars which turns out to work quite well other than it being really difficult to aim the camera. I got some great close ups of some rocks! We eventually started to continue down the trail getting closer and closer to him. Eventually he headed up hill straight towards the ridge we were descending. We lost sight of him and continued down the ridge. Eventually we came around a tree and saw him right in front of us! We quickly jumped back behind the tree. I didn’t think he would actually charge but I knew that they butt heads at 20 miles per hour and didn’t want to risk the chance of finding out what that feels like. We gave him plenty of time to move on before slowly peaking out to find that he was gone.

We continued down to Horton Pass, which is fairly non-descript but does have a plaque commemorating the elephant who heard the Hoo in the Dr. Seuss book. Not really – it commemorates Floyd Vernon “Jack” Horton a forester who apparently made many contributions to the development of the Wallowa-Whitman and other national forests in the Pacific Northwest. We then headed back to camp.