Lane Basin and Lane Glacier Hike

Our original plan was to hike to Fairangel Lakes. But just like the last time I tried, we were not able to cross the creek because the water was too high and fast. None of our group wanted to try to cross on slippery rocks with what was close to a raging river. So we decided to do the nice gentle hike to beautiful Lane Basin. There was a lot of water to negotiate there as well. Many parts of the trail had become almost like creeks with water running down them. But we were able to avoid most of the water and mud and work our way up the valley. We did need to do one creek crossing where I had to hand Bella to one of the other hikers about halfway across because I needed my poles to get myself the rest of the way. My feet did get wet doing that. We found the spot at the far end of the valley where the cute little Lane Hut used to stand. It was taken down due to major vandalism many years ago. We could see a hint of a trail that continued on up towards the ridge behind the old hut site, so decided to see if we could get up to the ridge. The trail was easy to follow at first but then it began to disappear into huge piles of boulders. Sometimes it was a trail and other times just a boulder rock climb. There was water crossing in little streams in many places as well. Bella took off making her own way, remaining close to the fastest hikers. She would occasionally come back to check on me, then scurry back through the rocks. This was kind of helpful because she was actually helping me to find the correct route. There were occasional rock cairns marking the way to whatever was of interest up ahead. It did turn out to be the way to the remnants of the Lane Glacier. For the most part, it is gone, but there was still a good sized bowl of snow and ice and we could see some old glacial ice clinging to the hillside above the snowfield. It was chilly and windy there so we didn't stay very long, but took a nice break to have a snack before heading back down. The view up there was breathtaking, with sharp spires in all directions. Bella enjoyed running around in the snow. On our way up she got distracted by a ground squirrel that had run under a big rock. She ran circles around that rock continually barking until we had to move past that area. Coming down from the glacier was pretty treacherous. In many ways it's actually easier to climb up rock boulder fields than to descend them. I kept taking pictures so was lagging behind a bit. I didn't want to lose sight of the correct path so hurried to catch up with Jane who was ahead of me. I stepped on a big rock and it moved, flinging me straight down into the rocks below. I only fell a few feet but landed directly on my left eye. My sunglasses protected my eye itself, but I now have a huge green goose egg over my left eyebrow. That's going to look lovely in a few days. But other than a few scrapes to knees and elbows, I wasn't hurt. I picked myself up and continued down with no problem. We had trouble once out of the rocks, finding the best trail down. There were so many stream crossings that it got rather challenging. Finally we just stayed to the right side of the valley and found the correct trail. Bella ran most of the way down, making her own trails through the tundra and jumping streams. She even swam across one of them. We were all quite tired by the time we reached our cars down at the Reed Lakes parking lot. Our leisurely hike to Lane Basin turned into a 10 mile mountain climb. But it was certainly worth all the hard work. It was a new trail for all 6 of us.