The Trails — an Honest Guide

Since Boone and I have you between lakes, let me give you the honest hiker's guide to this loop, because the trailheads are coming up fast and they are absolutely not all the same difficulty.

The gentle one is the Gull Lake shore walk back behind us — about two and a half miles out and back, nearly flat, good for every age; we've built it into this tour, so if you take it, the audio goes with you.

The famous one is Parker Lake, off the far north end of the loop — I'll point out that turn when we reach it. Around four miles round trip, a steady but manageable climb up a sagebrush canyon into a hidden lake basin under the peaks. It's the best effort-to-reward ratio in the area.

Now the steep ones, and I mean this. The Fern Lake trail, leaving from near the Double Eagle resort ahead, climbs sixteen hundred feet in about a mile and a half — a genuine calf-burner with loose sections. Yost Lake, from the same start, is about four and a half miles with seventeen hundred feet of gain. They're beautiful, but they are for fit, shod, watered hikers with a morning to spend — not a whim in sandals. And the Rush Creek trail at Silver Lake, which climbs beside the old tramway, is relentless switchbacks in open sun.

Every trailhead here sits above seventy-six hundred feet. Whatever the sign says, add the altitude. Carry water, start early in summer — afternoon thunderstorms are a real thing here — and the lake you earn will be all the bluer for it.