Lake Fork Peak, 12,882' (3,926m)

Yesterday I went up Lake Fork Peak for the first time. I’ve been noticing it on my many hikes to Kachina Peak because, once you’re up there, it’s pretty hard to miss.

I wasn’t entirely sure about the best approach, but from a distance I had noticed something that vaguely resembled a trail. In any case, trail or no trail, I was going to give it a try.

The first few hundred yards beyond Kachina, including a drop of about 200 feet, were just open country. But as I got closer to the notch between the two peaks, I found what I call the “red trail.” It’s not exactly a trail in the usual sense, but more of an itinerary marked by red dots spray-painted on rocks every hundred yards or so.

The red dots start a little below the Kachina lift base station, continue to the top of Kachina Peak, and then seem to disappear until you pass the low point between Kachina and Lake Fork Peak. I was pretty excited to find them again there, so I followed them for the better part of an hour.

Eventually, though, I realized they were not taking me to the summit, so I left the route and went straight up for about 15 minutes. That brought me almost exactly to the high point. So, that worked out nicely.

I took my summit picture and then headed down the south ridge of Lake Fork Peak, assuming I would eventually reconnect with the red trail. That worked out too. Within a few minutes I found the dots again and followed them in reverse.

It seems those red dots mark a route around the Wheeler Wilderness cirque and eventually back toward Wheeler Peak. The route follows the ridge in some places, bypasses a few summits, and occasionally drops well below the ridgeline before climbing back up again.

So that’s my next project: hike the cirque from Kachina to Wheeler, then descend via the Williams Lake Trail back to the Bavarian. Sounds like a fine way to spend a day. In the meantime, here are yesterday's pictures:

View of Lake Fork Peak from Kachina Peak. The cliff band to the left is what I refer to as the "gendarme" or guard of the peak. It gets its own picture below.

View of Kachina Peak from Lake Fork Peak. Click to enlarge and you'll see close to the middle of the picture, the top Kachina lift station.

View down the valley with Williams Lake hidden by the knob in the middle of this shot. The highest point above it is Wheeler Peak.

Walk down (north) a 100 yards from the summit and the lake appears behind the knob.

The high point in this shot is Old Mike Peak at 13,088'. The peak just to its left is Simpson
Peak, 12,970' and, as opposed to Old Mike Peak is right on the cirque ridge.

Here is the impressive gendarme shown on its own (mentioned in the caption of
the first picture.

Here is Loki on the way back down finding one of the rare snow patches left.