Cougar Divide — Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2020

The first six miles of Wells Creek Road are in pretty good condition, the last six miles are much rougher although the final mile wasn’t too bad. I headed up the trail in the dark with flashlight so that I could get to the first viewpoint for sunrise (and moonset) at around a half mile. The trail has very steep and narrow sections. The only parts where I found the trail tough to follow was at two places with large downed trees. If you cross a large downed tree and don’t find yourself on the correct track within about 20 feet, it likely means you are off track (which happened to me twice on the return). Mosquitoes varied from bad to horrible. The mosquitoes at the meadows towards the end of the trail where the least obtrusive. The other meadows (all full of flowers) were horrible with mosquitoes. I used very high percentage DEET at least five times on head, wrist and hands. The rest of me stayed covered. This worked pretty well and the main problem the mosquitoes caused me was trying to take pictures without them being in the frame. When I returned to the car, I jogged a couple of circles around the trailhead and all but dived into the car. The only remaining snow bank on the trail is near the end and is no problem. Some tracks could be seen heading up Chowder Ridge from the end of Cougar Divide, but they didn’t appear to get to the ridgetop as there are steep snow banks below Chowder’s ridgetop.