After an unsuccessful day trying to access Twin Sisters Lakes, I still had a day left of vacation time so I decided to try to get to one of the places I’d marked on my map as a place to stop during a loop in the William O. Douglas Wilderness, Otter Lake, just north of Cramer Lake.
I woke up at the Soda Springs campground and drove a few hours to the Dog Lake campground just off Highway 12 and started hiking around 10am. This is an absolutely gorgeous hike, and I need to come back here again when I have more than a day to explore. The snow starts immediately on the trailhead and disappears for a bit on the uphill after you ford Clear Creek, but returns again once the trail levels out.
Crossing the north fork of Clear Creek is relatively easy right now, if you don’t cross right where the trail is but instead make your way about 200 feet upstream, just upstream from a small gravel bar in the middle of the creek. The water was only about 8 inches deep here and it’s easy to make your way back to the trail after crossing.
The whole area, and the trail, is still under many feet of snow but I followed a bootpath to Cramer Lake (while also needing to do some navigation on my own), and from there it was a straightforward half mile to Otter Lake.
I camped on a little peninsula of land that juts out into the lake, the only part of this area that’s snow-free, and found the only flat human-sized patch to sleep on. The lake was still about 1/3 iced over and gorgeous, birds were plentiful and lively, and on Tuesday morning when I woke up at around 5am, from my sleeping bag I watched a couple of otters cavorting on the ice on the lake.
I packed up around 10am and hiked out. The snow is getting pretty unpredictable, and although I didn’t need my snowshoes, I did posthole up to my hip 3-4 times, and had a few falls from the snow giving way under me. If you’re careful about where you step, mostly you’ll be okay but sometimes it’s unavoidable. The absence of human sounds after Dog Lake was amazing, but between there and Cramer Lake I’d occasionally be treated to a flyover of a couple of F-18 fighter planes, which came absolutely screaming overhead. It was so loud that it was physically impossible for me not to cover my ears.
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