Glacier Basin — Sunday, Sep. 28, 2025

We left our camp at Monte Cristo around 8:15. The air was already smoky, unlike the previous crystal clear day. There are a lot of nice stopping points on this trail if you don't want to go the whole way. The first is after about a mile of easy trail at the Justice Mine Powerhouse sign, which has a beautiful view of the waterfall.  After this, it gets fairly overgrown. Not so much that it turned into bushwhacking, but it definitely made it tough to see where you stepped on the increasingly rocky trail. If you look up the slope, you can see the reddish tailings piles of the Mystery Mine.
The trail just gets rockier and steeper--there's even one spot with a bit of proper exposure. At a bend in the trail is a little side trail leading to an outcropping overlooking the waterfall. This would also be a great turnaround point.
The WTA description says there are ropes to help get up the rocks, but there are not any ropes. You get to clamber and scramble. Some of the stretches are twenty or so feet of smooth-ish rock. It was fun to butt slide down on the way back! Farther up, the trail levels out a tiny bit, and while there's no scrambling, it's narrow and overgrown and although I had been having fun, this part was definitely the "are we there yet?" stretch.
We stopped at the pile of tailings to poke around. My husband justified lugging his big camera up here by clambering up to take pictures of pikas. I looked at all the rocks full of pyrite that are just scattered everywhere. Definitely stop and look at them (and wash your hands afterwards since there's probably lots of arsenic around.)
From this point, you have two options, though we didn't realize it at the time. Uphill, there is some flagging that marks a trail. There is also a trail that continues along the creek. We took the latter, and though we had to hop along a boulder field at one point to regain the trail, we didn't get lost. You just keep following the creek. The other route takes you up to a trail with flagging leading you across a huge boulder field. Of my party, one preferred the upper trail, while the other two preferred the lower.
Eventually we got to the basin, where springs popped out of the boulder fields and flowed around a pair of massive blocky boulders. Views were limited because of the smoke, but the area had an eerie, magical feel. I wish we could have explored more but smoke and time limited us.