Family of four spent the night at Flajack, hiked to Gladys divide the next morning, and then came back down to Staircase.
The first 4 miles is a slow incline and super easy. It gets steep fast after the Flajack turnoff. Was pretty slow going for us. Took about 4 hours and 45 minutes to get up there total from Staircase. As others have mentioned there are 4 or 5 notable blow downs on the trail. All are passable, and only one is a real PITA.
Foubd a helpful ranger and a nice site for our two tents on the left of the two lakes. Definitely other campers but didn’t feel crowded and not noisy at all. Bugs got bad almost immediately, and didn’t let up even after sun was down. We basically wore head nets the whole time.
Hiked up to Gladys divide in the morning. Left around 8:30 and got back around 11:15, didn’t see anyone on the trail the entire time.
The trail up to the divide is in great shape. One small patch of snow, but felt sturdy.
We tried to make our way up to Gladys peak, but finding the trail was pretty hard. We got up to about 5400 mostly traversing hard packed snow fields and picking up the trail here and there. Turned back after about 20 minutes, mostly because one of our group didn’t join and it was lame to leave her waiting given how buggy it was up there (yup, even at 5000 feet with a brisk breeze the mosquitoes were still biting up a storm). Views from the divide, especially the in your face vista of the Sawtooths are awesome. I expect the 360 view from the top of Glays is even more striking.
Hike down from Gladys goes fast. After quick lunch we did the Flapjack to Staircase section in about 3:30. We started seeing folks about two miles in. By the time got to the main trail there were tons of folks heading to Flapjack, Big Log, etc. definitely get your permit if heading out there.
Comments