Lotta trails covered in this obvious-choice 15 mile loop.
Beverly Turnpike - TH accessible in my Honda Fit. I only scraped once in and out, and in the same place both times.
I had this idea to do this loop to get full continuous Stuart Range views without having to summit or scramble anything. Checked the cloud base forecast... 17000! supposdly. lol
Arrive to the inside of a ping pong ball. Extremely poor visibility all Saturday. I think this loop would have given me generous servings of what I was looking for, but not this time. So it became about the rocks (many wonderful bright colors, polished in the rain) and the flowers, which are many in bloom but somewhat bowed with the weight of the water on them.
The paths listed were all in decent shape, a couple blowdowns here and there, no major diversions. Except:
Entering and exiting the bowl north of Earl Peak (I am calling it Earl Basin), by way of Volcanic Neck and Wrong Turn respectively, is to switchback up unstable gravel dunes. I felt the descent eastward was shorter than the ascent at Wrong Turn so I would do this loop in the same direction if I did it again. Earl Basin is also the most difficult to navigate of this entire loop. There isn't any scrambling and rare small blowdowns, and it's not exactly brush you're fighting, it's that the trail tread is often heavily obscured by-of all things-persistent sprouts growing up just the same in the path as they would anywhere else, making it slow-going at times to choose which way seems most likely right, based mostly on vibes and somewhat on the slope. There were some pretty steep drops above and below the trail at times in this section, so sticking to the path is important. There was a cairn for the junction to head north on Hardscrabble but I did not actually see the path to do so.
The entry to Earl Basin from Volcanic Neck has a lingering snow drift in it that is carefully passible on the sides but a rather sheer drop down its face.
I abandoned the plan to summit Navaho and camp at Navaho pass due to weather and head downhill for better shelter.
In the rain, look out for what i think is Serpentinite all over the place. Deep olive green.
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