Girls Gone Wildwood

Glacier Lake from Glacier Pass Normally John and I spend the end of August and beginning of September hiking in  Europe , but because I spent part of June in  Italy  and we are planning to spend Christmas in Europe, we stayed home and decided to explore our own " Oregon Alps ". The Wallowa Mountains are in northeastern Oregon, about a 6 hour drive from Portland and even though I have lived in Oregon for 17 years, I had never been. We decided to combine 2 of the hikes from William Sullivan's 100 Hikes in Eastern Oregon book,  Ice Lake  and  Horseshoe and Glacier Lake ; a very similar route is also described in Douglas Lorain's   One Night Wilderness: Portland .  After researching the route a little more, it is the classic route to do in the Eagle Cap Wilderness section of the Wallowas and can get crowded, and considering we were going on Labor Day weekend it would probably be even more crowded. Knowing that information we decided to leave after work on Thursday

David aka #trailrunning told me he wanted to run 40 miles for his 40th birthday and eat sweets and doughnuts the whole run, he had be at 40 miles. We had planned on doing Wildwood end to end and the North Nasty , which we called Wild and Nasty, but his coached advised him to run ~6 hours with 2 3000 foot climbs instead, because David is training for The Bear 100 (miler).  David and I went back and forth on a few route ideas and finally landed on one of my favorite routes, the Bald Mountain - Ramona Falls loop with the addition of an out and back on Yocum Ridge . The climb to Bald Mountain and Yocum Ridge satisfied  the 2 3000 foot climb requirements, even though it was more like 2000 feet and 4000 feet and the route would probably take us 6 - 7 hours to complete.