Maybe the title should have been Trail on Fire. I got my fall color fix with red huckleberry leaves. The area was definitely past peak. The majority of the leaves had fallen. But there was still plenty of color to be found.

No, I didn’t get lost. I know where my limitations lie. Last week I was trying to find a couple of lakes without trails. I climbed up on a ridge and couldn’t see them. I could have continued bushwhacking, but I wasn’t sure that I was going to both find the lakes and find my way back to the trail, so I stopped my search.

Today I was in the Land of Small Trees. That kind of LoST. Olallie Lake is over twice as high as Opal Creek, which was where I was yesterday. Being in the higher elevation forest with small trees was quite a change from the Opal Creek old growth. Another change was that I only saw one other hiker all day. Olallie Lake itself was deserted. Amazingly, there weren’t even any helicopters in the sky. It was like it was the end of the world and the last two people left had nothing better to do than hike to a bunch of small lakes.