Hylite Reservoir to the Bear Lakes

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My first overnight hiking trip of the summer was through the Hylite Canyon area all the way back to Bozeman, overall about 20ish miles. Hylite Reservoir is a great place for people to go to get out of the crazy summer heat of the high plains. It has a huge lake/reservoir to go swimming in, a dozen or so trails to hike and a ton of waterfalls coming down the mountain (see the journal entry: A Hike Up Hylite Mountain). It was a nice hike through some thickly forested evergreen trees and through some nice Alpine Meadows. Believe it or not, I learned something on this hike!

Yippee! Here's a list of what I learned:

Bluebells are NOT poisonous
I learned that Blue Bells (this is a link to a very useful site on plant life here in Montana) flowers and leaves both taste like oysters, but the leaves are a little stronger tasting. Our flower dude, Shane, thought they may also be slightly poisonous and it will probably make Ben Sharp very happy to know that they aren't (he ate roughly six plants of bluebells in this one field).

One way is easier than the other
It is much easier to hike from Hylite to Mystic Lake than the other direction, we must have descended a good thousand feet down an amazing drainage to get to Mystic Lake and it would be rather unpleasant to go the other direction. Though I will say going from Mystic Lake to the Bear Lakes is quite a climb in itself (though it is straight up with no switch backs).

The National Forest Service Does a Crappy Job of Maintaining Their Trails
At least from Mystic Lake to the Bear Lakes, there was this one section of trail where the Blown Down Trees were so thick, it forced us to bushwack off trail and use a system of 'beeping', 'booping', and other weird noises to keep track of where everyone was and try to find the trail again. Now if this was a small stretch of trail it wouldn't have been such a big deal, but this was at least a thousand feet of trail, just completely devastated by something, it was kind of eerie. There was another section where the whole concept of "the trail is a gutter" was really emphasized because the trail was at least a foot and a half below the surface of the ground. Erosion seems to have won this battle and it is extremely sad that a couple of water bars couldn't be made from all those blow downs to help conserve the soil and the trail in this section of the Gallatin National Forest.

Take a Right to go to the Better Bear Lake
So by the time we got to the Bear Lakes we were wiped out and tired, so we didn't bother to take a right and go up this hill to see what was on the other side. Well let me tell you what is on the other side a much nicer, rockier, less marshy algae infested lake than the one we camped by. But I will say our campsite was pleasant and the night sky clear as could be. We had a nice little fire, some Crown Royal, and a huge feast (again I figured we could eat like kings since it was only one night). The weather was so nice and the moon so full that both Shane, Gauss, and I slept outside under the sky.

Bring your Flip Flops
Coming out of Bear Canyon you have to cross three cold wide streams and it is just so much more pleasant to have something on your feet than walking bare foot (I know some of you have tougher feet than I do, but my wussy feet needed some extra protection).

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