Chain Lakes

If there were some magic elevation near the equator where it was fall all year long i'd move there in a heartbeat. No matter how many years you live up here, a drive out in the mountains on a perfect fall day will leave your jaw on the floor. Every curve in the road smashes you with an incredible vista. The Boreal Forest glows gold in crisp sunlight below mountains crowned with fresh snow rising above vermillion bands of berries on the slopes in between. You may come back home and self righteously scorn your friends for missing such incredible sights, only to find out they were doing exactly the same thing as you that day, and were equally angry at you. It might take some drinking to work things out.

On one such day this fall i drove down the Matanuska Valley to the Kings River. I'd brought my ATV and decided to try and get farther up the Chain Lakes Trail, where i'd been turned back months before just as things started to get interesting. Depending on where the trail stopped i thought i might do some hiking.

Looking upvalley at Castle Mountain. You can see a couple of the "Chain Lakes" at the bottom if you look hard enough.

A close look at the summit of Castle Mountain. Instead of typical jagged and broken rocks it shows erosional features that look more like something out of the dry desert with characteristics of wind erosion.

Higher up were rolling meadows of Caribou Grass.

This time around i made it up the trail pretty quickly. There was much less water and mud, and i'd learned my way through the more technical rocky areas. Even better news was that i had no mechanical problems. The machine worked flawlessly with no heating or power issues even on long slopes so steep i didn't dare stop and was resting my hips over the handlebars to keep the front tires on the ground, basically standing on the back wheel hubs.

Soon i was in new territory, and i followed the main trail up to it's endpoint high on a ridge. There was a lot of evidence of people who tried to get higher and failed tearing the place up, unless they were on a dirt bike. The dirt bike trails when incredibly high up the mountain. It's possible that some crazy nuts may have made it all the way to the top.

The mountains behind Castle Mountain have some orange patches that i believe are gypsum. The orange becomes more prominent as you go up the Matanuska Valley, culminating in Sheep Mountain beyond the Matanuska Glacier.

I'd never seen this mountain before. Just shy of 8,000ft, this peak marks the edge of what i would call the core of the Talkeetna ranger. It's 15 miles back from the road but technically reachable via the Kings River drainage, which i'm looking up here.The Talkeetna Glacier is just 3 or 4 miles to the west of it.

Looking down valley from up on the ridge. The weather had started to get a bit unpredictable. I couldn't tell if the storm was going to pass by or jump over to my side.

The trail for the ATV had ascended around 3,000 feet. I continued up higher, another 1,000 feet before i made it to an even higher ridge at 4,600 ft. From there if you had the time you could continue up to the summit at 6,200ft. The views were great; maybe you've noticed.

The light was pulling off some pretty amazing tricks but the weather started to turn bad on my side so i headed back.

During the whole trip storms were brewing to the south but they seemed to be moving east to west along the mountains, so i felt safe and enjoyed the light show. On the way back i did get to enjoy some rain/sleet for about 20 minutes until i rode out of it. All in all it was a great day, and i got back to the truck right at dusk.