Bowman Lake

Today we headed up to Bowman lake in an extremely misguided attempt to get to Penner Lake (I found out afterwards that there is a much easier way to get to it). We took 20 to NF-18 up to Bowman lake road, and after a bone jarring ride finally ended up at the lake. It was hot out, and after a brief hike we realized that there was no chance of getting up to Penner Lake without a boat, so we ate lunch and hung out for a while and enjoyed the mountain breezes.


Someone had even managed to tow a sailboat up to the lake and was showing some serious skill getting it all around the lake in almost no wind.

I wasn't looking forward to another ride on that road, so we tried meadow lake road to Gaston road, and holy sweet mother of god is that a fun road to drive in our subaru. It is freshly graded with deep gravel and broad sweeping turns. Bliss.



After a bath back in Alta, we spent a little time trying to find the northwestern property boundary, since I have a "theory" that the property lines that we were shown are too small by 300 feet. The area that I think is on the property is dense with trees and very difficult to get through. Our already dull machetes were about as useful as pocket knives after 20 feet, and I managed to ricochet a pine branch into my left eye. I still don't really understand what happened but the fact is that the branch that I had aimed a particularly brutal machete blow at not only did not get chopped, but ended up in my eye. My eye was weeping for the rest of the day.

If anyone has any suggestions for something more effective than a machete (don't say bulldozer please), I'd love to hear about it. I sharpen those damn things once every two months and they are pretty much useless after a single session.