Red Mountain/Cat Lakes
September 12-14, 2007

In spite of the fact that I visited Red Mountain lakes last year, I was interested to see how extensive the fire damage
was after last year's destructive Red Mountain fire which started after I was there.

Amazinly, the fire seems to have spared the majority of the lakes in this area, and reserved most of its damage
for the Bear Valley at large. We examined all of the lakes with the exception of Lake7678, the furthest east of the Cat
lakes. It is reasonable to assume from the fire pictures that I took, that it got the wrath visited upon it, but
we failed to get down that far to see for sure. And since a lot of the lakes have no names/altitudes associated with them, I have placed a Topo graphic at the bottom of the page with the altitudes that I gleaned from my Topo! software.

Unfortunately, the multiplicity of Idaho's 2007 fires have created smoke/haze conditions that make picture-taking
definitely sub-optimal. The traditional mountain blue sky necessary for great pictures is lost in the haze & smoke.

I decided to again separate the different pictures into sections. It seems a little clearer that way.

The Hike Itself

The Packing Partners

Lake 8262 Our camping location for this trip.	Lake 8106 The Middle Red Mtn Lake	Lake 7850 A lower Red Mtn lake
Lake 7800 The lowest Red Mtn Lake Didn't visit here. But it also was spared the fire.	Lake 7860 The southernmost Cat lake	Lake 7924 A Cat lake north of RM lake 7850
Lake 7940 North of 7924 No pictures here. A fairly marshy lake working on becoming a meadow.	Lake 7870 A small off-track lake that saw some influence from the fire	Lake 7920 Basically a pothole lake that is busy filling in. A future meadow.
Lake 7930 The northernmost Cat Lake and a pretty one to boot!	Lake 8004 The highest of the Cat lakes and a long way from the tent!	Lake 8238 Basically a small cirque pothole lake above Lk8106

The Red Mountain fire sequence pictures