Medicine Bow Peak

We're way behind in getting travel posts published because we were having way too much fun traveling! So we won't be confused about when each "wandering" happened, we'll start each blog with its actual date.

July 19, 2023

We discovered the Snowy Mountain Range of the Rocky Mountains when we traveled through Wyoming in 2021. It was new territory to us then, and we remembered it fondly as one of the most beautiful group of mountains we had ever seen. So we couldn't return to Wyoming without making a stop in the Snowy Mountains. They were just as beautiful on our second visit!

We had a big hike planned for the day. We were heading to the summit of the highest mountain in this range--Medicine Bow Peak. We started at 8:30 a.m. at the trail head at Marie Lake. 

Many hikes require hours of steep hiking to get to beautiful views. But the great thing about hikes in the Snowy Mountains was they start at high elevations with beautiful views. This hike started at 10,486 feet in elevation, so the air was already thin. The columbines were at their peak bloom, looking better than the ones that Denisa used to pamper in her flower gardens.

A long line of lakes lay at the base of the mountains. Our hike started on The Lakes Trail, that gave us a front-row seat to each of the lakes.

We also got a front row seat to the wildflowers along the trail. The arctic lilies literally spring out of the snow, and the snow only recently retreated on this trail.

This area doesn't open until the middle of July. So even though it feels like we are deep into summer, these flowers think that it is early spring.

The longest lake that we hiked beside was appropriately named--Long Lake.

We were blessed to wander another of God's wonders!

Mark knows that Denisa loves wildflowers, so he also knows that she would pick this picture for the blog.

He was snapping another picture, when Denisa pointed to the sky. An eagle just caught a fish in the waters of Long Lake and was flying away with it in its talons. Sorry that you only got the pointing instead of the eagle!

The first 2.5-mile section took us more than two hours to hike because we kept stopping to take pictures. We'll speed up the blog by just scrolling through some of them.

We have to stop and explain this little pink flower. We've only seen it at very high elevations and then only in boggy areas. While it isn't terribly impressive from a distance, it has to be enjoyed most up close. While it has a more sophisticated scientific name, we call it the pink elephant flower.

If you look closely, each little bloom looks like a tiny pink elephant with floppy ears and with its trunk curled in the air. We have wandered into another of God's wonders!

While those first 2.5 miles flew by with so many beautiful views, the next few miles did not. We came to the intersection with the Sugarloaf Trail and we had two options. We could walk a nice trail with little elevation gain, or we can start up a very steep and rocky trail to the top of Medicine Bow Peak. What would we do?

You guessed it. We headed up that steep path with switch-backs up the face of the mountain. We started seeing more and more of the lakes that dot the landscape in the Snowy Mountains. We were over 11,000 feet in elevation, so the air was thin. The views and the elevation literally took our breath away!

So we had to stop often to enjoy the view and breathe.

Snow still covered some of the trail. While some hikers chose to go around it, we traipsed right through it.

As we got closer to the top, the lakes looked smaller, and we found we had to climb through increasing amounts of snow.

Denisa was rather relieved to see the last slope to the top was completely covered with snow.

It was actually easier to walk up the snow than to maneuver over the rocks underneath it.

There were plenty rocks to navigate at the summit. We climbed this mountain in 2021, and Denisa still remembered how hard it was to move around the summit because there was no flat soil up here--only rocks. But we have a picture to prove that we made it to the 12,018-foot summit.

The view from the summit was a little hazy, but we could still point out more than two dozen lakes around us. You could see that a marmot was perched at the edge of the rock in the lower left corner of the picture below.

The marmot was taking for granted the beautiful views that we had worked hard to see.

Right under us was the very long Long Lake, and the series of other lakes that we had hiked beside earlier this morning.

When we made it to the summit of Medicine Bow Peak in 2021, we took a few pictures and then headed back down the same way we came up. But this time we opted for the longer loop trail. The problem with that decision was that we must traverse over all those rocks at the top. These were stove-sized rocks with angled tops and pointy edges. While Mark was like a gazelle leaping from rock to rock, Denisa was more like a turtle crawling from point to point. It was a slow quarter-mile of rock scrambling to make this into a loop hike.

When we found snow, we opted to go that route even if it was on the edge of the cliff.

We were glad to finally get to a dirt trail with only occasional rocky sections that led us to the other side of the mountain.

The yellow buttercups were blooming like it was early spring--which it was for them. While we had dozens of lakes to look at on the other side of the loop, back here we had only a single lake about a mile away.

We had to say that the longer loop on the back side of the mountain was a little boring. But we were making much better time because we only took a hand-full of pictures.

That is, until we came upon a marmot posing among the wildflowers.

She let us get very close, and never did go down into the burrow. Fewer people take this loop trail, and this inquisitive animal seemed happy to have the company.

We would say that we wouldn't recommend this long loop trail. It had many rocky sections, and some of them were very steep. While the first 2.5 miles flew by, the last 2.5 miles slogged by.

We thought we would be hiking up on the ridge with good views the entire way. But the truth is we only got one good ridge view at the very end.

Maybe there were two good ridge views.

We were hiking downhill in the grass when we met another hiker that asked to take our picture.

We could see part of the long trail we had just descended.

We were at last heading back to the beautiful views of Lake Marie where we started.

Our legs were tired from the 8-miles we had just hiked. What really added to the tired legs was the 1,749 feet in elevation they climbed to get to the summit of the highest mountain in the Snowy Range. But we were blessed to wander in some of the most beautiful of God's wonders here in Wyoming.