Distance: 9 Miles
Elevation: 7500 - 5000

We awoke to another beautiful day, the morning light and the mist on the lake provided a perfect reflecting pond.

The trail wound down along Elk Creek toward the Minam River and then along the Minam, giving us some nice outlooks towards the mountains and cliffs and the occasional waterfall.

Once down to the Minam we began to see many more signs of humans, our lunch stop was clearly a popular camping spot for horse camping parties. Hopefully our Leave-no-trace approach was not leaving behind as many signs.

The Minam was a fair sized river and we had high hopes for the fishing, unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be very good, although we did manage to pull in a couple of nice high mountain trout.

Our camping spot for the night once again demonstrated the don’t take the first place you find rule. We had originally stopped at the convergence of the Minam and Trail Creek, a very shady and dirty spot. One of the guys did some exploring and discovered a 100 yards away a great camp. This was either a sheep herder camp or a hunting camp because there was a well established camp with tables and benches.

Once again, lucky for us no people, only the wildflowers.

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