Naturalist Basin

The weekend of 28 Aug 10, Tracy and I decided to try our luck with Naturalist Basin. We had tried to hike here a couple of times in the spring, but there was always too much snow. I didn’t want to hike it in the summer because it’s a very crowded trail. The forecast was calling for storms this weekend, though, and I was hoping it was late enough in the year to keep the crowds back. Well, we got to the trailhead and there were close to 20 cars there. I almost called it off. But Tracy convinced me to give it a shot, so we headed in. We actually saw very few people. I’m not even sure where all those people from the trailhead were, but we didn’t see very many at all. In fact, we saw two groups leaving, and after that we only saw two couples that were in the basin. We camped at Evermann Lake and had the whole lake all to ourselves.

The hike was very easy, and the basin was pretty, but it wasn’t anything spectacular by Uinta standards. Basically, it looked like about any other basin in the Uintas, we thought. I’m sure it’s popular because of how close the trailhead is to Salt Lake, how easy it is to get to the trailhead, and how easy the trail was. I’m glad we did the hike so I can mark it off the list, but it wasn’t anything worth risking the people for future hikes. On the plus side, while the forecast kept people away, it stormed all around us but it never hit us!

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