So here we are day two of our Sawtooth adventures
and today we are at Yellow Belly Lake. So to get to the trailhead you head east
of Stanley. You're going to go 17.7 miles and on your right hand side
is going to be this dirt road to Pettit Lake. You'll get to a four-way junction
turn right there, you'll go over this little bridge and there will be
a sign a very small sign so keep your eye open.
Turn there and continue for 1.4 miles until you get to a
y-junction. At the y-junction you will see a sign, it says
Yellow Belly Trailhead. This place is right down the road from the Tin Cup
Trailhead. That's the trailhead that takes you to
Alice Lake, takes you on the Toxaway loop.
The hike itself is pretty basic getting to Yellow Belly. It's 1.2 miles
until the you see this giant lake all of a sudden appear. It's almost
like a little outdoor playground there's a lot of
felled trees, a lot of dead wood, a lot of things you're kind of
climbing over, scrambling over. But this is not our final destination. We heard
that up the road a little bit is a smaller
more secluded lake, tucked in the mountains. So we're gonna
explore Yellow Belly Lake a little bit and then
we're gonna go find McDonald Lake.
Oh what am i going to say.
All right come on Jon pull it together. All right so here we are, we made it to
McDonald Lake. The hike from Yellow Belly to McDonald is a
great trail, super level it follows along the lake so
you always have the lake in view. It was really easy. Brett could do it so
kids could probably do it. The colors start popping on this part of
the trail more than they did in the first mile
to Yellow Belly where it was just kind of rocks and
sparse pines, beautiful green wildflowers start showing up.
You'll come out and you'll see this beautiful little lake, this
wonderful meadow and then these huge Sawtooth peaks just right behind me
kind of framing the scene. And no one's out here
which is pretty awesome. So I guess it's time to relax
wait for the sun to go down. You know we're shooting the stars tonight.
Never miss an opportunity to shoot the stars in North America's only dark sky
reserve. So I will whoop Brett's butt in the game
of cribbage, make some coffee, and we'll wait
for sunset and for those stars.
I would like a shower
oh it's not gonna look pretty.
That's so hot.
Brett are you trying to make your top ramen into a mitt?
That is so hot. It's a little beef stroganoff we got cooking up.
Secret recipe.
All right show me what you got.
It's nice, no one's around, the birds are chirping,
we have serenity, peace. The mountains are just waking up yawning
from their nightly slumber.
Once again I totally recorded an ending that just
didn't seem to fit. Not for the same reasons as
the last video but... I think I've almost been
programmed to kind of have this super high fake energy
whenever I'm on camera. I thought I needed to do that.
Somewhere along this the creating this Sawtooth series I decided
I'm not gonna do that anymore, I'm tired of that.
I'd rather just go with the actual emotion
that's going on and speak the way that I actually emotionally feel at the time.
And at McDonald Lake that was just peaceful.
Tranquil. We'll see what kind of outro and emotion we go with next week
as uh next week's video is Cabin Creek and I accidentally sprayed us with bear
spray on that hike. My bear spray works. It might just be an outro of
Brett yelling at me. But we'll just have to wait for next
week to see how that goes. Or you won't. You could be watching this
video seven years in the future and there's 70 more videos on the
Sawtooths that I've made. And whenever you're watching this.
Past, present, future.
Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.
you