The Caribou Lakes Trail: Twenty Miles Into the Trinity Alps

1A forest of standing dead trees

The first thing you notice is that the forest is gray, and the second is that it is completely silent.

Much of the lower trail passes through country that burned in the Red Salmon Complex fire of 2020 and the River Complex of 2021. The trees are still there, but they are charred and bare — thousands of trunks standing upright with no branches and no leaves, like poles pushed into the hillside.

It should feel sad, and at first it does. Then you start looking down instead of up. The ground between the dead trunks is thick with new growth: young pines at knee height, brush, and more wildflowers than I have seen anywhere else in these mountains. Fire is not the end of a forest here. It is the way the forest regenerates, and it has been doing it for far longer than anyone has been walking through to watch.

What is genuinely difficult about it is practical, not emotional. Dead trees give no shade. On a hot afternoon that part of the climb is exposed the whole way, and the black ground holds the heat.

2Leaving before the light

I started early, which on this trail is less a preference than a requirement. My pack weighed about twenty kilograms, which is more than it should have, and I was carrying two liters of water because the next reliable source was a long way up.

There is a particular quality to walking before sunrise. You are not looking at scenery yet, just at the small circle of trail in front of your feet, and your mind goes quiet in a way it rarely does. The temperature is perfect. The brittle burned branches on the ground snap under your boots and the sound carries a surprising distance.

Then the sun came over the ridge and the whole burned hillside turned orange for about ten minutes. That is the moment in the photograph above. Ten minutes later it was simply hot, and stayed that way.

3The climb does not really stop

Roughly 4,280 feet of climbing spread over ten miles does not sound severe written down. On the ground it means the trail is going up almost the entire time, in long switchbacks that turn back on themselves again and again across the face of the slope.

This is where a heavy pack stops being an inconvenience and becomes the main fact of your day. You find a slow rhythm and you protect it. You stop thinking about the lake. You think about the next turn, and then the one after that.

The water situation is the part I would plan differently. Between the lower creek and the basin near the top there is a long dry stretch, and in midsummer the small streams marked on the map are not always running. Two liters was enough, but only just, and only because I started before the heat. Carrying four would have cost me two more kilograms and saved me a lot of rationing.

The reward arrives gradually rather than all at once. The trees thin, the air cools, and the view opens sideways instead of upward. Suddenly there are alpine peaks along the horizon with snow still sitting in the gullies in July, and you realize you have climbed above the burned country entirely.

4Over the saddle

The trail crosses a saddle — the low point on a ridge between two higher peaks — and everything changes at once. Behind you is dry forest. In front is a wide granite basin, pale and open, with snow still lying in the shaded folds and small pines growing straight out of cracks in the rock.

Water is everywhere up here and most of it is invisible. You hear it under the snow and running beneath the rocks long before you see any. In early summer the sound of melting snow is more or less constant, a kind of white noise that follows you across the whole basin.

This is also the point where you understand the shape of the place. The lakes sit in a bowl carved by ice, held on the downhill side by a lip of solid granite. That is why the water stays instead of draining away.

5The lake itself

Lower Caribou Lake is deep, cold and very dark blue, held in gray granite with a few wind-bent conifers around the edge. There is no building, no road, no path around the far shore. It is one of the largest lakes in the Trinity Alps and on the evening I arrived there was nobody else on it.

What I had not expected was the solitude itself — not the absence of people, which I knew about, but how strange it feels. No cell signal. No engines. No aircraft overhead. After ten miles of hard walking your ears keep waiting for a sound that never arrives, and it takes a while to stop listening.

I swam, briefly. The lake is fed by snowmelt and it does not warm up in any meaningful way, so “swimming” means getting in, making a sound you did not plan to make, and getting out again. It is still worth doing after ten miles under a heavy pack. Upper Caribou Lake sits a short climb above the lower one and is smaller and shallower, and most people who come this far walk up to see both.

I pitched my tent on a slab of granite above the water. The rock had been in the sun all day and was still warm through the tent floor hours after dark, which is the single most comfortable thing about camping on stone. It also means you are not driving pegs into anything — you tie out to rocks and hope the wind stays reasonable.

The stars, once it was properly dark, were the best I have seen in California. There is no town close enough to put light into the sky, and at that altitude the air is thin and dry. You can see the Milky Way as an actual band rather than a vague brightness.

6Something moving in the dark

Sometime after dark I heard steps on the gravel. When I turned my headlamp toward the sound, two bright points of light looked back at me from about six meters away. A deer, entirely unbothered, working its way through the low plants at the edge of camp.

Deer in wilderness areas are curious about camps for an unromantic reason: salt. They are drawn to sweat on gear and straps, not to people. It stayed nearby for several minutes and then wandered off. I did not see a bear on the entire trip, which I was quietly grateful for and slightly disappointed by.

The wildlife that stays with me, though, is smaller. In a shallow pool the next morning I found a mountain yellow-legged frog sitting perfectly still on the bottom, in water cold enough to hurt my hands. These frogs have disappeared from most of their historic range in California. Finding one is a good sign about the water it is sitting in — a reminder that the value of a place like this is not only the view from the top.

The walk out is its own lesson. Ten downhill miles with a lighter pack sounds like a reward, and for the first hour it is. Then your knees begin to object, the burned section arrives again with no shade, and you understand why people talk about descents as if they were harder than climbs. They are not harder. They just hurt differently.

Would I do it again? Yes, but with more water and less food. That is the honest summary of nearly every trip I have taken into the Trinity Alps: the country is more generous than the trail, and the pack is always heavier than it needed to be.