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Middle Fork, Iron Gate Trail Head- Loomis Washington




























DAY 1: Middle Fork Trail Head-Iron Gate Trail Head To Sunny Camp

10 Miles that's all it was supposed to be to get to Sunny Camp from the Middle Fork trail head. The Middle Fork trail head connects with the Iron Gate trail and continues on to Sunny Camp. It was a long rough...steep....tree hoping trail....We took this trail due to we had a Horse......6 of us set off down the trail at 10 AM July 4th to spend 2 nights in Horseshoe Basin area.....Abrigo a 14 year old Paso Fino, my 2 year old niece....who had the pleasure of riding Abrigo most of the way....my brother and his wife and my 12 year old nephew.....we had originally planned to hike all the way to Louden Lake and camp there....well as we started down the trail plans changed fairly rapidly.....we had about 75 to a 100 downed trees....due to being total horse packing rookies we did not come prepared for downed trees.....my brother had a small hand saw which he put to good use with a lot of arm muscle and sweat.....we spent lots of time breaking limbs, and pokey stuff of dead trees, trying to clear a trail......it was a lot of work....we went over, around, hoped logs that the horses belly was rubbing on.....between downed trees....every way you could imagine to get past all the trees...dragged...pushed...pulled them out of the way.....there was a few times we wondered if we shouldn't just return to the truck head back home and crawl in bed for the weekend.....finally we made it to the steep uphill section.....by then the little one had feel asleep so we pulled all the packs off, including the horses and took an hour rest......the trail is actually a good trail....lots of nice meadows....fairly flat in areas...just mass trees down.....after our nap we loaded back up and hiked up through a beautiful exposed rock garden before topping the trail and connecting to the Iron gate trail.....we felt like doing a victory dance.....from there we knew it would be smooth sailing into Sunny Camp.....but not to far down the trail the long day had pretty much caught up with most of us.....some of us wanted to cry....some of us did.....stumbled through the meadow prior to climbing the slight grade up into Sunny Camp...the flowers were beautiful in the evening light.....the lupine was in prime shape.....We reached Sunny Camp at 6:30 PM.....luckily the camp spot was open....set up camp and got a small fire going and chowed down on dinner.....the little one was in fine form.....she acted like she was hopped up on Caffeine.....the happiest little camper.....a pretty strong wind was coming down the pass....made it a little chilly but other wise the weather was great....I was worried what Abrigo would do during the night....concerned if he would still be standing tied to his picket come morning......first time that we are aware of for him to trail pack...and spend the night in the wilds....He was a champ....couldn't have ask for a better horse....he was amazing with all the downed trees...crossing water and putting up with the chatter box on his back....a extremely patient horse.....I didn't have much to worry about....after we crawled into our sleeping bags we were down for the count.....Long day hiking for a simple 10 miles.....
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