Click on photo to go higher and look back to the west.
There is a narrow cliff-hanging trail from Caribou Pass to Arapaho Peak.
If looking down 900' at Caribou Lake and the smaller crater to the left does
not give you vertigo, I heartily recommend this trail. Most of it is three to four
feet wide and has very little elevation gain as it follows a contour around the
north face of Mount Neva. On my July 10, 2000 journey here with Stephen
Harry, we did encounter some snow across the trail. We carefully crossed it,
and then suddenly found a five to six foot drop-off in the snow that looked
way too dangerous. We decided to climb up and around the snow and took the
photo above a little after we had left the trail. We are safely on gently sloped
tundra. The mountain is so steep that the trail is hidden beyond the curve in the
snowdrift. We expected to have to go only a short ways around the snow.
This turned out to not be the case. Instead, we had to climb a considerable distance
up Mount Neva. We followed an old trail that miners had apparently used
many years ago when the Caribou Trail is snow blocked as it was for us.
We then descended to Lake Dorothy. Later we got back on the Caribou Trail
and easily walked back from the east to close to where the trail was blocked.
We found a wonderful fresh water spring below a snow bank, and refilled our
water bottles at probably the only good place to get fresh water in this vast
land high above the trees. Scott walked a short ways further back on the Caribou Trail
to see where it was blocked, but it seemed to be quite a ways back. Later, while
preparing these images, he much regretted not going all the way back to photograph
the snow barrier.