East Bank Ross Lake — Saturday, May. 5, 2018

With the Mountain Loop Highway still closed, we loaded up on backpacks on a bicycle trailer and biked to the East Bank Trail from Colonial Campground  for an overnight hike on Saturday, May 5. We ended up going about 8 miles on the trail and camped at Rainbow Point. The trail was in relatively good condition given it's been vacant most of the winter. There were several trees down, but only 3-4 were tricky to get around. Never caused more than a 2 minute delay. We saw two other hikers, who appeared to be staying at Hidden Hand campground (about 3 miles from the trail head). Other than that, we had the lake entirely to ourselves. From the trail head, it took us 6 hours to get settled at camp, including a couple of nice food/beer breaks along the way. 

There were a few creek crossings to note. Two of the crossings in the first five miles were a little deep, so while not difficult to cross you might want to change out of your boots if your goal is to keep them dry. At both Roland and May Creeks (both by campsites so easy to identify), the crossings were a little more difficult. At Roland, if you head east from the trail about 150 feet there's a logjam that you can work your way over without getting wet, otherwise you're wading through water about a foot and half deep. At May Creek, the railing for the bridge is out. It's still very sturdy - just take it slow if you get woozy with heights like I do. See photo below. 

Rainbow point is an excellent campsite, complete with groomed tent sites, picnic tables, established fire pits, and bear boxes!

The quiet weekend and beautiful weather led to some good wildlife viewing! Two very curious deer followed us for awhile and kept trying to sneak up to steal food from our campsite. Western Toads were on the trail, and we saw two black bear cubs on the hike out! We must have startled the cubs and mom as we saw them quickly climb up a tree as we came around a corner (about two miles from the trail head) but never saw mom. We quickly backtracked to make sure we weren't accidentally going between the mom and cubs, and then watched them through binoculars for about 20 minutes until then climbed down and scampered into the woods. It was a good reminder to refresh ourselves on bear etiquette :-) https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bears/safety.htm. Our bikes were safe and sound where we'd locked them up the previous day and it was an easy ride back to the campground. 

Overall amazing two days.