My recent trip back to the States was full of fun and family. It included two milestone events. I landed in Utah and started out running. The morning after I arrived, I loaded up with my dad, brother, and three nephews to drive three hours north to Bear Lake, Idaho. We waited at a small post office in Franklin for some friends, then drove to the top of a neighboring canyon for Bloomington Lake. It was lovely! Leaves were changing, so trees were all kinds of green but also yellow, red, orange, and brown.
The trail climbs up from the parking lot and levels out. Almost immediately we saw a small lake. With the mountains in the background and autumn trees all around, this could have been our destination. We were told it wasn’t. This was the lake before the lake.
Just a few hundred meters more and we started following a little stream to its head at a small clear lake with sheer rock walls at one side. It was beautiful. The trail overall was less than a mile one way.
Of course, the water was freezing, so swimming or wading was completely out of the question. We did find the rope swing, though, that dangles from a large tree on the lake’s edge. A couple in our group took a swing and thankfully didn’t plummet into the frigid water.
We walked around the lake in both directions the farthest we could go. The sheer cliffs look dangerous from the far side of the lake, but if you climb up the slope you’ll find it has lots of space to easily walk to the point.
Bloomington Lake makes for a fun outing for an autumn day. I’m told the lake can be pretty crowded during the summer. There were only a couple others on the trail with us and pretty staggered in our walk, so we were in relative solitude.
