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This past weekend my "brother from another mother" Bill and I did our annual backpacking trip. Usually we go into a particular basin and do bigfooting things. This year that whole area was smoked out by wildfires upwind so we stirred things up a bit. We hiked into Blue Canyon Basin in the Sky Lakes Wilderness. It is a broad, shallow glacial cirque in the head of the South Fork of Rogue River in the Cascade Range between Crater Lake to the north and Mt McLoughlin in the south. There was fairly heavy haze as we left town but it got better as we neared Blue Canyon trailhead. The trailhead is on top of a ridge. From the TH the trail drops steadily but gradually to valley floor passing one lake on the canyon wall and meeting at several at the canyon bottom. To that point the trail is heavily traveled but gets less traffic depending on which direction you choose. We headed east past some lakes under the back rim of the cirque. We passed the turnoff to Blue Canyon Lake which hangs high on the back wall of the cirque. (We came back to this trail and used it getting out of the basin .. more of that later.) On the way in we passed Horseshoe and Pear Lakes, climbed a low ridge, and dropped past Dee Lake to Island Lake. My intent was to camp at Dee Lake but we missed it ... out of sight of the trail. Though I had never been there I recognized Island Lake when we arrived. We set up camp at Island Lake, filtered some water, ate dinner, and went to bed not long after dark. Sometime not much later the wind blew what was left of the smoke out of the basin and we had a great view of stars, Jupiter, and later the moon. Saturday AM we woke up to this at Island Lake: ... no smoke!! NONE!! We got up fairly early but it was after 9:00 a by the time we had breakfast and broke camp. The day stayed clear, at least up high, but heated up a bit. We reversed course and headed back with intent to take a different trail up out of the basin. We stopped at Pear Lake for a while, then after a short walk, we stopped for lunch and a nap beside Horseshoe Lake: After a break we hiked the last half mile to the junction with the Blue Canyon Lake trail. At that junction, the fun ended and the work began. Trails within the basin were fairly level and more or less maintained. The Blue Canyon Lake trail was neither. The lake is about 2/3 of the way up the trail to the ridge but off a few hundred yards through some gnarly brush. There had been some maintenance attempted as far as the lake. It ended there. Also the yellowjackets, which had been noticeably absent, began there. We stopped about where we figured lake level should be and I bushwhacked to the lake. It was not a fun bushwhack. The lake was pretty gross. The water looked clear but the lake bottom seemed coated with a bright yellow-green plant layer. There were no obvious camping spots. I decided we should move on. The last 1/3 of the trail to the ridge, along with the Cat Hill Way trail which ran along the ridge 2.5 miles or so back to my truck, was littered with fallen logs and had a lot of impinging brush .. mostly huckleberry. That whole section was overrun with yellowjackets as well. I almost stepped in one ground nest. No stings, but .. close. From the trailhead, we drove back to where we had cell service, phoned home / checked in with Bill's wife and my GF, then drove to where he usually parks his trailer in hunting season and camped one more night to finish off the mountain house, etc. Good trip. No bigfoot. No tracks. No vocalizations (though I have not reviewed the audio recording from the night yet). No heavy "vibe" as the research area gets when they are around. Time to start figuring out something for next year ...

I've never been to one and would find it an absolute joy to attend.

General area ... in general terms, yes. Not that basin that I know of, but we're talking about the crest of the Cascades ... absolutely there are reports. They can potentially be life-threatening. Even for someone who is not allergic, disturbing a next and receiving hundreds to thousands of stings is a lot of poison to absorb. That's an unusual, unlikely worst case. The real "pain" is more of a hassle .. trying to cook a meal. It draws th' varmints in and they swarm your food. Sometimes they'll nest pretty near trails and you can disturb them just passing by. Bill and I have each been victim of a bee swarm at least once hiking. In the southern Oregon Cascades, the mosquitoes arrive with the snow melt and continue through late summer. The numbers are high through mid July, typically start downwards about then, but are still really bad through mid August and they're essentially gone by Labor Day. Usually the yellowjackets show up somewhere mid-late July and pick up through Labor Day. First hard frost is usually the end of the bugs but that can be late September. MIB

I had a good "Sasquatch Day" today, starting with a breakfast with 4 local researchers and wives in a restaurant for the first time in over a year, followed with an afternoon sortie into the mountains to check out a couple of lakes N.E. of Mission, BC. I arrived at the first lake about 3:30, after parking on the logging road and making a short, steep, muddy hike down a rough trail to the shore. I found lots of tracks on the soft mud of the beach, but all of them were human and dog, nothing at all that hinted of Sasquatch. I returned to the 4x4, and continued deeper into the mountains, on a much rougher stretch of disused logging road, with speed reduced to 10km/hr. due to deep potholes, lots of rocks, and a rather sketchy looking old bridge, but did not reach the second lake target, as it was getting too late for me to make it the rest of the way there, and still get home by the time I had promised my invalid wife. That one will wait for another time, when I can devote a whole day to the task. It was great to be able to have an indoor social gathering for the first time in ages, and as always, refreshing to body and mind to get out in woods for a while.

@JustCurious, I checked under that bridge before crossing, and found nice deep steel I beam girders, well trussed. Oddly enough I heard last week that BC Forest Service has just removed the bridge, girders and all, and about 2 km before there dug 3 10' deep tank traps across the only road in. That's really strange, as there's a Provincial recreation site at that lake. Why are they blocking access?