Bob Marshall backpack to the North Wall

Jolie and I did a 7 day backpack trip to the north wall in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. We had great weather, no smoke, and completed our longest backpack together (65 miles). Here we are on the first day (the only bad weather morning of the trip) heading up our first 2,000 foot high pass of the trip.

Pretty waterfall below Headquarters Creek Pass

100 feet below Headquarters Creek Pass.

On the other side of headquarters creek pass (far right side of picture). Comming down from the pass was only really strong wind we experienced during the whole trip.

A major score on our first day - found a patch of huge strawberries (huge for wild strawberries) - tasted good on our chocolate dinner dessert.

Bridge over North Fork Sun River - read the sign. Telephone polls in the wilderness?? It evidently wasnt that wild before it got designated a wilderness

No telephone polls here, or trees. One of the burn areas we hiked through. This is along Red Shale Ck. Good thing about burn areas is you can see for miles ... on a hot day the bad thing is no shade. 

Didnt see the black bear that made these prints

Our first view of the north wall - the focal point of this trip. The north wall is 10-15 mile long limestone cliff that is beautiful. Our plan was to camp in this meadow and have this view, but another party with horses beat us here. We didnt want to camp near horses so we headed down the trail a bit to a less scenic but still nice spot.

Sunrise on the north wall near our second camp.

Hiking along the north wall on day 3 on our way to Lake Levale, our 3rd straight day10 mile+ day with 2,000+ feet of elevation gain

More views of the north wall

more north scenery

We saw thousands of gentian flowers during the week.

Lake Levale, our destination on day 3. We spent two nights here to have time to explore and rest up.

On our "rest day" we hiked up to the continental divide to an unnamed pass. We saw two marmots chasing each other at the top so we named it Marmot Pursuit Pass. Lake Levale where we camped is visible at the base of the north wall towards the top of the picture.

After lunch and a nap, we couldnt muster the energy to stand up for a selfie, so here is relaxed selfie (day 4)

Jolie trying to avoid the hassle of taking boots off to cross a stream and instead balancing on shallow rocks.

We stayed in Round Meadow for our 5th night. It is in the middle of a burn area that didnt look so pretty at first, but it was actually a very nice site. Near sunset, the color of the grasses and the burned trees made for a very nice photo.

It was a pretty camp, but it was in the bottom of the valley and it was a very calm and clear night. We woke to 28 degrees. That is ice on our boots from the dew on the grass freezing on our boots.

Day 7, first thing we had to do was take off our boots and cross that freezing cold creek before we warmed up and headed to Route Creek Pass.

As we were just about to crest Route Creek Pass, Lonesome Ridge on the other side just looked so huge (it was) - made for a good picture showing the scale of the landscape

Day 7 was sunny but hot - here is a cool moment several miles before we got back to the car. To make the heat worse - the last 2 miles of trip was along a dirt road with no shade and dust as cars drove past us - sorry no pictures of the dusty road.