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| BIG SANDY RIVER |
Deep Lake is one of my favorite lakes. As soon as I first saw an image of it, I made plans to visit. I personally prefer the Clear/Deep/Temple Lake area to the nearby Cirque of the Towers, and it takes a lot less effort to get to. The first time I visited Deep Lake in September of 2010 I was a bit rushed. We had drove to the Big Sandy Trailhead that morning from Salt Lake, hiked five-and-a-half miles to Big Sandy Lake where we set up camp, and then decided to try running up to Deep Lake and back before it got dark.
The Deep Lake Trail is not well marked so watch your map very carefully. Big Sandy Lake has several inlets coming in on its north end, and we mistakenly followed the inlet coming out of Rapid Lake thinking we were headed to Deep Lake. We followed the inlet of Rapid Lake (which we assumed was Clear Lake) to what we thought was Deep Lake (really Miller Lake). Realizing that the lake I thought was Deep Lake was too small to be Deep Lake, I looked at my map again and discovered that we had come up the Rapid Lake/Miller Lake Trail. Luckily, Miller Lake is not too far from Temple Lake and Deep Lake, so we continued on up the basin past Temple Lake and over a ridge to Deep Lake. Both of these lakes were very stunning. We didn't arrive at Deep Lake until dusk and were only able to get a few shots of it before it started to get dark. From Deep Lake we hurried on to Clear Lake with the help of a flashlight and some headlamps. Clear Lake seemed nice, but was too dark for us to get any photographs of it. We finally found our camp at about nine o'clock that night.
When I visited again in September of 2016, I had more time to enjoy the area. This time we had camped on the north end of Big Sandy Lake, and again I led our group up the wrong path to Deep Lake (didn't learn my lesson from the previous trip). This time we accidentally followed the inlet to Joe Lake. Fortunately, Joe Lake is not too far from Clear Lake, so we followed some make-shift trails (it appeared many other hikers had made the same mistake as us) over the ridge and down to Clear Lake. Clear Lake was amazing, and from there you just follow its inlet up to Deep Lake. After enjoying Deep Lake for a while, we climbed the ridge over to Temple Lake and then down past Rapid and Miller Lakes before arriving back at Big Sandy Lake. This entire hike was amazing. One of my personal favorites.
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