Crane Pond, Pharoah Lake Wilderness - July 11, 2010

Beautiful pond/lake! Hike is along an old road and can be upwards of 2.3 miles to the pond if you do it from the official trailhead. The "road" is drivable a ways so we went in about a mile and parked at the goose pond trailhead which made it only about 1.3 miles each way. You could drive even further to nearly the end of alder flow and only have very short jaunt to Crane. I am told people will start to be ticketed for driving it but for now rangers are looking the other way. This makes it a bit easier to get to some of the further away spots like Pharoah Mountain and Pharoah Lake! We're definitely heading in there on another trip.

Crane Pond is wonderful - we saw a loon and it said hello right away! Lots of fish and deep clear waters. We swam at a campsite that had big flatish rocks at the waters edge with very deep water so we jumped in. It clearly is higher use because of the accessibility, but there was only one other party that had kayaked down to the end of the lake campsite. We also saw some fishermen come out in a canoe when we were leaving, but no one else on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in July.

Above - Alder Flow - We could put a boat in an paddle right to the Crane pond with just a short carry over to Crane.
Below - Claire climbed this root system of a huge white pine that had tipped over.