Lake Como Again

Ludwig's still laid up, waiting on parts (scheduled to arrive Tuesday), but the Subaru is just as willing to get us someplace. Some friends had rented a huge cabin at Lake Como and invited us for the weekend to chill, so we loaded up Fang Fang and headed down US 93 into the Bitterroot valley.
The last time we'd been here it was covered with snow and ice, and the lake was frozen solid. Unsurprisingly, five months made quite a difference.
This set of pictures shows our hike to the far end of the lake to where the creek that feeds it dumps into the lake as a roaring rapid.

This view looks across the lake to the South. Little Rock Creek makes a nice waterfall (the white streaks left of center) at the end of a textbook-perfect, if not especially high, hanging valley. The Bitterroots were heavily glaciated during the last ice age (the Wisconsin Glaciation, I think, but it might've been an earlier one) and the ice left behind all kinds of features like this to prove it.

Just because I like this stuff so much here's another shot of that hanging valley, this time unobscured by the chick.

Melissa forded this little stream with her characteristic grace.

This osprey wasn't too happy about our troop marching past its nest. You see lots of osprey nests in Western Montana.

This is the lower part of the washing machine created by the creek as it enters the Western end of the lake.

I'm the yellow spot above center. You can see where the water is still a bit turbid below me. Actually, the canoe here was involved in a potentially serious accident right here a couple years ago, when its pilot got too close to the rapids and tipped it. Filled with water, a canoe will still float though it will weigh several hundred pounds. The current pushed him into a big dead tree and tacoed the canoe, putting him in the lake. He was lucky to get out, as the water here is never very warm. The canoe is repaired (obviously), and those light patches are the scars it earned in the incident.

We did our first-time canoeing together the next day, and after some initial steering issues, kind of got the hang of sloppy canoeing (viz., steering by switching sides, not by using correct paddle strokes). Melissa enjoyed it enough to suggest that we rent a canoe sometime and take it to nice gentle lake for some practice. This time, I won't fail to get a shot of old Ludwig wearing the boat.