Mohawk Lakes Trail

Author's Comments

The first time I climbed to Upper Mohawk I underestimated the trail and paid for it the rest of the day. Two thousand eight hundred feet is real elevation, and at altitude it feels like more. But this is one of those hikes where the reward keeps arriving in stages, and you stop measuring the climb against the destination because the middle of the trail is its own argument. Continental Falls comes early, and it is the photograph most people make and leave with. A tripod and a long exposure in the soft morning light, when the canyon is still in shadow and the water turns to silk over those tiered ledges. It is worth the time. But I would urge you to keep climbing. Above the falls the trail opens into mining ruins - weathered timber, rusted iron, the bones of a stamp mill that has been losing its argument with the weather for over a century. In July the wildflowers come in around the ruins in a way that feels almost staged. Paintbrush, columbine, the whole alpine inventory. I have made some of my favorite frames in the region in this stretch, where human history sits inside the cirque like an afterthought. The upper lake is what you came for. Twelve thousand feet, walls of stone rising on three sides, snowmelt threading down them in white veins that move all summer. Get there before ten. The afternoon storms above treeline are not a suggestion, and the light is best in the first hours anyway, when the cirque is still half in shadow and the water has not yet been ruffled by the daily wind. Bring a wide lens. Bring more water than you think you need.

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