Well, we awoke on the Fifth day to beautiful skys high in the mountains at Blodget lake. We had a short walk ahead of us so we did not get into much of a hurry to leave camp, or even get up for that matter. Around 0900 everyone was pretty well up and running. While Danny and Rob pasted time around the camp, I decided to do a bit of climbing to see what was over the mountain top. I was slightly disappointed to see another small fishless lake very similar to Blodget, and the view was blocked by another mountain so the climb had little payoff.
View over the bowl creating blodget lake
I returned to camp only to find that Rob and Danny were plotting to go for a swim in the frigid waters of the lake. The two of them headed down to the water and I followed for entertainment purposes. Once they reached the water side the first fish of Blodget was spotted. In the crystal clear waters a 12-14” lake trout could be seen. Excited by this, Danny sprinted back up to camp to grab his fly rod while Rob and I kept a watchful eye on the fish. After many attempts we were forced to give up on the obviously non-hungry trout, we later found that perhaps the reason he was not feeding was because he was trying to spawn with the only other fish in the lake. We watched the courtship take place for a minute or two, clearly we were hard up for some action. Once we lost interest in this it was time for that ice cold swim. By this time I decided that I was a little gamey and could use a good bathing as well. The three of us waded in up to the knees and lathered up, then dove the rest of the way in to rise off, that was quite possibly the coldest I’ve ever been, I could have passed as a woman, seriously. We hoped out dried off then proceeded to lay around in the sun for another hour or so.
Panarama of Cross Creek Valley
Finally around 1300 we broke camp, packed up and began our trek to the next campsite, the Missouri Lakes. Blodget Lake was on the opposite side of the valley of Missouri Pass. The typical route to get over to Missouri pass would be to drop down to the valley floor, intercept Cross Creek Trail and take that up the other side of the valley to the pass. Thinking we could save time and effort we decided we’d try to stay high on the mountain alleviating us of having to climb all the way down then hike all the way back up the pass on the other side. This turned out to be quite an adventure, much of the time we were either slipping on the weeds and flowers the covered the less rocky portions or we were kissing rocks as we shuffled across, around or over them. We managed to make it most of the way though with only one incident, Dobbie decided he could fly and made about a 25 ft jump off a large rock face, we couldn’t believe he didn’t break anything.
Once we got to the other side, Rob and Danny did some exploring of another nearby lake (Fancy Lake) and some old mining ruins. 
Rob, Danny and Dobby doing some exploration near Missouri Pass
After this we started our way up Missouri Pass. Missouri Pass wasn’t too bad to travel up, moderate slopes with plenty of switch backs. Before we knew it we were at the top. On the other side, the trail was snowed in, in July!
Atop Missouri Pass looking at the Missouri Lakes
So we had to take an alternative route down. After another solid 30-45 minutes of hiking we were down from Missouri Pass and looking for a campsite around Missouri Lake for the night. We found a suitable location, dropped our packs and headed for the fish. Danny encountered some bad luck upon setting down his pack, his fly rod got hung up and snapped 2ft from the end. Danny did what he could to make the rod usable again but little could be done. The fishing at the beautiful Missouri Lakes was very slow. After several hours of fishing we only managed to catch a few small cutthroat. It was pretty much another meatless night of pasta sides and rice…boo. The clouds rolled in and once again it started to rain, for the second night in a row we were forced to take refuge in Rob’s tent, not the best way to end a day.
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