Old shoes at Cirque Lake (Winds)

There was an old pair of Five Tens that had been placed carefully on a rock at the edge of the Lake, where I saw them this summer. They looked to be abandoned (were not in usable shape), and had possibly been sitting there for many months, so I picked them up and hiked them out.

I'd forgotten about them until I saw them again this morning, lying in a box at home that I had dropped them into. Just thought I'd check to see if they belonged to something that cared about them, or if there's a story behind why they'd been abandoned by Cirque Lake.

Good on you for packing them out. Such a beautiful place ... good to be kept wild.

I recently looked into a trip to RMNP. Talk about red tape! Quite a contrast to the Wind Rivers.

The Winds are beautiful, and the lack of regulation is nice, but the place is getting heavily impacted and overused. The horse packers are destroying a lot of the trails, and the backcountry is getting overrun. Cirque Lake hasn't been drinkable for quite a few years now.

Once you cut through the red tape in RMNP, the human impact on the back country is far less than in a lot of the Winds. Campsites and bivy sites are in relatively unobtrusive spots, and the trails aren't torn to bits by the non-stop horse traffic. I don't like user fees and I'm no fan of red tape, but every time I've visited the Winds I've come away with a better understanding of why backcountry permits and quotas might be necessary evils.

I know Lonesome Lake was long-ago declared unfit for human consumption due to Ecoli levels. On the other hand, we drank water running from ~Cirque Lake on many days, untreated. No ill effects.

Agreed about the horse-impact on the trails. We used pack horses to bring gear as far as Lonesome Lake while we hiked in over Jackass Pass. At the end of our trip and on a rainy day, we hiked down the trail they normally come up - it is indeed a mess from horse traffic.

Some advocate that horses can take gear above Lonesome Lake - that the terrain is manageable for the horses. I'd hate to see the impact from horses spread up there.