Certain places have a sort of greatness that can penetrate you. They captivate and inspire. They overwhelm; reduce visitors to sitting at their feet, looking up in awe that such a place could be.

Walking through the forest of pines, out of sight of the creek but close enough to hear the water falling over rock, everything was indicative of the type of beauty one might take for granted in the Trinities. The forest was pretty here just as it was a basin or two over. When the forest thinned there lay expansive meadows covered in the delicate white flowers, purple iris, blue lupine and the leaves of thousands of bulbs not yet ready to flower. East Boulder Creek fell from the outlet of the lake in a cascading waterfall down the channel between two adjoining ridges. The view opened and looked out across blue mountains, their silhouettes overlapping and lightening into the distance.

Beyond one last fall in the creek lay East Boulder Lake nestled beneath the Scott Mountains[1], towers of red peridotite rock[2], still clad in fractions of winter’s snow. Beneath the snow, the slopes shone dark with the green of conifers and bright with the lushness of spring meadows all cast in the long golden rays of a waning afternoon. Behind us rose an unnamed peak of pink rock, tall and wide, and blue-gray with thickets of sagebrush.

East Boulder Lake, Trinity Alps Wilderness

East Boulder Lake beneath the Scott Mountains

Upper Boulder Lake, Trinity Alps Wilderness

View down the East Boulder Creek drainage

Sunset over the ridge

[1] The Scott Mountains are part of the Red Trinities named such because they are made of red peridotite or serpentine rock, opposed to the granite that makes up the White Trinities.

[2] Peridotite is a generic name used for coarse-grained, dark-colored, ultramafic igneous rocks. They usually contain olivine as their primary mineral and are economically important rocks because they often contain chromite (the only ore of chromium). Peridotites can be source rocks for diamonds.