Seven Lakes Basin & High Divide

Friday took the ferry over and got to trailhead by noon.  During the weekdays they are doing road paving work so we had to wait about 20 mins at one point to pass road crew.  Hiked the trail up the Sol Doc river, through to Heart Lakes.  The first night we camped at a campsite beyond Heart Lakes a bit along the High Divide Trail (signed campsite) arriving at 5pm.  This camp site had no water, but amazing views of Mt. Olympus - and we went back to Heart Lake for water (was helpful to have extra collapsible containers to carry water back).  We think this is Cat Basin camp site...but not sure - but it held 4 parties easily.

Next day we packed up and headed out on the trail 8:00am, it was pretty obvious to us where the regular trail stopped and you had to go almost straight up to the Cat Walk...however others missed it and went straight on - on our way across the Cat Walk we could see them working through some challenges to get to the Cat Walk!  At the top of the ridge we came down the Cat Walk and across to Boston Charlie's - very small area and brown tarn - we dropped some of our gear in case we wanted to come back and stay over night (there was one other tent already and really room for maybe two parties max) and headed up.  Once into the main basin above we traversed across the basin and onto snow, gaining the ridge for the last 50 meters to the summit.  The guide book suggested we could run the ridge around the basin, but it didn't look very good and there was a slight trail across the basin.  You want to feel comfortable on a bit of scree/loose rock and on snow.  Summit view (1:30pm) was fantastic.

Came on down to Boston Charlie's and because of the projected rain and clouds we decided to head back across the Cat Walk in the afternoon to avoid any rain.  We decided to camp at the Cat Stock location (at the end of the maintained trail), which was really wonderful, arriving at 5:30pm.  The turn-off the trial is marked and we followed the path for quite a ways, eventually hiking down 150 feet to a meadow with running water and great camping sites - although with the water were mosquitoes!  In any event it was a nice camping area - in hindsight we wondered if we could have gotten water and hiked back up to more open areas in the first set of fields you see so reduce the number of bugs?

Hiked out on Sunday, leaving the camp at 7:30am and down through Heart Lake and back at cars by 12:30pm.