Y Meadow Lake
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What I didn't like was that Emigrant Wilderness was extremely dusty, compared to all the other parks we've been to this year.
This led to very dirty hikers!
To be fair, I'm not sure if it was because it's the end of summer and it's been dry all summer, or if it's always this dusty.
Compared to Yosemite and Sequoia National Park, the scenery isn't as dramatic, but nevertheless it was nice to get away from all the crowds and have relaxing nights by lakes on a holiday weekend!
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The trail to Chewing Gum Lake is marked as "secondary trail" on the map, which according to the ranger just means "not maintained". This turned into a small adventure when at one point the trail sort of vanished at a large slab of granite and we had to make up a route (after failing attempts to search for rock cairns others left behind) before we found the trail again. I would not recommend this secondary trail from Crabtree up to the Chewing Gum Lake for anyone not comfortable with getting "lost" periodically, since at a few spots, the trail was definitely not easy to follow.
Chewing Gum Lake itself was rather small, and after a bit of fussing around we decided to move on to Y Meadow Lake. This ended up being a smart idea, as later at Y Meadow Lake someone told us there were ~30 people at Chewing Gum, and Chewing Gum is not a big enough lake to support 30 people.
Y Meadow Lake was quite nice. In terms of campsites, there was a lot of room to camp along the east shore in particular, with a few campsites at the north end of the west shore also. According to the weather forecast, it was going to be quite windy that night, and they weren't kidding. Thank goodness Kekoa found this nice campsite sheltered by a rock. The campsite even had a pre-built fire ring and a large log for sitting to go with it. Another nice part of day 1 was that we ran into a ranger, and he gave us all sorts of opinions on trips we could take, many of them involving easy cross-country routes, which we've been meaning to try out.
The morning out of Y Meadow Lake was sort of an adventure. From the official trail to Y Meadow Lake is another one of these "unmaintained secondary trails", and to get to the lake, you sort of follow a trail, then you see the lake, and you just walk towards the lake. Now getting BACK to the trail was not nearly as easy of a task. Kekoa just sort of pointed out that we needed to walk along west side of the valley, after quite a bit of "am I going in the right direction?" we eventually found the trail again. Yay.
This day was pretty mild (mostly flat), and we got to Upper Wire Lake in about 5 hours and found a super nice campsite. This campsite's fire ring even had wood pre-collected, so to start a fire all we had to do was assemble the wood. Kekoa's first reaction was "We could build a bonfire with this", after informing him of my fear of big fires, and much to my dismay, we had a huge fire going on that night.
We started off the day doing some cross-country hiking. Starting at Upper Wire Lake, we bushwhacked to Middle Wire Lake (Banana Lake), Lower Wire Lake, and then back to the trail. Cross-country was quite an ... interesting experience. When there is no trail, everything seems to go a lot slower. There were also a few points in time when we were like "uhhh are we where we think we are?!?!" and "uhh there's a cliff here, time to backtrack". After an hour an a half (and maybe 1-1.5 miles) of adventure, we finally made it back to the trail (between Gem and Jewelry Lakes).
Kekoa and I were also too lazy to hike the extra mile to Bear Lake at this point, and we also passed multiple groups (including a 10+ person group) heading to either Camp or Bear Lake, so we decided to hike it out that day.
The last 2.5 miles or so where pretty uneventful, we passed this loud group of Russian guys that seemed to cheer loudly every time they got to a sign post! Afterwards everyone in this Russian group seemed to strip down to their underwear washing in the river by the trailhead (I wasn't joking when I said it was dusty). The sight itself was quite interesting, I wish I had a picture of it.
The End. :)