Hike to Phelps Lake

One of the main goals on our days off was to take a trip where we could use both cameras to get a good comparison of their capabilities. I was disappointed with the initial tests for the new camera and wanted to get a true comparison of the relative capabilities of the old and the new. We settled on a hike to Phelps Lake in the Laurance S Rockefeller Preserve. It was very close to us and just inside the National Park at the south end.

We arrived for our hike at 11:30 and started out on the 3 mile loop trail into the Preserve:

The Visitor Center was a new building that gave a nice introduction to the area and a review of the history of the Rockefeller's involvement in the Grand Teton National Park:

There were several options to hike into the lake and we chose the 3 mile loop of the Lake Creek Trail and Woodland Trail which is the loop described in the above link on the Preserve. The trail going to the lake followed the creek that was the runoff from the lake:

The trail crossed the creek in a few places and this was one of those locations:

We were surprised when the trail - which took us through the forest most of the way - came to this huge clearing that was beautiful with the mountains in in the background:

We finally arrived at the lake:

This gave us a chance to provide the first real test of the differences between our cameras. In the first shot of lake above, you can see some white specks in the center of the photo. This was an area where the trail that went around the lake had some rocks on the shore where people could walk out to the water. The two shots below are taken with the two cameras on maximum zoom. The first is with the old camera, and the second was taken with the new camera:

There is a clear advantage in zoom shots with the new camera. We took a total of 88 shots with the 2 cameras, and we compared the shots from each camera. The new camera was clearly better in most situations, but the old camera was almost equal to the new one in other situations, with the exception of the zoom shots, which is the reason we purchased the new camera in the first place.

We sat and had our lunch while at the lake and enjoyed glassing the shoreline and mountains with our binoculars. We started back at around 1:30 and the trail that would take us back went into the forest, away from the creek, and took us past the area where the water ran off into the creek:

There were beautiful wildflowers all along the trail and we took many photos of some of the ones we hadn't seen before. Below are a few parting shots of some of these flowers. Starting with this variety of Columbine:

a Giant Hyssop:

and the Wild Blue Lupine:

So ends our hike to Phelps Lake. The exercise was wonderful, and the weather was fabulous. There were no health issues and we were happy with the results of the camera comparison.

Today is our day to complete our chores so it will be a different kind of day from what we are used to doing - and not as much fun...