During my trip out to Colorado last August, we decided to take a roadtrip to Salt Lake City, UT, for a couple days. I’d never been to Salt Lake before, and I was really excited to check out the city and get some cool hiking in. Enter: crazy wildfire season. Enter: pressure system over SLC. Literally the weekend we went to SLC, smoke from the California wildfires moved into the city due to high winds and something about the weather system that was in the area trapped the smoke in the city. In the city, you weren’t supposed to be outside for long periods, and the day we drove in, everything was coated in a orange haze, like some kind of Mad Max apocalyptic color-grading.

Still, we didn’t drive all the way to UT for nothing, so we trekked out to the mountains in Kamas, where the air was clean enough to be outside, though you could certainly still see the haze of smoke hanging over the mountains, especially earlier in the day. We had our sights set on Lofty Lake Loop, a 5-mile trail that is rated as moderate. There were some challenging sections of uphill rock scrambling and loose gravel going downhill, but it was overall not difficult.

The trail begins beside Pass Lake, through beautiful fir forests with mountain peaks in the distance.

About 2 miles into the hike, you’ll pass your second lake—Kamas Lake. You can get a better idea from these photos of how bad the smoke was. This was about 10 am or so, and the sky still has that orange glow, the sun muted, and the mountains are almost obscured by the haze.

After the steepest incline and rock scrambling of the hike, you’ll pass over a peak and Lofty Lake will come into view below. The trail curves around the lake, with some good rocky outcroppings along the edge where you can stop for a snack and water break.

The final lake of the hike is Scout Lake, which you first view from above before making the descent down to its shores. There are also some beautiful wetland meadows in this section of the trail with the mountains framing them from above.

Thanks for reading! If you want to read about my other hiking adventures, go here or click “Hiking” at the top of the post.