Sawtooth National Recreation Area
Sometimes, you don't need to travel far from home to have a wonderful vacation.  One of our shortest-travelled vacations ever also turned out to be one of our most impressive. While it is just 135 miles from our home to our campsite in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA), the last 110 miles of it follow three of Idaho's Scenic Byways.  It was certainly one of the most spectacular destinations we've enjoyed in all of our years of vacations.  We took lots of photos to remember it by.
Sawtooth Trip Map

Image Courtesy Google Maps via the Google Maps GPX Viewer

Highlights

We certainly did pack in plenty of activities in our six nights of camping!

Lowlights 

No, it wasn't the perfect vacation, as there were some downsides to it along the way, but it certainly was one of our more enjoyable vacations ever!  The camping was relaxing enough and the scenary superb enough to deal with the following less-than-ideal situations.
  • Mosquitos, mosquitos, and more mosquitos.  The repellent just didn't turn these guys away!
  • A couple of days of rain kept us off the trailhead
  • Early season obstacles (flooding, trees across roads) kept us away from some geocaches, hikes, and drives that we were interested in.

Favorites

Here's what each family member said was their absolute favorite activity of the trip:
  • Trent:  The Shuttle Boat on Redfish Lake
  • Raymond:  Throwing Rocks in Lake Stanley
  • Amelia:  Redfish Creek Falls
  • Suzanne:   Fishhook Meadow Hike
  • Mike:  Valley of the Giants Hike

Takeaways

Some final thoughts from our vacation:
  • The Sawtooth Mountains truly live up to their name.  With several jagged peaks above 10,000 feet, these are some truly impressive mountains
  • The Stanley Lake Campground that we stayed at presented us with the most impressive view we've ever had of any campground we've stayed at.
  • The area also boasted several large mountain meadows, containing lush grasses and filled with early summer wildflowers.
  • Every river, creek, and stream was swollen beyond normal measure due to the abnormally large snows this winter, and the rapidly warming
  • It was fun to find a couple of geocaches, but we learned to not always trust our GPS!
  • The history along the Custer Motorway presented us with a rich and enjoyable history of the area.  It was an unplanned, and unexpected delight to our trip.
  • 200+ photos from our digital camera can't possibly lie!

Last Updated -- 10 November 2012