Up at 5:00 am - best night’s sleep of the trek so far.  Rolled over and caught another half hour, amazingly enough.  Up at 5:40, 36 degrees.  Did the wakeup routine at 6:00.  Neil not feeling too well, but said he was OK (might be the altitude; we’re over 10,000 feet here).  Mike, Hugh, Rick and I handled the bear-bags.  As I headed down to the bear-bags (about 2 minutes ahead of the others), I heard an elk calling down the draw - but I couldn’t see him, and that was his only call.  Fairly leisurely packup this morning.  Luke’s boot look good, but the trail will tell of course.  Another 9 1/2 miles today, but most of it is at very high altitude.  Just as we were leaving, I had a sudden onset of G.I. upset - guess I drank too much cold water too fast while camelling up.  Let most of the Crew go while I completed an urgent latrine call.  Got going 10 minutes after the rest of crew, with Matt, Chris and Rick.  A stiff uphill to start, still nicely wooded however.  At a fork in the trail (Moss Lake Trail to the left, Bears Ears Trail to the right), the rest of the guys over-marked the correct way (Bear’s Ears) with an arrow of rocks, a bandanna, and a cairn - I think we got it!

We caught the rest of the Crew just after they stopped for breakfast, a nice spot on the requisite sun-lit rocks overlooking the valley and back towards Valentine Lake.  Fruit Newtons, raisins, mueslix cereal, with Pilot crackers and gorp for trail snacks.  Two sub-groups from the midwestern crew passed as we were finishing up, and we soon followed.  Unfortunately, we then got ourselves disoriented - a myriad of silly mistakes:  getting fooled by a false summit, not orienting the map, and misreading the terrain.  I headed up the hill on the main trail, looking for the pass and the Lizard Head Trail (over Windy Mountain), but I stopped 5 minutes too soon.  We ended up crossing the valley on a faint trail (*not* the Lizard Head Trail), and ended up on a ridge overlooking Valentine Lake and Washakie Pass before we finally got it figured out.  Back across to the Bears Ears Trail again.  By the time we got back to where we first got disoriented, we had lost 2 1/2 hours and a liter of water each.  Not surprisingly, everyone was pretty aggravated, but no real harm done.

Lesson learned, we headed back up to the actual pass, arriving at 11:45 am, and stopped for lunch (right up against a sunlit rock face to our left, which got us out of the wind).  Still pretty windy and distinctly nippy; about 11,500 feet here.  Saw the last 4 members of the midwestern crew hiking on the Lizard Head Trail on the high ridge to our right - so at least now we had our actual trail confirmed (and obviously, it helps to have been here before, like they have).  We saddled up at 12:15, and quickly reached the actual trail intersect.  Ted and Mark headed straight to see if there was any view on the other side of the saddle (yes, but not much - just a high altitude bench with a broken ridge (Mount Chauvenet) at the far end).  I took a photo of Al at the trail sign (there was a large elk backbone skeleton sitting at the base of the sign).  Right turn on the Lizard Head Trail, and a steep uphill past Cathedral rock.  Not surprisingly, Windy Mountain was indeed very windy - there was no tree cover whatsoever, and the trail was completely exposed.  Plus we were feeling some altitude effects too (we were just under 12,000 feet in a few sections here).  Great views back towards Washakie Pass and the rest of range (Buffalo Head was directly west).  Took multiple crew photos with some spectacular backdrops.

Eventually, we took a sweeping left turn, crested a mini-pass (with a trail marker listing 11,820 feet, the highest point on the hike), and caught our first view of the Cirque of the Towers.  Spectacular!  A yellow-bellied marmot watched us suspiciously from a nearby rock pile.  Mark took a few Crew photos, and we headed down the ridge.  As we noted on the stretch after Washakie Pass yesterday, the trail was obvious in some stretches but cairn-to-cairn in others.  "Big Sky" country - felt like you were walking on top of the world.  During one water break, we took a few minutes to help Luke with a splinter.  Passed a young couple from Wisconsin, going the other way, then (much later) two women from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota (they had a very long way to go with not a lot of hours left in the day; I gave them a quiet warning, but they didn’t seem concerned).  Finally got to the end of Windy Mountain, with a great view of the Cirque valley laid out in front of us.

Very steep and difficult downhill from 3:00 – 4:15.  [Photos: 1, 2]  Some nice flowers in various spots alongside the trail, but that was about the only nice thing about it.  Even using my walking stick, I slipped and semi-fell.  Then Ted fell and cut a knee, fortunately not too badly.  Mike slipped multiple times, but managed to remain upright and uninjured.  Water was a bit of a problem (breakfast was many hours ago at this point); we shared around as people started to run out.  Passed the trail intersection to either Bear Lake or an un-named companion lake next to Bear, and were soon into a much nicer forest, having many trees with oddly twisted trunks.  Took the North Fork Trail to the Lizard Head Meadows area.  Passed the midwestern group, already set up in their camp.  We found a fairly nice place to the right of the trail about halfway up the meadows, but Ted and Hugh talked us out of that one in favor of another site about 200 yards further down, that had a bit more open space for tenting.  Elevation 10,020 feet, so we have dropped 1800 feet from the mini-pass on Windy Mountain.  There was a small herd of horses in the meadow between our camp and the stream, being watched over by two wranglers and a dog.  Oddly, the horses were not only hobbled, but also had very large (and noisy) bear bells, and we had a distant musical chorus for the rest of our stay.  Walking out into the meadow gave a real feel for the "Cirque," with huge gray spires reaching up all around us (at least half a dozen major peaks, ranging from 12,000 to just over 13,000 feet in elevation).  This is considered to be one of the crown jewels of the Wind River Range, and it was easy to see why.  Mitchell Peak (our intended climb the next day) was right across the meadow from our campsite.  It looked doable but was clearly going to be no picnic.

We went ahead and set up camp, with the tents dotted here and there among the trees.  Each tree and even each shrub seemed to have its own copious load of dead branches attached, somewhat complicating setup.  This was probably the most dangerous area with respect to fire hazard that we had camped in so far - in fact, it may have been the most dangerous fire risk area I had ever camped in, and it was easy to see how a forest fire could easily get out of control here.  Real care needed.  Hugh and Thomas handled dinner and cleanup tonight - everyone else went ahead and cleaned clothes (and ourselves) at another conveniently adjacent stream.  Chris set up the bear-bags.  Dinner at 6:30 - black bean soup, chicken TVP with corn and cheese, Stove-Top stuffing, and bug juice (where did Ted come up with these recipes).  Dessert was a special concoction of the now dreaded dehydrated apples cooked with sugar and cinnamon.  Too much food - turned out to be our first meal of the trek with leftovers (we bagged it up for carryout).  Discussed Mitchell Peak as we finished up dinner - I warned our more gung-ho climbers not to "sell" the climb to the guys who were reluctant (as they had already been trying to do).  After dinner, Chris had a fox run right by him during his "constitutional."

Al, Matt and I headed back out into the meadow to scan and critically appraise Mitchell Peak.  Todd, Luke, Charles, and Chris joined us a few minutes later, so we had our whole climbing crew there.  Talked over the necessary equipment, clothing, and expected route (up the draw about 2/3rd’s the way up to the saddle, then cut right to take one of two promising ascent routes to the actual peak).  We couldn’t see the last stretch from below, but Al’s guidebook offered assurance that it was scalable.  But as I warned the guys, it ain’t gettin’ up a steep climb that’s the hard part, it’s coming back down - so we could get 90 percent of the way, and be forced to turn around.  Bear bags at 8:15, and bed at 8:30 [Picture of the Cirque of the Towers at Sunset]; the mosquitoes came out in force again as dusk came on and the breeze faded.  Wrote diary in the tent until about 9:15, and crashed.