I planned to hike in the Dayton Peak area but I saw a logging truck come out of the area, so I knew there were active logging operations. I did not want to hike near that, so I had to come up with something different to do.
Nothing really appealed so I decided to just head towards Matlock and walk down one of the many logging roads in the area. I don't have a car that will get me to the snowy hikes on the actual trails at the moment.
I picked a road just past Lake Nahwatzel and started hiking with no particular goal in mind. I saw that I was near Bingham Creek, so it might be fun to explore that. After a bit of wandering around and looking at my GPS map I saw that Jackpot lake was only a few miles away. I've never been to Jackpot Lake but I have noticed it on the maps before and always wanted to see it.
Jackpot lake became my goal for the day. It was a four mile hike up snowy logging roads with a mostly accurate map. My map is very old but most of the roads and the trail and rail lines on it still exist to a certain extent. The rail line I tired to follow had been pulled up and trails on my map were often actual roads now. There were also a lot of newer roads that were not on my map.
The lake was nicer than I expected it to be, but I do think it might be just a mud-hole in the summer.
I'm going to go back to this lake but next time I will start at the Sandy Beaches access point at Lake Nahwatzel.
This was a nice hike even though it was unplanned. It was lucky that I hit upon a nice destination, not all logging roads have nice lakes.
8 miles with 200 feet elevation gain
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