Jackpot Lake

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