An excellent hike to a beautiful alpine meadow, minimal rain on the return.
We set out a little before 10 with a short grunt climb up to Elbow Pass and Lake and then the road down through Desolation Flats. What we though might be the trail to Piper Creek turned out to be the side trail to a beautiful waterfall featured in other rambler trip reports. Peter kept us on track when he spotted the trail turnoff a little while later. The trail takes you down to the Elbow River crossing which was accomplished in several ways by our large group.

On the other side we caught up with another group (of 7) also heading up to Piper Pass. The good trail continues across Piper Creek and then up into Piper valley between Tombstone and Elpoca Mtns. The trail does seem to wend it's way quite a bit south and east of a direct line from Elbow Lake area to the meadows of the valley. There is certainly a much shorter route but it would involve significant bushwhacking. It was around noon before we finally broke out of the trees and gained the fantastic alpine meadows. We had a first lunch there before proceding to the pass.

Several Ramblers got is a little bit of scrambling by ascending the ridge to the east of the pass.

Sheep were spotted on the meadows below Mt Schlee.

And I'm not sure where Bill and Kathy spotted this monster.

As we got back down to the tree line, we started to hear thunder. For the rest of the way it seemed to roll all around the surrounding peaks but never really affected us. Once we were down in Desolation Flats we had some rain and donned jackets for a short while. By the time we were back at the cars, it was nice and sunny again, but we could see that Pocaterra Ridge had gotten significant hail. We were back at the cars at around 5:30.
Many thanks to Christine, Jeannette, Kathy (photos), Nancy, Shirley, Aldis, Bill (photo), David, Jim, Peter, Peter, and Stan (with Honey), Carl (C/S/P).