Thomas Canyon Trail

Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest


(map link)

This trail is found in a campground and parking for it is next to the fee collection station. There's a sign so you know. From there, you get to walk halfway around the circle to finally find the actual trailhead. There's no parking there unless you take a site. The only sign to identify it is "please stay on trail" but it's well established and hard to miss once on it.

00: sign partly into the trees
All that marks the Thomas Canyon Trail

03: much built trail
Steps seem to mark this certainly as built trail into Thomas Canyon

There's a lot of trails that access the creek early on. There's a nice swimming hole and some waterfalls, so no wonder, especially as the campers probably wander a bit.

04: hidden water falling off the rocks
The first waterfall is hard to get a look at and even harder to photograph

08: cascade to short drop
The second waterfall is quite a bit easier to see

09: cascade, drop, and pool
The third one is over a swimming hole

It's quite a pretty little creek in Thomas Canyon and there continued to be little trails that got close to it. I took advantage of a few of them.

10: circular holes in the creekbed
A lovely creek with all sorts of old potholes in its bed

11: trees on rocks
Big mountain mahogany

12: valley up the side
Hanging valley along the way

14: little waterfall with little water
Another little waterfall

I must have gotten a little too obsessed with being near the water, because the trail started to get hard to walk as it struggled upward. That's because I'd lost track of the real trail. I thought I'd climbed back up to it, but I hadn't. Eventually I pushed through enough to find the wide and easy track again and there were no hard bits on the way down.

17: bands of yellow at a step
The canyon comes to a step up through levels among bands of yellow

19: circle of end
The end of the canyon is in sight

20: hole in the rocks
That looks like a familiar arch, but it's probably not the back side of the one I was looking at on the way down the Ruby Crest

21: whole canyon
All the way around the canyon

There's old beaver ponds in the upper reaches, but most are empty now. I wonder why since there is water flowing in. The Forest Service topo says the trail abruptly ends at the wilderness boundary and OpenStreetMap only gives it a few more feet. I followed an obviously lesser trail a little further. It's possible someone makes tracks up toward Snow Lake Peak or maybe even Mount Fitzgerald sometimes. Not for me.

25: post beside a trail
Past a wilderness boundary most obviously marked by witness post for a section corner from 1927

26: headwall
Small trail continues beside Thomas Creek which has a faint waterfall up ahead (where the thin stream of water has turned the rocks dark)

I headed back down. Right back out of the wilderness, but the edge stays close to the east for no good reason.

28: simple sign
Ruby Mountains Wilderness is marked if you look hard enough

29: flats and slopes
Heading back to Lamoille Canyon

30: curves dropping down
Everything comes rather directly downhill around here

31: dropping off
Got some downhill to go

32: bright red bracts
A lovely paintbrush

33: pink flowers
Geraniums were all over the place and some quite numerous

There's a beaver pond off on the other side of the creek that I stopped by on the way down.

34: water with sticks at the edge
Along the dam of the beaver pond

35: bright yellow
Monkey flowers (still blooming!) were growing in the water seeping through the dam

Then on down the rest of the way. I took the other way around the campground loop, which is ever so slightly shorter. It was lucky because one of my fellow hikers popped up to point out a little mountain goat down by the water.

36: fluffy and white and bigger than a rabbit
Little mountain goat at the water

Thomas was a delightful little canyon to hike.


*Ruby Mountains 2022 photo album*




©2022 Valerie Norton
Written 16 Dec 2022


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