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.

All that marks the Thomas Canyon 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.

The first waterfall is hard to get a look at and even harder to photograph

The second waterfall is quite a bit easier to see

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.

A lovely creek with all sorts of old potholes in its bed

Big mountain mahogany

Hanging valley along the way

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.

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

The end of the canyon is in sight

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

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.

Past a wilderness boundary most obviously marked by witness post for a section corner from 1927

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.

Ruby Mountains Wilderness is marked if you look hard enough

Heading back to Lamoille Canyon

Everything comes rather directly downhill around here

Got some downhill to go

A lovely paintbrush

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.

Along the dam of the beaver pond

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.

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