Man Camping

It had been a long time since we have had a father and son camping trip. Jen said she was glad to get me out of town so she could spend some quality time with her mother. We will probably have to make this a more frequent occurrence. Hopefully next time Joe can get the time off too. Captions are under the pictures which were all taken on Daniel's camera.

 The first day Dad, Edwin, Richard and David woke up in Idaho and Ben and Daniel woke up in Colorado. Dad pulled his jeep up to the front porch to load the backpacks. Jennifer said something like, "I'm a little worried about your four day trip if you have to pull up to the front porch to load your pack and still expect to hike up to the lake." This is the view from the road about 10 or 15 miles from the trailhead near where the roads from Colorado and Idaho met.

We loaded up all our gear at the Big Sandy trailhead and headed up the trail about six miles.

We set up our basecamp on the far side of Big Sandy lake the first night just about dusk. We were supposed to stay a couple hundred feet away from the lake and away from the trail. This is the view from the little meadow by where we camped. We could see a small waterfall and a spectacular view of the mountains around us.

That first night we had a full moon. I had a little trouble sleeping through all that brightness. Plus I found out my sleeping bag isn't rated for freezing temperatures. I woke up at sunrise and decided to go fishing down  to the lake. I caught around ten or eleven fish and decided I better go back to camp in case everybody else was looking for me. I took three fish back to camp and found out I should have stayed fishing at the lake because everybody else was still asleep.

After breakfast we headed out on a day hike to a couple of nearby lakes. We found that the best fishing during the daytime wasn't in the lakes, it was in the small streams that run between the lakes. The water was so clear you could see the fish go for your lure or fly. There was more than one person who got so excited when it was time to set the hook that they pulled the hook away before the fish could get it. I also occasionally saw some trout fly. I'm not mentioning any names, but some people got excited enough to yank the fish clear out of the water so that it landed on the bank behind them.

Here's David with the biggest fish of the whole trip. A beautiful cutthroat trout. We noticed this guy hanging beneath a big rock. I think everybody tried their hand at catching him. We were giving up and getting ready to move on when David gave it one last try and got him. That night we went down to the lake at dusk and had quite a haul of fish.

The next morning we all got up at dawn to head down to the lake again. You can see the pink tint to the sky and the nearly full moon.

The fishing was spectacular. We all caught plenty.

We kept a few of them to eat for breakfast and headed back to camp.

The most popular sight in the area is the cirque of the towers. We decided to go have a look. It was quite a hike up and back down. But we made it.

At the top of Jackass pass we stopped for a bit of a rest and some lunch. I used up a lot of calories to get up there, but I don't think I replaced all of them. I was still hungry after our lunch of ramen. It's a good thing we had plenty of other snacks. Some of my favorites included the dried mangos and the pineapple licorice.

On the way back down from the pass we took a little different route past one of the lakes. We ended up having to climb over a bunch of boulders. Daniel got a great shot of Ben. That night we had a birthday party for Richard. The reconstituted buffalo chicken wraps from mountain house company are pretty good, but don't look anything like the picture on the package. The bright orange food was tasty and went well with our chocolate and coconut cream birthday tarts for dessert.

The next morning we got up and broke camp to start the hike back to civilization.

The lake decided to show us some beautiful views to say goodbye. I think between the six of us we caught between 200 and 300 fish, a good share of them out of Big Sandy lake. And thats saying something because we only bought a license for the second and third days of our trip, more than 100 fish per day.

We were pretty tuckered out on the hike down. I love this picture of everybody taking the weight off their backs. At the trailhead we saw some other people getting ready to head out, including a herd of pack goats.