Backpacking 2008, Part I

Inquiring minds may want to know about the backpacking trip I took last week with a group of family members from Husband's side.

Let me try it this way: I'll write two stories, and you decide which one you'd rather take home.

Story #1:

What a great backpacking trip! It started with a fun weekend family reunion at my sister-in-law's home in the woods near the foothills of the Cascades. I hadn't intended to go on the trip, but the family is so fun to be with, and they were so convincing, I threw together a pack and headed out with them on Monday for the 5-day trip. We parked at the trailhead and hiked up a canyon along a rushing river. Some family members joined the backpacking crowd for a day hike before heading home, making it an even larger and merrier group.

I had to cross and river on a single log, and I'm proud as punch to say that I navigated that, as well as other crossings, bravely and sturdily. (See the family watch me cross, above.) We hiked through various river and forest biomes, always with the music of the river nearby, until we reached Trout Lake, a little gem of a lake 600 feet above the elevation where we started.

You should see the way this family backpacks! If anyone knows how to do it with "coolness," they do. They dehydrate everything they're going to need for cooking, carry it in, and lay out meals fit for royalty. Every night we ate gourmet food: Thai food complete with peanut sauce and satay sticks the first night, Italian pasta and pesto the second night, North African food with a superb lentil-tomato soup the third night, and Greek food with hummus and stuffed grape leaves the fourth night.

On the second day we hiked up another 2000 feet in elevation, taking switchbacks by a gorgeous, long waterfall almost all the way up. We camped at Copper Lake, which had a lovely little set of campsites that accommodated the ten of us nicely. The view of the ring of snowy, craggy mountains around Copper Lake makes a stunning picture. And the river water (put through the backpackers' purifiers) was the sweetest-tasting water anywhere.

The area of Foss Lakes is peppered by lakes and waterfalls. From Copper Lake we did a couple of day hikes to other lakes in the Foss Lakes set: Malachite Lake, Little Heart Lake and Big Heart Lake (pictured here in a photo by my brother- in-law). Tiny wildflowers were blooming, and the scenery up over the pass to Big Heart Lake was a panorama of mountains, canyons, lakes and waterfalls. We took so many pictures that I ran out of storage space on my camera before the trip was over.

And there was so much to see: cute little chipmunks, grey-and-white jays, colorful lichen and fungi on rocks, frogs hiding in puddles and pools. We didn't see any bear or moose or wolves or anything scary. One morning we were treated to the sight of a chipmunk that had chewed his way into a used ziplock bag we'd brought up. He couldn't find his way out at first and was scrambling and rolling in the drollest manner as he tried to escape his bag and our laughter!

Best of all were the conversations. I don't think any of them were notably deep, but with a family hiking group like this--three physicists, an ObGyn doctor, a physical therapist, two educators, two engineers, and a kid just finishing high school--you know it had to be a rich time together as we cooked, cleaned up, tended the fire and hiked together.

We hiked down on Friday afternoon and celebrated the end of our trip by chowing down at a Mexican restaurant on the way back to my sister-in-law's home. I loved the trip and hope to go on another one of the family's yearly backpack trips. And next time I'll know how to prepare better, and will contribute one of those gourmet meals!