Camping: Monday

I am tired. I am sore. I've had a lot of fun. We started out Monday late, after a breakfast of cereal, packing up "the last few items" which took us until 2:00pm in the afternoon. Our biggest crisis had been that our previous packing crate, a 30 gallon monster, was too big to fit into the car with two children and the 26 gallon cooler. We lucked out that shastaw had given us some unused 18 gallon containers, and I quickly retrieved one and repacked the car with it. The few items that could not fit completely got packed around it. When we were done the car was fit to explode, and the tents and camp chairs were bungee'd very securely to the roof.

I took the wrong road and made the trip an hour longer than it needed to be, but eventually we made it up into the mountains. We were running low on gasoline and I had to stop at the one town, with the one gas station, for forty miles in either direction from Enumclaw and Yakima, that being Greenleaf, where they wanted gasoline for $2.769. We would learn, on the way out, that a week of rising oil prices had led to a weekend price of $2.999. I filled the tank anyway and bought a bag of beef jerky. Yummy!

The girls tolerated the trip very well, playing and singing. When we arrived at the campsite by the White River we discovered that the credit card machine was dead and they took cash or checks only. I had left my checkbook at home, and Omaha found she had only one check left. A disaster! We left an IOU with the camp host; I would drive into town the next day and get cash needed to make the trip possible.

We set up the tent and put out the pads and sleeping bags, and then we made a fire for dinner. We had a helpful but nosy neighbor who introduced himself as Doug and his wife as Beatrice. Her taste in literature, if the book in her hand was any clue, went to Triumphalist fantasy novels (pre-Rapture mythology that an outbreak of Evangelical Christianity will result in the vast majority of humanity becoming Christian). He was helpful in that he leant us his hatchet, as I had forgotten mine, and I needed it to split firewood. He was nosy in that he was fascinated with the radiant heat oven Omaha was experimenting with while we made hamburgers. He said "It [was] so nice to see a whole family, still together, everyone working and getting along so pleasantly." Mindful of his wife's reading, I made polite noises, pulled out of some Promise Keepers literature I had once read, to the effect that society didn't make it easy but we were determined to make it happen anyway. He nodded gravely with understanding.

The hamburgers were fabulous, and the "oven" worked quite well, toasting the fries. It was a delicious dinner. Afterwards, while we were cleaning up, I snatched the last of the fries off Omaha's plate and she looked at me. "You're like a raccoon!" she said.

The girls in their sleeping bags.
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We put the girls to bed in their tent, because by then it was very dark. They brushed their teeth and went to sleep after some healthy giggling. After an hour or so while Omaha and I read our books we went to bed. I could hear the river, very low as the snowpack last winter was very shallow, hissing and crashing less than a hundred yards away. Every once in a while I heard that curious thumping sound, a kind of negative pressure wave. The stars were beautiful.

Camping: Tuesday

Omaha reported sleeping poorly, so onto the list we added an inflatable camping pad and a blanket. We had given the spare blanket to the girls and Omaha said she felt cold last night. I awoke early and hurtled into town to pick up the cash we needed to pay off our IOU and get our supplies. The round-trip took three hours, mostly because there was construction on the road into Rainier National Park and the road was down to a half-lane. A single lane of a two-lane road, it was not just that traffic each way had to switch off, but we also had to wait for the asphalt trucks coming up the mountain. I didn't complain; the wait let me listen to another two chapters of Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnet.

When I got back I discovered that Omaha had already fed the girls a breakfast of breakfast bars and milk, and I had my own when I got back. Omaha and I teamed up to make PB&J sandwiches, snack bags of banana chips, raisins, peanuts, and dried pineapple, and filled all of our water bottles.

The girls on Glacier Basin trail.
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Then we went for our first hike: Glacier Basin and Emmons Moraine trails which led out of our campsite. The total length was seven miles. It was a beautiful hike that led up the edge of Eammons Glacier ridge. At first, the shady, deep forest kept us cool, and we refilled out water bottles from

A waterfall on Glacier Basin trail.
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falling waterfalls, using the Pur water filter Omaha and I had bought many years ago. Pur has gone out of the portable filter business but their design was bought by Katydin and improved, and is still the best portable filter for this kind of work. The water tasted delicious, like nothing you can get down in the city.

The trail followed the Interfork River, which we crossed to reach the Emmons Moraine trail. That was much more exposed, and we slathered ourselves with sunscreen before continuing up the mountainside. It got dusty and somewhere along the way we called a halt for lunch. A chipmunk entertained us with its constant running back and forth across the trail, hoping to find a dropped crumb when we left. We reached an ominous sign

Ominous sign
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that read "Warning: Maintained Trail Ends Here" and after a few minutes' more walking, we turned around. There was still a social trail, but we weren't going to try and press our luck. Instead, we went back down, crossed the log bridge that traversed the narrow Interfork River, and started hiking up to Glacier Basin.

We never made it. After drinking from the Interfork, the girls were refreshed, but we'd already done three miles and the girls were getting tired. Omaha and I had asked much of them this day, and they had walked like troopers, but enough was enough and we headed back down. We saw frogs, a snake, and in one open area a large number of butterflies flitting about.

One butterfly.
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Many rest stops later, we fell back into camp and all of us lay down for a nap. It was only around 3:00pm, but exhaustion was the order of the afternoon. Well, except for Kouryou-chan, who got up and played outside in the campground. A half-hour later, I rose, and Omaha and Yamaarashi-chan a half-hour after that.

After our nap, we walked across the White River, taking a

Narrow bridge over the White River
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scary narrow bridge and then up a small trail. We only went for about half an hour, but I have to wonder from where the heck these kids get all their energy.

When we got back, Omaha started a fire. She's much better at that than I am. I made a sausage marinara sauce and boiled rotini; it actually worked very well, but next time I'll know to bring ground beef instead as well as prepacked spices. Afterward, we cleaned up in a team: Omaha washed, Yamaarashi-chan rinsed, I dried, and Kouryou-chan put stuff away. We cooked marshmallows and the girls ran around making up games as they played until the dark fell on us. They went to bed without complaint. Omaha and I watched the stars for a little while, then went to bed ourselves.