Camping: Wednesday

Our Wednesday breakfast was scrambled eggs with cheese. I would return home later to find that there's a much easier way than what Omaha did, but Omaha just cooked them on the stove and they were excellent that way. Waking was good today, not stiff at all. In fact, I was less stiff than I've felt on previous trips.

I tried the coffee that I'd brought. I had ground them before the trip and they tasted stale, even after a few days. How people bought tins of ground coffee in my parents' age befuddles me.

The hike of the day was to Clover Lake, 2.5 miles round trip, mostly down to begin with, meaning mostly up to the end, with a stop at Sunrise Lake. We walked through vast subalpine meadows buzzing with insects-- flies, beetles, but also huge butterflies and at one head of flowers so many bees the buzzing was audible yards away.

The girls at Clover Lake
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Clover lake was beautiful and sufficiently low above sea level that we were allowed to wade into it. The higher you go, the hardier to cold and thin atmosphere and hence the more fragile to other forces are the microecosystems of the mountain-- other forces including human tramping feet. The girls tried it and came back with chilled feet. The sun bore down like oven coils, so maybe that wasn't a bad thing. Much more sunscreen was applied.

As predicted, the hike back up was brutally hard to both children and adults, requiring a good many stops and one confontation with Kouryou-chan. She just would not drink "her" water. We made it into a game that she could steal from the adults' water bottles if we could drink from hers, and that kept her sufficiently hydrated to keep her cheerful all the way up the side of the mountain to Sunset Point and our car.

We drove all the way to Sunset proper, a huge flower-covered mountaintop meadowland with a tiny knicknack store, where we bought the girls candy bars, and a large ranger station where I bought a more up-to-date trail map and listened as one of the rangers paid a creepy amount of attention (I thought) to a 12-year-old girl dressed like America's next great starlet but with that awkward, unsure, full of "Ok!" voice that comes from getting too much attention.

We made it back to the campsite and tried to make beer-can chicken. It worked, mostly, and with buttered noodles and steamed broccoli it was all delicious and perfect. The girls went over to a campfire circle reserved for the rangers and listened to some nice old lady talk about volcanoes. Omaha and I read, and I made it about halfway through Charlie Stross's The Atrocity Archives before going to bed myself.

Camping: Thursday

Omaha and I awoke early and walked arm-in-arm to the campsite bathrooms. While she was in there, one of the other campers commented on her leapord-print pajamas and joked that she should be careful lest someone take a shot at her. We roused the girls and made coffee and hot cocoa, for it was chilly in the morning, low 50s, and then I made pancakes. That, I had done right, making a batch of the dry mix before we left and storing it in a ziploc bag before heading out. They were astoundingly good, and I'm not sure what I did right, but, sigh, they were just the thing we needed.

We relaxed this morning as that afternoon the hike was only going to be 2.7 miles, half what we'd done the previous two days, and I got through two more chapters of Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnet. Later, I made a lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and set up the shower warmer so that we could all take more than just a sponge bath.

The family on the way up to Silver Falls
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The hike today was the Silver Falls loop on the Ohanapekosh River, 1.4 miles up and 1.3 miles down on the opposite side of the river. We were warned that there were bees, but we never saw any. We drank from a small creek that fed the Ohanapekosh, again using the 1 micron water filter. The start included a nature trail with "self-guided" posts along a "hot springs" segment, and the girls were fascinated with just how hot the water was, that it came up from the hot lava part of the Earth. Omaha tried to stop and read from the nature trail pamphlet we'd picked up at the trailhead ranger station, but Kouryou-chan kept pulling ahead. we did get to read most of them.

We snacked and drank water along the way, and at one point I tried out GU, the ultimate endpoint in sports nutrition: 100 calories of raw high-use carbohydrates in a generic "berry" flavored concoction vaguely textured to resemble snot. Nevertheless, it works, and both girls were fascinated and had to try some. The swallow of water after "eating" some is necessary just to wash the stuff down. Yech. Omaha politely declined and Kouryou-chan thought it funny to pester her about it. "Please, try some! Please become one of the goo people!"

Silver Falls.
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The falls are beautiful and loud, and much taller than the picture seems to suggest. The hike back down was mostly downhill.

Dinner was chili, which was quite yummy. Afterward, we had marshmallows, and I made my way into more of The Atrocity Archive. I looked at myself in the mirror, and with four days of stubble and no suitable washing I look like Mountain Elf! That makes the girls giggle even more. There are clouds coming around the mountain, so Omaha suggests putting up the rain fly over the tent. The clouds had sufficiently obscured the sun that the solar shower had failed to heat up. Oh, well.

Aronud 2 in the morning Omaha and I awoke with the urgent need to head to the loo. As we walk, I recalled seeing a sign at the Silver Falls trailhead ranger station that the Perseids meteor shower was tonight, and look up in time to see three falling stars, the last one leaving a blazing trail that persists in my site for several seconds. Omaha only saw one, but the night is so obviously clear we take the railfly down so we can again see up through the netting on the tent's roof at the night sky.

Camping: Friday

Kouryou-chan cleans up around campsite.
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I awoke Friday an hour before everyone else, made myself the first batch of coffee all week that actually tasted good, and finished The Atrocity Archive. That poor book; it has a child's footprint, marshmallow stains, dust on the cover, and a slight scorching across the top. It's almost apropos. When Omaha and the girls awaken, we eat cereal and then break down the campsite.

Breaking down the campsite was an adventure. The girls helped me by folding the tent, putting away their clothes, and policing the campgrounds for fallen trash, of which there was surprisingly little. I packed the roof of the car with more stuff than we left with, but it all sat quite nicely and when webbed into place is going nowhere. Omaha directed the packing of the back of the car, and soon we were ready to go.

We drove up to Tipsoo Lake, ten miles northeast of the campsite, and had our lunches of tuna or PB&J,

The girls at Tipsoo Lake
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and then we were off up the trail to Nachez Peak.

Nachez Peak was odd in that it travered from the federal park to a federal forest, so at two points along the trail we passed a tree with all sorts of dire warnings about what you're not allowed to do in a park on one side, and all sorts of dire warnings about what you're not allowed to do in a forest on the other. This trail was middling-length, about 3.5 miles, but the first part was almost entirely up, and Kouryou-chan had chosen not to wear her hiking boots but instead her Dora the Explorer sneakers, which didn't have the traction needed. She kept slipping and sliding and at one point bonked her knee quite painfully. I had to weild the band-aids and BZK.

At one point, we were passed by another family and the young girl of their group was singing a campfire song and our girls just started singing along so naturally and instinctively it was disturbing. "You are now one with the collective," I intoned, making Omaha laugh. We were slathered in sunscreen because this trail was high and almost entirely exposed. It had views across vast flowery meadows, and when we got to a lookout point along a cliff the girls had a giggle experimenting with echos off a sheer mountain face a half mile or so away. We reached an unnamed lake and the girls again waded in to cool their feet

Elf on Nachez Peak. Photo by Kouryou-chan.
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and Kouryou-chan got the camera and took pictures. Man, I look grungy.

We made it to the peak, where I shared more GU with Kouryou-chan. Yamaarashi-chan declined, saying she didn't like the texture at all. Smart girl. You don't eat that stuff for the texture. We passed some people on the way down, and Kouryou-chan's skidding and halting became a real problem. She fell once more, re-opening a scab on her knee and making her want to give up and be carried down the mountain.

Yamaarashi-chan saved us all by singing YMCA camp songs, some cute like "Dandy Bear," and some gruesome like "Baby Shark," but all of them with call-and-response or sing-along portions on which Kouryou-chan joined in, and soon she forgot her ouches and the soreness in her calves and the two marched on together. Perfect sisters in so many ways.

Yamaarashi-chan on Nachez Peak
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She really was the hero of the day and helped us make it back to Tipsoo Lake in one piece.

We drove home. I actually listened to Omaha's advice this time (despite strong evidence that men cannot actually hear women's voices clearly) and we were soon back in familiar territory.

Grungy and disgusting as we were, we went to the Claimjumper. Yamaarashi-chan asked "What kind of restaurant is this?" I told it her it was a meat restaurant. "No, I mean, is it Chinese, Japanese, French..." I said, "It's meat, honey. Really." And so it is. Sadly, though, the meat was the least part of the meal for me; the charbroiled asparagus and blue cheese wedge were much more tasty than than ribs.

We got home and immediately dunked the kids into the bath. While we had been gone a new bottle of MOP Kid's Shampoo had arrived in the mail, and we double-dipped their hair and made sure they scrubbed themselves and when they were done we could not see the bottom of the bathtub. Then it was Omaha's and my turn, and we went to work on ourselves. Afterward, everyone got moisturizer for hands, feet, and face, and checked for sunburns. The only one seemed to be on the back of my neck-- all in all, a good record, considering.

We put the food and perishables away, dumped a ton of things into the laundry queue, and went to bed. Oh, it was so nice to sleep in my own, clean bed. I'd let the mattress air out all week, and that with the fresh sheets led to the most delightful and solid sleep I'd had in months.