Camping Day Three: Snow, Suffering and Predation

Mt. Adams

Breakfast the next morning was oatmeal, which I cooked over the camp stove. We spent a lazy morning cleaning up and playing more Frisbee, made PB&J sandwiches for lunch, and then headed out onto the Cultus Creek Trail.

It was a beautiful trail but brutially difficult, uphill at a "strenuous" angle all of the way.q It was only three miles or so, but entirely like climbing stairs . Above 4500' we encountered snow. A lot of snow. In late July. The girls had a lot of fun playing in it, making snowmen, and throwing snowballs.

We reached the trail intersection, after much whining from Kouryou-chan about how hard it was until the snow. We met a fisherman coming back from another trail to Wood Lake. He said if we wanted to find the lake, it was "that way," but "A bit of a slog." The girls ran off into the woods to find it, at one point crossing over what looked like an empty meadow but was, in fact, a frozen-over pond. A close examination showed the ice wasn't all that thick; they were lucky not to have fallen through. A beautiful, but dangerous, wintry wonderland.

Snow!

Getting down through the snowfields was a challenge. Omaha fell and slid about 20 feet. The girls kept running off without us, and we finally had to rein them in and tell them to stay in sight at all times.

At one point down the trail, I stopped to photograph a flower I'd never seen before. It was a big bulb of many little white blossoms. Looking closely, I could see odd off-white spherical discolorations within the flower that turned out to be tiny spiders. A bee landed on the bulb next to one of the biggest spiders, which was still barely the size of a pea, and began supping. The spider lunged, there was a sharp, high-pitched BZZZZzzzz.... which sadly died away in pitch and volume, and then all was once again still except for the spider's slowly throbbing abdomen as it exsanguinated the bee. A super-cool moment, something normally recorded only by nature photographers, and I got to see it in real time.

Impending Doom!

Quiet Aftermath!

If you look closely at the top of each photo, in the first you can see the bee, alive, and that slightly yellowish orb to the left is the spider. In the second, the spider is under the just-killed bee, eating it. These photos are about four seconds apart.

We came down off the mountain and trudged back to camp. I said it was like climbing stairs. When we got back to camp, my pedometer indicated that by the end of the day we had climbed over 200 flights!

Deer in our campsite

I made the girls cook hamburgers for dinner while Omaha took a nap. While we were eating, a deer walked right through our campsite, along the side trail that led to the camp stream. I barely managed to get my camera out as she reached the main road and trotted into the meadow across from it, and it was too dark for the autofocus to work correctly. Sorry about that.

We played an epic round of Quiddler. For the seven-card round I came up with two words, but being the silly nerd that I am, I had to put down with a flourish, and in my best movie trailer voice said, "By day, he's an ordinary man. But by night, he's soft, chewy and has long-lasting flaver. He's Weregum." Well, it was "were" and "gum," but the girls, exhausted from the hike, completely broke up laughing.

Camping, Day 4: Stranded, Cold, and Tired

Girls at natural bridges

Ever year whe put about 20 pounds of dry ice at the bottom of the cooler, and it usually lasts about six days before it melts completely. It keeps the food cold in a stratified way-- refrigerator up top, deep freeze at the bottom. This year, I must have done something wrong because the freeze zone was deeper than previous years; the eggs froze and cracked. Did you know that frozen egg yolks harden much like boiled ones?

With much stirring, I was able to break it all up enough to make really delicious pancakes. We ran out of water, so we had to drive to the nearest campsite or ranger station for more.

Natural Bridge

The car's battery was dead. I wouldn't have thought that using just the dome lamps, for just a few hours, could have done that, but apparently they did. Maybe the battery's old? I got a jump from some hikers who'd come up to do the trail we'd done yesterday, and we fetched water.

Omaha wasn't feeling well, so we left her to nap while the girls and I went to do the local Natural Bridges and Ice Caves touristy places. Natural Bridges is a half-mile long lava tube, mostly collapsed but for two natural arches crossing over 18-foot deep gaps. We walked the length, but the girls weren't impressed at all.

Grizzled Old Elf

The ice caves, on the other hand, were super-cool. Freezing inside, with ice everywhere. The entrance is a hole into the earth about 12 feet in diameter with a wooden staircase leading down; the cave is an uncollapsed lava tube that goes off in both directions. To the south is a short space to "the gallery," which is completely closed off; ice is present here all year long. Unfortunately, while getting there, we discovered that there's a puddle about 14 inches deep and four feet wide covering the whole floor of the cave. The puddle is slush-- and in the dark looks just like ice. All three of us plunged right into it. Kouryou-chan backed out, but Storm and I trudged across to see the Ice Gallery, which was very pretty.

The other half is about a quarter-mile of cave with much less ice, at the end of which is an opening about three feet high. The outside wind blowing through is what keeps the ice down in there. Dull gray but sharp-edged boulders are everywhere, and climbing over them is a challenge, but we made it out. The voices of the family in front of us faded out. "Well," I said, "Either they got out, or they were eaten." Kouryou-chan did not think that was funny.

Ice Cave Stalagmite

Ice Cave Stalagmites Collection

Luke, I am your dinner

Back at the camp, we made beercan chicken. We still have the entire campsite to ourselves. Depsite warnings from every quarter that "mosquitos are bad," they weren't.

After dinner, rounds of Uno, more S'mores.

Around midnight, drumming started up somewhere to the north of us, far away, but loud enough to be heard clearly. I slept well, but Omaha complained she was cold no matter how ferociously we snuggled.