elfs | 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
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

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.