Elf Sternberg

In the morning, Omaha baked biscuits in a reflector oven, and for the first time since we bought the thing the reflector oven seemed to work decently well. We cooked the last of the bacon and the eggs, dug some cheese out of the freezer, and made breakfast sandwiches.

The birds have discovered that breakfast is when the most food is around. They assault the campsite in squads.

The girls were amazing when it came to breaking down the campsite. It took less than two hours.

When the girls and I had visited the Ice Caves, Omaha hadn't been feeling well and decided to stay back at the camp. Since we were going to be passing it on the way out, now she wanted the opportunity to see and experience it herself. The girls had seen it, and decided to stay in the car and read instead.

Omaha also decided that she wanted to see the ice gallery at the back of the cave. Now, the last time I tried that, the girls and I had discovered that a foot-deep, twelve-foot wide pond of icy slush lay between the entrance and the gallery. Rather than get her shoes wet, Omaha spotted a "shelf" about eight feet above the pond, and basically played spiderwoman to crawl all the way to the gallery opening. The photo is pretty amazing for the low-light feature.

There was another couple there, delightful people, all hipsterish. They were both amused and pleased when they realized that I was spelunking in a kilt.

We also did the Natural Bridges, and had more fun crawling down into the fallen lava tube. There was a cave at the end of it, too, but we didn't bring flashlights.

We drove into the little town, filled the car with gas and ourselves with coffee and smoothies, and drove home.

Omaha wants to buy a barn and put "THOR!" on its side to counter all the "Jesus!" barns we passed on the way through the rural vallies of southwestern Washington. We passed innumerable signs, and apparently the most popular now is "Prepare To Meet Thy God!", a message that is more than a little intimidating.

Obama hatred is ripe in the countryside. We passed one barn with "America's #1 Enemy: Change," which put me in mind of Virginia Postrel's observation that since the 1970 most elections have been a battle between the future and it's enemies. As we drove into civilizations, my phone suddenly woke up and tweeted like mad as messages poured in. The virtual world had returned.

The girls have been obsessing about Soul Eater, and Omaha and I were well and truly sick of it by the time the trip was over. We were little more than an hour out of Seattle when Omaha put her foot down and told the girls to shut up and be absolutely silent for 30 minutes. They made it 14 the first time. And then Kouryou-chan passed us this message on the second try.

We got into Seattle and drove to The Keg. They were out of prime rib! Nooooooooo!

We got home, took hot showers, and poured ourselves into bed. I was grateful to be home-- and grateful I'd changed the sheets before I left, so when I got home it was a clean body in a clean bed. That was a fun trip, but now it was time to get back to life.

Today was our longest hike of the trip.

We made a breakfast of bacon, scrambled eggs with cheese, and toast. The bacon grease made a spectacular fireball when it poured onto the grill, but nobody was hurt by it. Fun!

We geared up to take a day hike up to Cultus Lake, found on the eastern face of Mount Bird, along a trail called Indian Heaven. It seemed odd to me that the Cultus Creek Trail didn't go to Cultus Lake.

The trail was much easier than the Cultus Creek trail two days prior, and we ascended quickly up to the top of the ridge. It was the same elevation, but a longer hike, about four miles. My feet, in clean dry socks, were immediately soaked through by my shoes, still-wet from the ice-caves. I wore them anyway; the ankle supports had already saved me multiple times. We left the girls' shoes in an open meadow across from our campsite, and they wore sports sandals instead on the trail up.

The hike was fun and there was snow again. We reached Cultus Lake and decided to detour to Deep Lake, nearby. The girls and I sat and had lunch in a small glade next to Deep Lake while Omaha walked as far around Deep Lake as she possibly could, but that wasn't all the way around. The lunch was a mix of everything we had left, some PB&J, some chicken salad, some roast beast. After those lakes, we pushed on to Clear Lake, at the end of which we reached the Pacific Crest Trail.

According to two hikers we'd met on the trail, the Pacific Crest Trail was mostly flat, easy up-and-down all the way to the Cultus Creek Trailhead, and from there we could descend the same trails we'd done two days prior-- which meant the girls could enjoy the same snowfields they'd played in two days prior. With that, we impulsively decided to give it a shot.

The walk was fairly smooth, with lots of snowfields on either side of the trail but only a little bit on the trail. We reached the Cultus Creek trail and again decided to do something on impulse-- find Wood Lake. Instead, after slogging through wet snow for over a mile, we were lost. We never found the lake, we have no idea how far off the trail we were, as it was buried under two to three feet of snow, and we were lost in the woods. We followed our own foot trails back, since the GPS decided that it was too mountainous to find satellites anymore, and got to the trail marker for Cultus Creek Trail.

We descended back to the campsite. Many of the snowpacks we'd seen two days prior had receeded by up to half. It became clear to us why we had been warned about mosquitos: when the snow melts it leaves thousands of perfect breeding ponds. But we were lucky-- it hadn't melted yet. Three days after this day, this place was going to be murder-- and we would be gone.

Dinner was a calico beef & bean mix. And after hiking 12 miles, 24892 steps, or the equivalent of 187 flights of stairs (so says the pedometer), it was delicious. We tried to make kettle corn using bacon grease, but it didn't work-- the fire wasn't hot enough and slow roasted the corn rather than steaming and popping it.

I figured out the best way to program the GPS is to use the "approximate location," tell it "Oregon" in this case, and once it's found you with the list of satellites it knows it can see in Oregon, tell it to use your current location.

We went to bed immediately. We were all too tired to play any games.

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.

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.



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!

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.

Our first day out camping started with a hectic scramble to finish packing the car, buying the dry ice for the cooler, and making sure we had absolutely everything we needed to make this a successful trip. Our destination was the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, specifically the Indian Heaven region. We headed out just around lunchtime, so our first stop was Arby's.

The drive out into rural Washington is a reminder of just how tiny our little enclave is. Within an hour of leaving our city, we were deep into Obama-hatred country. Hand-made bumper stickers informed me that "Obama is the start of tyranny" and "A broke nation can't afford healthcare." (Note: The USA is not broke. Other countries are paying the USA to store their money here; they wouldn't do that if they thought our financial system was about to go ass-up.) Everywhere I saw copies of the Ten Commandments; one, in a general store, had a note saying, "Post this everywhere to drive liberals nuts." I don't see why: it's your property, you can say whatever you want on it.

Gifford Pinchot is a USDA-managed national forest, and the roads there aren't necessarily ideal for the casual visitor. I was glad we had the Forestor this year, as it seemed much more sure-footed than the Escort, although maybe that's just memory playing tricks. The car handled well and we got decent mileage even with the clamshell on the roof. The girls have been obsessed recently with the anime Soul Eater, and would not shut up about it.

As we took to the gravel roads, we spotted a deer and a fox along the way. The fox looked rangy and thin, but the deer was sleek and full. As we drove up Forest Road 24, we saw a fascinating sign, and would later learn much more about the "Handshake Agreement of 1932." Basically, this region was a food source for local Indians, and the agreement left it that way, allocating most of the local berry-growing terrain to the natives.

We reached Cultus Creek around dusk and settled into the task of setting up tents and making dinner. This enormous beetle, about the size of my hand, kept flittering around like we'd disturbed his rest or something, but eventually he left.

We managed a fire with wood the previous occupants had left behind. There wasn't much, but it was enough to make pizza loaf-- a big loaf of french bread, carved open lengthwise and filled with pizza cheese and sauce, wrapped in foil and tossed into the fire for 20 minutes or so. It was quite delicious. We had marshmallows for dessert, roasted in the fire, and competed to see who could make his or hers bloat the most from internal steaming without catching fire or falling into the flames.

I bought a headlamp before leaving. It's absolutely one of the best uses of LED technology yet, giving me a pool of light, broad or narrow depending on the setting, wherever I turned my head.

I have been reading Theodore Rex, the second book in Edmund Morris's Roosevelt trilogy. It deals with 1901-1908, the period of Roosevelt's presidency, and there's a lot of great material in there. Since I have a (admittedly stalled) fin de siecle novel in my collection, I've been mining it for references.

The girls played Frisbee in the dark.

The mosquitos were thick that night. I can't imagine what it must have been like before the invention of DEET.

We went to bed, road-tired after the long day. Although the weather had been warm, sunny and mild, temperatures at night dropped to the mid-40s. I had brought warm nightclothes, but Omaha's house pajamas didn't cut it, and she reported being cold all night long.

Things forgotten: Omaha's water bottle. The adults' breakfast cereal. Plain sugar for tea and coffee. The large grill. The second washbucket.