Camping!

So last Labor Day weekend, we tried to camp at Battleground Lake State Park.  Well.... We did camp, but only for one night because of torrential rains.  We had rivers running through our campsite and a lake in our tent and no more dry clothes by lunchtime on Saturday. But this year, our Labor Day weekend camp-out was a success, Friday through Monday!

Jack loves to have his picture taken.  Here he is, right after we got to our campsite. He looked around for a good place to pose (this is the pole that you can use to keep food out of the reach of animals) and said, "Here Mom.  Take my picture!" He loves his Dora backpack...

Mike loved his new camping stove! This is the first night- hamburgers. Yum! He also successfully cooked eggs, pancakes and chilli (that I made at home and froze for our trip).

We also used the campfire quite a bit for cooking. Of course, we had s'mores but we also made hot dogs and biscuits on a stick!

Biscuits on a stick were a bit doughy, but were pretty good if you cooked them on a low flame for a long time.  Jonah's was mostly dough, since he thinks he can cook over smoke.

The kids and I thought this video was pretty funny.  Hope you enjoy it! Oh, at the beginning, Jack is saying, "Where's stick? Where's stick? Where's stick that I found?" And later, near the end of the video, he says, "Can you take a picture of me?" You should be able to understand the rest! :)

Campfire! from Julie Tull on Vimeo.

Our routine.  Either Mike or I wash the dishes, but the kids bring the dirty dishes down and the clean dishes back to the table. In this picture, Mike is washing the dishes (obviously!) and the kiddos are waiting for clean dishes.

Saturday afternoon was spent at the lake since it was warm enough to play in the water.
Mike and Paige loved playing on a log out in the water.  They would balance for a while and then jump off.

Mike, Paige and Jonah built this sandcastle while Jack and I sat nearby.

Here is Jack again posing for another picture.

And here is Jack sleeping on my lap at the beach.  He just laid down in my lap and fell asleep for an hour or so.  I loved this! I miss holding my sleeping babies.  They are so sweet!

We spent most of Sunday geocaching.  Here was one of their finds! Jack had to use the bathroom, so we missed out on finding this one.  But it was a good thing.  Mike, Paige and Jonah got entangled in a swarm of bees and Jonah (of course!) got stung- proving that he does in fact get stung by a bee every time he goes camping.  Poor kid.

Monday morning we found a few more caches in Battleground park.

Here is Jack again, posing.

And Mike, Paige and Jonah posing in front of their earth cache.  An earth cache is like a geocache in that you find it with the help of a GPS, but there isn't a box to open or anything.  It is a good way to find cool things, like this lava rock.  This earth cache had a little lesson with it, comparing the weight of lava rocks to regular rocks. Oh, if you didn't know, Battleground lake is in the crater of an old volcano.  The water is slightly warm (74 degrees F or so) because of the lava tubes underneath.

On the way home on Monday (Well, not exactly on the way home...) we went to the "Ape Cave." It is an underground lava tube from an eruption of Mt. St. Helens.  Really cool, really cold and really fun for us.  Jonah was soooo cute.  He was walking very slowly with his headlight pointing down, searching for mice, even dead ones.  He never found any... I thought the kids would be afraid with it being so dark in there, but they weren't. I think it was like being in a Scooby Doo movie for them.  They loved it! 

The kids were all sad to go home. I think that is proof of a great camping trip!

Quinault Rain Forest

This year we decided to go explore the Quinault rain forest in the Olympics for our annual hike.  The group was bigger this year. Zac and Jeff came along with two of Zac's brother in laws; Doug and Eldon, Eldon's son Hunter, and Jeff's dad Randy.  Unfortunately Ben and Greg couldn't make it, and I think after Rainier we scared Paul away.  Anyway it was a good group.  Unfortunately we never used my camera for any group shots, so I really only have pictures of the scenery.  We planned for about 40 miles with 4 days to hike, always leaving extra time for an easy day if needed. 

Eldon has a big family and therefore has an Expedition so we were all able to easily fit in one car with our gear and drive together.  We arrived to the ranger station close to mid day, got our pass, drove a little further and started our hike.  Instantly the scenery was beautiful.

The route that we chose went by the world's largest yellow cedar.  When we got there though, it was pretty disappointing. Apparently, yellow cedar's aren't as big as other world's largest trees, and this one was either dead or barely alive.  Oh well.  The hike was great getting up there, and the flies were huge and many there so we didn't want to stop for long anyway.

On of our options for the first night was the Three Lakes camp.  The area was nice, but it wasn't late when we got there, and everyone but Randy still had a lot of energy so we decided to continue on the last 4.5 miles and camp at Three Prune, where we would camp the second night also. 

As we continued we saw lots of great meadow's where we hoped maybe to spot a bear.  Everyone, or most everyone I think was really hoping to run into one, just to watch him.  Zac, I believe, wanted to wrestle one, or watch Ben do it, but as Ben wasn't there, it probably would have been me to get mauled.  Zac bought a suture kit before Rainier and is still dying to try it out.  Crazy..., but I kinda want to also.

The first night there were two other groups at the same campsite, we were tired and really didn't talk to them.  Only one group briefly who told us that our planned hike for the next day was mostly under the cover of trees and there was no places for pumping water so we should make sure to take enough.  Great information...

Day 1: 11.3 miles and ~4000 feet elevation gain

The second day we planned to head up to a peak called Kimta peak; elevation 5399 feet.  The hike was about 5.2 miles and we left the majority of our gear as we were camping at Three Prune again the second night.  The hike ended up being about 90% directly in the sun and there was plenty of streams and snow melts (forming small ponds) where you could pump water.  But in the end, it didn't matter, again the scenery was incredible and that was what was important.

During most of the day we hiked in basically two groups; Zac, Jeff, Hunter, and I and Eldon, Doug, and Randy.  Throughout the hike Doug would take on the role of solitary man though, didn't seem to want to go quite our pace out front, but also didn't want to hang back with Randy.  Anyway, after what felt like we had gone more than 5 miles we started to question the point in the distance that we thought was Kimta, especially as the trail started to drop away from this point and we continued to lose elevation.  At this point our group had split up a little more and it was now just Zac and I.  This is when we came up over a small hill and found ourselves face to face with a pretty big black bear.  He couldn't have been more than 20 feet away.  We stopped of course, and did what all good tourists do and started to locate our camera's to take some pictures.  The lighting wasn't great though and the bear didn't want to pose, so the pictures weren't that great.

The bear basically just looked at us for a minute and then decided he wanted nothing to do with us and turned and started down the trail the other way.  So we followed.  After a bit the bear stopped to go to the bathroom.  This I got a decent picture of...

After this he walked a little further and then finally decided he didn't want us following him anymore and took off the trail and pretty quickly disappeared into the brush.  It was amazing actually how quickly he just disappeared, really makes you appreciate how well they can hide if they want.

Anyway, we continued on for a while longer and after continuing to descend further and further finally got smart, stopped and pulled out our topo map to figure out where we where.  As it turned out the peak we were looking at wasn't Kimta peak at all.  Kimta peak was much less dramatic and we passed it about 2.5 miles before.  This made our day quite a bit longer.  There was another campsite, Lake Beauty, that was 5.2 miles more past Kimta peak.  We had actually talked a little about trying to go all the way there earlier in the day. This wasn't a popular plan with most at it would have made the total day 20.6 miles.  But once we realized we had already traveled half the extra distance there we really had to think more about this idea.  In the end we decided to turn back as we didn't know how far back the others were.  We ran into them only about 20 minutes back, but were still glad we turned as we were totally exposed to the sun and already starting to get tired.  After a couple stops to fill up water and a long hike back up and back down we all arrived back to our camp site a couple hours before dark.  I took this last picture on the way up because I liked the way the tree framed the view. Looking at it now though, I like the way it centers on the spot where we turned around for the day; in the middle of the large exposed clearing.  The peak in the distance is what we thought was Kimta peak; it wasn't.

As a side note, Julie and I had just watched Roots a couple weeks before this trip (a really great mini series if you haven't seen it) and during the entire day I was thinking "Kunta, Kunta Kinte," because of the similarity in name to Kimta peak. Anyway...

Day 2: 15.4 miles and ~4100 feet elevation gain

On the third day we had a pretty easy day planned.  We were going to hike all the way down to the north fork of the Quinault river and stay at a campsite right on the edge of the river.  It was about 11 miles but we lose about 2500 feet of net elevation along the way.  That morning before we left camp the fog was floating over the valley.  It looked really cool. 

Most of the morning we were again hiking in a more rain forest area, which I really loved.  I just can't get enough of how many shades of green you can see at once all together.  Truly beautiful, pictures don't do it justice.

We reached the campsite at only about three in the afternoon.  When we got there we immediately started talking about continuing on. Our car was only another 3 miles away and we could easily get home one night early.  The only potential problem was Randy was starting to get really tired and we thought he might be done for the day.  About 30 minutes later when Randy arrived we asked how he was doing and if we wanted to continue.  He didn't want to, but the idea of getting home early and eating Subway that night was as appealing to him as the rest of us, so we took another 30 minutes break and then continued on to the car.  We had perfect timing too, even though we were technically in a rain forest we had perfect weather the entire time (we seam to get really lucky every year and get perfect weather for these trips), but when we got to the car rain cloud started to move in.  It started to rain before we had even driven completely out of the Olympic National Park.  Perfect timing and Subway never tasted better...

Day 3: 13.45 miles and ~900 feet elevation gain

I have never (I can't believe this actually since I have lived most of my life in Washington) hiked in the Olympics before, but was truly taken back by the diversity of what we were able to see and we only covered a small amount of all the possibilities.  We will definitely be back to the Olympics again.  Add them to a list of hikes that is already longer than we will be able to do yearly hikes.  But oh'well, it is great to have some many choices and I don't think any of them will ever be a bad one.  All together this was a great trip.  Totally different from Rainier or the coast hike, but really cool all the same.  Let see what next year brings...

3 Day Total: 40.15 miles and ~9000 feet elevation gain