Back in 2015, with Oakley being only a few months old, I craved some adventure. For some reason Angela wasn’t able to come, so Oakley and I headed out to the Okanagan to a place called Eagle lake. This place really was the middle of nowhere - as I discovered painfully…
2015-03-18
We had a very long drive to get out to Eagle lake - almost 5 hours. I left on Friday morning and we didn’t end up getting to the trailhead until afternoon. The final stretch of road up to the trailhead was covered in snow - which did not bode well for our hike - but we went ahead anyway.
I ended up parking on the road right before the parking lot because of all the snow. I packed up all the stuff and we headed out. The hike was very snowy - no ground in sight. It was firm though, so we actually did pretty well for a few miles.
Most of the way, the trail had a strong slope down to the left and everytime a little bit of snow would break free and slide down the hill - Oakley went after it. This went on for probably an hour - puppy energy! After an hour though, she was completely smoked - puppy stamina!
After 2 or so miles, it became obvious that we weren’t going to make it the 6 miles to the lake. About 2 miles in, we called it and setup camp.
After camp was setup, I cooked dinner and gave oakley her dinner. She wasn’t in the tent for more than 15 seconds before she was out cold.
2015-03-19
We hiked out the following day and made it back to the car in the late afternoon. In a series of unfortunate events which were mostly driven by my bad decision making, I tried to drive out that evenning and the tires just sank into a few inches of the soft snow and I was stuck. In another bad decision, I stayed the night in the car and by the morning, I was frozen in solid. I tried to chip at the snow, but it was solid ice now. I had my inReach with me, so I texted Angela and she called me a tow truck and $500 later I was free. Over a decade later, I still think about how poor my decision making was on this trip…
2015-03-20
Either way, Oakey had a great sleep on the way home and we made it home by that evening.
