Sara’s first backpacking trip! It was amazing for everyone - Sara had a great time and it was an overall positive experience. Even more impressive, our little 4 year old hiked 12.5 miles over 2 days!!! I will admit that I didn’t plan it that way - we had to hike a bit longer to find a campsite than we had origionally planned, but mostly Sara wanted to go find blackberries and hiked over 3 miles to find them… Anyway, here’s the story.
We drove out to the trailhead on Friday night. Was a bit dissapointed because the motor control unit appears to have gone out on my water pump and something (either the dead motor control unit or the monitor) is draining the house battery even when it’s not being used. It also looks like I have a slow leak in the hose from one of the tanks to the water pump… Lots of things to add to my van to-do list, but nothing that would stop a trip!
We ended up getting to the trail pretty late (around 10:30pm) and quickly put the van in sleep mode so we could get some shut eye before the hike the following morning. Because we got into camp so late, we slept in a bit on our first day of hiking and didn’t hit the trail until around 10am the next morning. We made quick progress - a little over 1 mile per hour - which is about half of what I would have done without Sara, but I thought impressively quick for Sara. Sara seemed content to chatter about the whole way, but she just couldn’t be stopped…
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We took the northern path on the ivy loop and got to the national park boundary at ~ 2 miles along the trail. We found some blueberries along the way - they weren’t quite ripe yet so we had to hunt around to find any good ones. We found enough for a little snack though.
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Camp was supposed to be 3.8 mi from the trailhead, but I came to find out that there are multiple single campsites along the trail starting at about 3.5 miles all the way to the rugged ridge trailhead at 5.8 miles in. We ended up finding a camp just before the rugged ridge trailhead (so 5.8 miles along the trail). We took quite a few breaks but as long as Sara got her snacks - she just kept going! Our campsite was pretty close to the trail, but it was beautiful otherwise. As you can see, Sara was not eager to stay in camp and wanted to go hunt for Blackberries.
Let’s go find some Blackberries!
Coming back with our haul of Blackberries in hand, we made all kinds of blackberry treats - blackberry water, blackberry noodles, etc. It was all good, except the blackberry coffee the next morning - that was probably not a repeat…
On our way back from picking blackberries, we stopped to off to teach Sara about skipping rocks. She had fun - but I don’t think she really got the concept. :)
I got to try out my new camp shoes on this trip - super comfy!
Finally, Sara wanted to make butterflies before bed out of clovers (on the bear canister):
Day 2 was a straight shot back. We got on the trail a lot earlier as I had a feeling we were going to be taking a lot more breaks (which we did). We ran into quite a few people on the trail today - all of which were very impressed with Sara. The best was 2 moms who saw us climbing down the ropes (they had ropes up on the really steap parts of the trail) and Sara was, at first, telling them how good of a climber she was and then, second, coaching them on how to climb down the ropes better. :) Both of them were confident that their children would not have done what Sara just did (despite being much older).
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Some more backpacking chatter on the way home. This time, Sara was naming things - bridges, trees, etc. The particular bridge we crossed was tree, bush, … bainbridge. Quite the name for one bridge…
We found a bunch of these huge frogs on one part of the trail close to the river.
And a bug that Sara was particularly intersted in.
As we started to get near the end of the trail (last 1.5 miles or so), Sara started to find some creative ways to hike (and make things easier for herself). She wanted to ride the hiking pole while I pulled it. It couldn’t have been that comfortable, but she did it for over a mile…
And of course Sara wanted to collect some pictures of flowers for Momma (she knows how much Angela likes flower identification).
Back at the van, Sara hit the wall. She struggled for the last half mile or so, lots of breaks and snacks/water, but she stayed positive the whole time. Once she got into the van, she was out like a light for about 2 hours. She only woke for dinner.
On the ferry, she came back to life. She was very concerned with my feet and wanted to fix all of my dry skin… :)
And we are home!
