Rachel's Trip #3

Aug. 10, 2009 Today we got up at 7:00 and headed off to hike up to Columbine Lake. You have to drive for awhile to get to the trail head over some pretty rough dirt roads but we made it and started out at about 9:30 in the morning. We just took some deer sticks, string cheese, granola bars, some pbjs, water, and fishing gear so we did not have heavy packs. The trail is about 3 miles one way and not too bad. Some places were a little steep and w/the altitude we had to stop and catch our breath a few times. Not too far away from the trail head I heard a crashing noise and we all stopped and looked through the trees in the direction that it came from and spotted a young bull moose. He was spooked though so he did not stick around for any decent pictures. A little while later Jessica spotted a buck mule deer and then Luke spotted a small herd of elk from across a meadow. We couldn’t believe our luck to see so much large game on one hike. We came to a beautiful huge meadow w/an amazing backdrop of some mountain peaks w/snow on them and I was going to take Caleb’s picture when all of a sudden someone says, ‘Hey, there’s something down there’. Sure enough, two HUGE moose were grazing in the meadow. A big bull and a cow. We stood and watched them for a long time. Every now and then the bull would raise up his massive head and just stare right back at us. David snuck up and took this picture from behind a few rocks and the cow kept looking in his direction. She knew right where he was the whole time.
This is a picture of Luke watching them just to give a perspective of how close they were. After a little while they decided to walk into the woods and then you realize that they are about 4 feet taller then you originally thought once they walk out of the brush. They really were massive. We watched them walk away and then noticed there was another bull moose watching us from the other side of the meadow just under the trees. I don’t know if the younger boys realize how lucky they were to get to see such a thing! It was really neat.
We decided we’d better keep going if we were ever going to make it to the lake so on we went. I was trying to use this trip as a gauge to see if we could do an 8 mile backpacking trip later on in the week so w/all the stopping I knew I wasn’t going to be able to figure anything out. Of course a little while later we found a neat little waterfall and of course the kids had to stop. Then we found a huge square rock that of course they had to climb up.
As we neared the top we found a small
patch of snow. Now let’s see, what do you get w/5 kids and a patch of snow in August? Of course a snowball fight!
It ended up taking us 2.5 hours to do a 3 mile trail....not so good. Once we made it up to the lake we had our lunch and the kids began to fish in earnest. We could see trout swimming around and Caleb had dropped a baited hook in and then found out that his line was tangled so while he was trying to untangle it he got a fish on. Unfortunately because he could not reel it in it got off.
This gave them hope that they could be caught though so we spent several hours up there fishing and came home w/3 decent sized trout. The kids slept in the van on the way back to town. It was the quietest they’ve been since we started this trip. I didn’t even need any earplugs!
Because we were all pretty tired and sunburnt we opted to save the fish for another day and stop at Pizza Hut for supper. Then David J. cleaned the fish and put them in the freezer and we all changed into our suits and sat in the hot tub while we did our laundry next door.
We got back about 9:15 and I refilled the water bottles and put them in the freezer and went to bed. We couldn’t ask for a better day.
Aug. 11, 2009 So today I woke up at 5:00 for some reason but didn’t get up till 6:00 and did a little computer work, and packed a lunch for the day. After breakfast we headed up to Grand Lake and hiked up to Adam’s falls. The boys brought their poles and the only really funny thing that happened was that David J. was fly fishing and hooked a big one, himself, right in the back of his head. After some minor surgery involving his dad and a needle nose plyers he did get it removed. For awhile there I was thinking it didn’t look too bad as a sort of hair decoration but Dad said it must come out. Caleb was thrilled to get it on video. After not having any luck catching FISH we hiked farther down the trail to a creek that a guy told us he had some good luck at. The kids caught about 8 brookies (some kind of small stream trout) and kept 6 of them. The black flies were swarming them the whole time. The only wild life we saw today was some cute little chipmunks that came begging for some chips and would take them right out of your hand and then proceed to stand right there and gobble them up. We thought they were just adorable until they climbed right into our pack and took a whole handful of chips and ran with them. All of a sudden they seemed more like rodents! We came home in the afternoon and then started packing our backpacks for tomorrow’s overnight trip to Crater lake. Then David and I ditched the kids w/leftover pizza & hamburgers and went out to eat at a supposedly haunted restaurant. We also had to stop and pick up a few groceries for the hike tomorrow. I think we need to get some sleep tonight because tomorrow is sure to be a tough one. The weather has been perfect so far. Hope it holds out for the next 2 days. I don’t like to camp in the rain.