We did it!! The weather held for a bit and we were able to get out for a night up Bass Crk.  We packed up and got to the trail head around 10 am.

We decided to camp at the beaver pond up Bass crk.  Its not a super far hike (2.1 miles) but we wanted to be close enough to the trail head if something happened we could get out fairly quick.  Its pretty steep up Bass crk and we changed about 1000 ft in elevation.  We made good time and got to work setting up camp.

 

 

 

There had been campers up here last weekend and they had a pretty good spot for a tent stamped out but we had to expand it a bit for my tent.  We had a great time using our snow shoes to scrape and stomp out the spot for the tent. As I got the tent set up my friend got the fire spot cleared out.  The campers before us had brought over a bunch of green trees that we had to move out of the way of the fire pit. Once we got camp set up we decided to hike a ways up the trail.  I wanted to check out the falls where I’d been ice climbing a few weeks before.

On the way we found a small trail that veered off to the right and decided to follow that for a bit.  We thought we were just following a game trail but found a research game camera instead.  Those poor researchers are going to have fun when they see our silly faces on there.  After pretending to be wildlife we continued up to the falls

There were more cracks in the falls this week.  I didn’t get up to where we had climbed.  You could see where there had been snow and ice falling from that canyon and didn’t want to get hit.  You could hear water falling behind the ice and see it streaming down the rocks by the falls.

On the way down we found a LIVE spider in the snow.

After that terrifying encounter with wildlife we made our way back to camp. We stopped and collected wood and moss to start a fire on the way back. We worked HARD on that fire.  I brought those fire starters again but we had to use 5 of them. We got it going but due to how wet the wood was we had to go back out and try to find dead trees that weren’t too covered in snow or wet. My friend is awesome at finding good fire wood in the snow.  She says to look for trees that are dead and standing but grey.  That’s a good sign for dry wood.  Also she says that if the tree has “bonus branches” it’s a super good find. You can use the branches for kindling.  Here’s the fire queen with her awesome fire!

We boiled water and mixed up our MREs and had a nice dinner by the fire.  Here is where we made a mistake that had us up in the middle of the night but I’ll get to that later.

Our fire resources exhausted not too long after dark.  We were warm and full from our yummy dinners.  Even though it wasn’t too late we figured we’d be up early since my friend had dinner with her aunt the next day and we needed to be back in time.  After some tent selfies we hit the hay.

Earlier, I mentioned a mistake and around midnight I woke up THIRSTY.  I reached for my water bottle and it was empty.  Then I got to thinking that I had another but it was out by the fire and I had used the water in it to make our dinners….. I bundled up and got my flashlight to go out and  get it and lo and behold it was about a quarter full.  I took a few sips and have rarely been that thankful for water.  I took the rest back for my friend.  We finished off that little bit and tried to go back to sleep.  About half an hour later I had to pee.  My friend wasn’t sleeping either and we both were still super thirsty.  We got up, got my stove out, rounded up all our water bottles and pot and headed out to find a good patch of snow away from camp to get snow to melt.  It turns out it takes a lot of snow to fill one water bottle AND it takes a long time to get water to boil when its 10 degrees out.  Also, you end up with pine needles and other crud in your water no matter how ‘clean’ it looks when you’re gathering it.  We picked out what we could and then used our french press coffee mugs to filter out the rest.  That worked great!!  The screens on the french press got all the crud out.  We let the water cool a bit after boiling it but I have never enjoyed warm water as much as I did that night.  We boiled enough water for our two water bottles and went back to bed.  Lesson learned, Make sure you have your water situation taken care of  BEFORE bed!!

We pulled our sleeping bags over our heads and crashed. We vented the tent and didn’t have the condensation problem this time.  We put space blankets under our pads and that helped keep the heat in as well.  We used the same sleeping bags as when we camped in my yard.  We slept with our snow pants, sweatshirt, had and socks and stayed warm.  When I poked my head out expecting it to be dark, the sun was fully risen.  We’d slept till 9:10 am!!

Good morning, hows my hair?

We popped hand warmers in our boots to warm them up and finished taking selfies. Once our boots were warm we got up and started making coffee.

As we were enjoying our coffee my friend checked to make see what time dinner at her aunt’s was.  Turns out dinners at 3:00 pm!!  It’s about 10 am now and we have at least an hour of tearing down camp, 45 mins to the truck, then the time it takes to drive home and get cleaned up and drive the hour out to her aunts house.  We kicked it into high gear and got going.

We had great trip!  We survived and found things to do different next time.  I think each trip will get better and each time will present different challenges we’ll have to adapt to.

 

Good news she got to dinner by 3:00 pm.