Well, that was traumatic.  But – such is the life of an adventurer! – Hilda

Okay, that’s kind of how the adventure ended, but let me back up.

This year my daughter joined an outdoor club, and one of the planned summer activities was a 2-night backpacking trip in the Mt. Evans wilderness.  This sounded like a good opportunity!  I don’t spend as much time with my daughter as I’d like.  And I don’t get out into the woods nearly as much as I’d like.  Actually, I haven’t been properly camping even since I moved to Colorado, in part because I’m lazy, and in part because it’s a new region (versus where I grew up) with new rules and best practices and whatnot.  But the club would be handling most of the logistics, so she and I could sort of just tag along and have an adventure.  My daughter had never been backpacking before, and I hadn’t been backpacking since I was a kid, so…kind of a slightly terrifying adventure.  But it would be fine.  Adventure.  Let’s go!

But there were many stages to this adventure.

First stage was the acquiring of gear. 

My daughter got a loner backpack from the club, but I needed to supply my own.  And a tent.  And…the list is actually really long when you start to look at it.  And for backpacking you have to bring everything you might need, but only what you need (we were forbidden deodorant but graciously allowed an extra pair of socks), and as light as possible, and don’t duplicate something that can be shared around with the group!

Actually, the acquiring-the-gear stage had several stages (and thank goodness for club people who are patient and kind and know how to ease new people into a thing), which was something like this:

1. Get long list of required gear and spend more money than one ought to getting a bunch of stuff.  I could definitely have got away with spending less than I did, but even for regular day hiking I’d already been eyeing the idea of getting a proper framed backpack, and I found one that felt so comfortable on my lower back that I just got it.  And my shoulders are grateful.  So, so grateful.
2. Go on a practice hike with gear all packed up after the club leaders have gone through and tossed out half the things you tried to pack the first time.  (Can the functionality be replaced by your bandana? Then don’t bring it!)  Note: I am very grateful for the patience and generous assistance of the club leaders in walking us newbies through this very necessary step.  And I am also grateful they made me bring a bandana.
3. Do a practice tent set up.  My dad helped me with this one, and good thing, too, because it turned out the one I bought didn’t have the guy lines with it.  My dad cut me some line to use as guy lines and that got (re)packed with my new tent.  Good good.
4. Randomly, go on several other hikes with the new pack to test things out.  This happened because the original backpacking trip got postponed (it has been raining a lot this year) and so other day-hikes I’d been planning with my family happened before the big back-packing trip.  On these other hikes I learned that I really love how easy it is to cinch up the waist-belt on my new pack, that the water-bottle situation is less than ideal, but workable, that there is an awesome, easy-to-access little spot for my camera, and extra-jacket layers should just be lashed and unlashed to the outside of the backpack as needed.  I also learned that the pack cover should definitely go on for rain.  And that I might be good going up, but hiking poles are definitely worth their weight if I’m coming back down something steep with weight on my back.  (Also that marmots scream like people, but that’s for later.)  (And also also that make-your-own trail-mix is the way to go.)
5. On your own, practice and figure out how to use a p-style (look it up), while being both embarrassed and grateful the club leaders are super-pragmatic as well as patient and helpful.

Second Stage was planning the route and the food. 

 I didn’t have to plan the route (yay) because the club did that, but I had to be at least a little bit involved in the food.  Some people in the group were vegetarian.  My daughter and I have to avoid tree nuts (but thankfully not peanuts).  Etc.  The pots and pans and stoves and fuel had to be shared around with the group.  (Also water filters!)  And the weight of the food had to be shared around.

Due to our nut issue, my daughter and I got tasked with providing the trail mix, and I shall provide the recipe here, because it is awesome.  It started from one of those earlier in-between hikes mentioned above, because everyone in my family is picky, and on top of nut issues, my other daughter can’t do gluten or peanuts, so we just had to do an individual mix-and-match.  And then there was some accidental luck thrown in.  Here’s the recipe we used for the backpacking trip, but to do gluten free you can swap in gluten-free pretzels or gluten-free crackers.  And for the original my other daughter had yogurt-covered gluten-free pretzels, rather than peanut m&m’s.  (Also note that we kept the fruit separate until we were ready to eat it, because the moisture eventually leads to stale crackers, which aren’t as nice.)

Best Trail Mix (proportions very approximate):

1. bag of peanut m&m’s
2. box of chocolate-covered raisins
3. box of rough-chopped crystalized ginger
4. box of rough-chopped Turkish apricots
5. half a bag of pretzels
6. half a box of tomato-basil wheat thins (yes, specifically tomato-basil)
7. double handful of cinnamon rice chex

I wanted to leave out items 2. and 5. (I really don’t like pretzels).  My daughter wanted to leave out item 7.  We compromised and just included everything.

Third Stage was the actual backpacking trip! 

And yes, it was definitely an adventure, simultaneously not as hard as I’d feared, and also harder on my joints than I’d feared (I really don’t like going downhill), with beautiful scenery and random surprises thrown in.

This actual-adventure stage (of course) had its own sub-stages, and they were:

1. Three-mile hike in for the first night and that’s plenty.

We couldn’t get up to the trailhead ‘til pretty late, so the plan was not to go too far the first night.  This turned out to be great for a secondary reason, which was that the loner pack my daughter was using did not fit her as well as we’d hoped, and part-way in she and I just ended up swapping packs to account for it.  This meant that for the rest of the trip she and I had a hard time finding things because our stuff was in the other person’s pack.  It also meant that I was contending with weirdly evil straps on the loner back that seemed designed to dig into your shoulders sideways – which was very painful for the first hour or three and by the end of the trip I…didn’t have any bruises or sore spots at all?  Still not sure how that worked.  Evil straps were not a terrible contention on the first night, though, because a three-mile hike in is pretty much always just going to be a nice hike when you’re fresh, and we stayed below treeline the whole way (forests just always make me happy).

2. First night sleeping in my tent.

Despite the gentle hike in, the first night still meant the nervousness of sleeping in my tent for the first time.  It was a calm, clear night.  We had a nice sheltered camping spot.  And though the ground was hard (it always is, you know), it was pretty nice and level.  But…the gentle breeze made my tent rustle really loudly and randomly (I’d forgotten about the bungy loops to hold down the rainfly that first night) – is that a creature!?  There were rushing sounds through the trees! (They were planes…rather above the trees.)  So – it was a perfectly nice first night and I kind-of slept.  But then I got to see the sunrise in the morning.  Even in the middle of the woods where there really isn’t a view, it’s a rather lovely thing to see.

Also, there were plants about – high elevation plants that I’m not so used to.  (Have I mentioned I like plants a lot?  And taking pictures of plants?)

3. Why is day two starting with a lot of downhill (especially considering some in the group were hoping to summit on this day)?

So, yes, this trip was planned on a big loop hike, but that included the highest-elevation bit in the middle, so there were multiple reasons for sadness that the first big push of day two was mostly downhill.  It was a rocky trail and my ankles were not pleased (and I was the very slowest hiker) – but I had learned my lesson earlier and did have my hiking poles with me.  Compensations for this rocky start were a) the very beautiful fireweed, and b) a hummingbird that just about tried to dive-bomb my face (I was, of course, wearing my hat).  (Seriously, it stopped a foot away from my eyeballs – it was pretty cool.)

4. Uphill I’m actually pretty good at (though still extremely slow).

After lunch we got going in the proper direction (up), and I was happy to find that this was actually great and fine and lovely.  We were at elevation (the lowest part of the whole trip was still over 10,000 feet above sea level), it was a warm, sunny day (i.e., hot when hiking), and I had a 25 lb. pack on my back (with evil shoulder straps).  But that was all quite fine, because I like waking in the woods and over mountains.  I was still very slow, because I am a slow hiker, because that’s how my dad trained me to hike and apparently I can’t switch that off.  But when I caught up to the rest of the group while they were resting and one of them complained his legs hurt I kind of looked at him blankly.  Hiking’s not supposed to make your legs hurt…?  (Did I mention I was the very slowest hiker in the whole group? – sigh.  (But my legs didn’t hurt!))

5. Alpine tundra is gorgeous – and there are judgmental marmots.

And then we kept going up, well above treeline to where the view just spreads out around you in 360 degrees.  It was like those shots of trekking over the mountains in The Lord of the Rings (which I always feel really envious of when I’m watching that part of the show but also assume that in reality my stamina would prove less than impressive – except for this one day I was kind of there and I wasn’t doing too bad).

The crazy thing was that we left the treeline and it was rocky and windy and dry, but then at some point (still going up) it transitioned to being rocky and windy and…boggy.  It was really, really boggy.  There were all sorts of beautiful flowers blooming, because we were up in the Alpine tundra now, where the growing season is very short so everything has to grow and bloom all at once.  But there were several stretches where it was hard to pick a dry path and not get your shoes all wet in the bog and all the little runnels of streams everywhere.  At least it was like that on the slope.  When we started to reach the saddle crest it was the niftiest weird landscape.  It reminded me of the pools you can find dug into the tops of big boulders, scooped out by rainwater.  Except that the ground there was not solid, lichen-crusty rock, but thick, thick turf with big scooped out sections where the water had pooled up once but didn’t happen to be now – now it was pooled up over there instead…  Before that bit, though, there were marmots.  They were hanging out on the rock outcroppings (not interested in living in a bog) and made sure to scream-squawk at us in a most disapproving way as we went by them.  See them?  See how disapproving they are?

6. Rest break at Summit Lake (or, finally I get to take lots of pictures of flowers).

Just up past the saddle-bog was Summit Lake, the highest point we had to climb to on this trip.  A bunch of the folks in the group went up another thousand-plus feet from there to see if they could reach to the summit summit (a tricky path marked with cairns), but I opted to stay with the group taking a break.  I’m interested in going to the top of a mountain if I think there’s something nifty up there, but up definitely looked more like solid rock than nifty tundra, and I definitely needed a break (and I knew I definitely didn’t want to add an extra thousand foot decent to my day that wasn’t actually necessary).  The view was actually very beautiful from where we were (note, one can drive up to Summit Lake, so keep that in mind if you like the look of this view – it’s a lovely view for everyone).

And, with the rest of the group effectively holding still, I could finally run around (without my pack) and take as many pictures of pretty wildflowers as I wanted to.  (They weren’t quite the same pretty wildflowers as the ones out on the alpine bog, but you get what you get, and they were still very pretty.)

7. Down the cliff before camping.

So, Summit Lake is well over 12,000 feet and also next to a parking lot, so before the day was done, there was more hiking to go.  We dropped about a thousand feet, very nearly straight down, on a trail with an amazing view, but also only a little wider than a goat track and very slippery with dry gravel.  Once again, I was very slow – but we were heading toward twilight so I didn’t actually get to go as slow as I wanted to.  I was very slow but going as fast as I could.  My ankles were again displeased, and now also my knees too.  Really too bad, because again it was an amazing section of trail, both for the view outward and for the vast mountain rising up all around and behind you.

Which, honestly, was another thing that was weird about the hikers that passed us going up.  They didn’t pass us on the trail itself (thank goodness), but after we’d camped at the bottom, they passed us in the dark.  So…they were going up a very steep, slippery trail, in the dark, and they didn’t even get to see the beautiful trail they were climbing.  Also, the wind was starting to pick up.

8. The night of wind (and marmots?).

So, we had dropped down to the bottom of the cliffiest part of the cliff to camp.  But we were still above treeline, and there was still more (gentler) cliff to go.  The ground was rocks and spongy tundra, which actually worked great for pitching tents in (and I finally figured out how to use the bungy straps to strap my rainfly down nice and tight).  But we were still basically on top of a cliff.  We retired as soon as camp was ready, because it was starting to get chilly.  Then, I think I must have at least dozed some at the beginning of the night, but the rest of the order of events is hazy.  It involved at least all of this:

• The wind getting stronger and making it nearly impossible to hear anything outside my tent because of the constant rustling sounds.
• A marmot shrieking in the night right next to my head (I think – apparently nobody else heard it – but it was freaking loud).
• Having to get up to pee in the cold, black night, in the wind.
• Other people’s (multi-person) tents not doing well in the wind and some equipment trying to fly away over the cliff at 4 in the morning.
• Even stronger wind, that was very, very loud against the tent fabric.

So, everyone agreed they weren’t sure they got any sleep that night.  It was too windy to make breakfast.  Once there was light, we packed up and left.

9. Hiking back home as fast as me (and my knees) can carry me.

And so the rest of it was mostly just trying to hike back out.  This was too bad, because the next cliff down took us back down into the trees and the views were very, very pretty.

And it wasn’t a really quick finishing hike, either, because we still had over five miles to go.  Also unfortunately for me, my knees by now had declared they’d had freaking enough of going downhill and more downhill was Not Okay.  Fortunately, I had a knee brace and Ibuprofen with me (and my hiking poles) but it was not great and I basically had to just not bend my left knee for anything with a downward slope of more than about 5 degrees.  Another Unfortunately was that I cannot say I was the slowest member of the group that day (though I really ought to have been), because one of the other members had come down sick with altitude sickness – thank goodness we’d dropped down a thousand feet before ‘camping’ the night before or I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been.

I did get a final positive note, which was that the very last bit of the hike was uphill again!  Yay! (not a sarcastic yay – my knee really wanted me moving uphill instead of down).  Also, we’d been worried about my daughter’s knees because she’d had some trouble on some of our earlier hikes (we’d packed the knee brace for her) but she was essentially fit for the whole trip – so that was definitely good too; one always wants one’s children to be well and happy (even when wind-whipped and sleep deprived).

And, I would do it again, actually.  It was a beautiful trek through beautiful country.  If we went again, I would try to find a way to take my time a bit more.  I am a slow hiker.  And, honestly, I’m kind of a leisurely hiker, when given my druthers.  And I would definitely learn and implement stretches to hopefully help my knees survive better.  My knees needed lots more coddling than they got.  But it was an adventure!  All the way.

When we got home I was watching a bit of the show, Hilda, about a young girl with blue hair who lives in the woods and goes on adventures, and came across the quote at the top of this post.  You have to imagine it being said by someone very young and frank and chipper.  It seems extremely apt.