For the past few years, we had a little tradition of going camping during the 4th of July weekends with our friends (I'll leave their names off for privacy). We had gone to the campsite where we found the bear nearby and Rocky Mountain National Park. Very nice camping trips. But this year, we wanted to challenge ourselves a little more. We decided to not pack our cars and go camping, but instead, we'd pack very large backpacks and go to our camping destination on foot, with allllll of our belongings on our backs. It turns out that I had about 30 pounds on my back and Chris had more like 40 pounds.
Yes, the dogs had to carry their weight too. So, they had to carry their own food and some of our stuff too. They carried them on their backs like it was nothing.
We rented our packs since we didn't quite know if we'd like to carry all of our belongings on our backs just yet. Off we went. We'd hike up half of the loop on that Saturday morning and come back following the rest of the loop for a total of 11 miles. The day was cool, so that helped make things pleasant. We had a nice lunch by a forested area and we kept going. What was interesting is that you literally can't carry all the water you need. That would just be back breaking. So, we bought this cool water bottle filter that kills the bacteria using UV light. The taste wasn't great, but knowing you can carry a lighter load by refilling was truly worth it!
Once we got to our campsite, our shoulders were just so sore from the packs. But the scenery from the campsite was unbelievable! There was no one camping close to us at all (only across the lake), so it was quite remote and beautiful!
That night we cooked hot dogs and smores and had a nice night by the bonfire. The surprising thing was that it was so coooold - I still get surprised by that since it was the middle of summer. I went to bed early with the dogs and Chris and our friends stayed up a bit longer. That next morning, we had our breakfast - dehydrated eggs - and our friends headed back to finish some papers for school. We stayed to enjoy the mountains for longer. We took a long nap and Chris and the dogs were rested enough to go for a hike to other surrounding lakes. The dogs LOVE Chris and his adventurous spirit. Chris runs down trails with them and encourages them to follow their hunting instincts. This time the victims were marmots - the dogs didn't catch any of them, but they got very close. This is the second lake Chris got to see.
In the meantime, I took naps, enjoyed the view, exercised a bit, re-filled our water containers and made dinner - again, dehydrated food. This is pretty much all you can take to eat since it's non-perishable, lightweight and very easy to prepare. We had more smores that night....oh, and it even snowed for a little while too. Did I mention it was cold? I believe this was one of my first experiences with camping without any toilets... I think the most challenging part was to find a spot to do your business that felt private. I always feared an animal would approach me in the middle of it all. Ha!The next morning, we packed up all of our packs and headed out. It was a much nicer hike going back to the car - though we found out instead of doing a full loop, we actually did one segment of the loop twice. Oops! We had a nice picnic lunch, the dogs got to spoon and we were off to a nice well-deserved shower at home. The good thing is that our hike was close to Denver so we didn't have to drive for too long.
Backpacking - the next new tradition for us? We shall see.
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