Christopher was gone on the day of our 7th anniversary but totally made up for it by taking me on an awesome backpacking trip.
We were lucky enough to have family watch our kids while we went hiking up to Marmot Lake. We left Thursday morning with high hopes that the weather report of rain was wrong. Of course it turned out to rain the whole 5 hours we hiked up to the lake. It was slow going for a while with huge puddles, and small streams on the trail to avoid. But it was actually pretty fun hiking up a mountain in the pouring rain; it was quite the adventure.
It was nice enough to stop raining for about 30 minutes while we set up our tent, and started as soon as we had climbed inside to change out of our soaking wet clothes. We were able to get our dinner cooked when the rain stopped the next time but ate in the tent because it had already started to rain. We were warm and comfortable with really good gear we had borrowed; the hardest part was putting on wet shoes, barefoot, every time we went out of the tent to cook or go to the bathroom.
It rained most of the night, but we were warm and both slept great. We had planned on hiking up to Jade lake Friday but our shoes were still soaking wet; we would also either have to hike in our wet clothes from the day before or get our last set of dry clothes wet. It just wasn't worth it, so we spent the day at Marmot. It was wet outside but not raining in the morning so after we ate breakfast we found the most dry wood we could and Christopher Mr. Eagle Scout was able to get a fire going. We spent the 20 mins or so of firewood we had available drying our shoes out and drinking hot chocolate. We got our shoes mostly dry when of course it started to rain again.
We spent a lot of time in the tent eating snacks and playing card games. In the afternoon the rain really started coming down. we could hear people start to roll into camp and struggle to set things up in the rain. We would have gone out to help but we only had our one set of dry clothes and just gotten our shoes mostly dry to be able to hike out in the next morning. When the rain had stopped we went out to start dinner and were surprised to see about 15 new tents when there were only about 3 that morning.
We were able to secure the rest of our things and make sure our tent didn't get flooded. It did amazing with the amount of rain we got. There were only a few drops of water that came through the screen, the rest of out tent was dry.
We woke up the next morning and got everything packed back up and headed on our way. It didn't rain at all on our way out. We were able to hike on the trail without stepping in puddles and got to actually see everything. We hiked in with ponchos on and had a limited view, but we were able to enjoy how pretty everything was on our way out.
The rain was a good distraction for when we were climbing, I realized on the way out how much we actually climbed and it was more than I thought, I guess it was mostly because I was trying not to step in the deep puddles of water on the trail as we hiked.
I loved our trip and had a great time even if it rained and made some things a little harder. I loved being able to spend time with Christopher outdoors being active, doing what we love. I can't wait to go again!!
