Summer Camp Out: Indian Trail

Aaron and I have gone on tons of hikes about a mile and a half in on the Indian Trail.  We have seen tons of camping sites starting a half a mile into the trail and we thought that it would be so much fun to head up there for a camping trip.

On Friday, I got dropped off with some of our stuff at 5 o'clock to find a camping site and guard it since this camp was first come, first served.  I tried to light a fire for awhile but I was the worst at it.  I had one going for a little while but I needed to get bigger pieces of wood to take care of it.  Luckily I had the dogs with me to hang out and keep me company.  They loved wandering around the camp site sniffing as much as they could.

I hung this squeaker monkey in a tree nearby.  That way if they got too far from camp, I could squeeze it and they would come running back to camp.

(photo by Andy's iphone)

Anyway, at 8 o'clock everyone was in the camp grounds!  We set up our tents, got a fire going, made s'mores and drank hot chocolate and talked about different things.

Aaron, Clarise and I went to sleep pretty early at 10:30pm.  It had been a long day and we were pretty tired.  Andy and Geoff stayed up to keep playing with the fire.  It took me awhile to fall asleep since I had too much hot chocolate to drink, I needed to pee at about 11:30pm.  That was when some random loud hippies wandered into our camp.  I guess that they had been planning to camp in our spot but didn't show up till 11:30. I showed them where another trail head was to another camp site near by.   I was really tired and out of it and didn't really remember much of it the next morning.

There were about 5 of them and they were waiting for more friends.  So as you can imagine...they were a little loud.  The only person that they kept up was Andy...because he has crazy good hearing and his tent was particularly cold.

The next morning, we all woke up at about 8 o'clock.  Time for breakfast!!  That was a series of unfortunate events.

First of all, Andy and Geoff burned through all of the wood we had the night before trying to prove how manly they were.  So they needed to go hunting for more wood.  And we had to get creative with the chopping of the wood.

Geoff shoved this wood into a cement hole near by and hopped up and down on this difficult piece.  It didn't work.  We had to move onto other methods.

Geoff found a really sharp rock and tried to use that to cut the log in half.  It sounds crazy.

 But it did start to work.  The problem was that it was taking WAY too long.

So he propped it up and had Andy hold it down...then he threw a rock at it.  Humans are very highly evolved.  We know how to use tools.

Well, after about the 5th hit, it snapped the tree in half.  We are totally as awesome as Bear Grylls!

 Look at this strong man face!!

Back to breakfast!  Clarise and I were put in charge of cooking.  I brought some awesome pancake batter to make these wonderful Hawaiian pancakes.  Well....the propane stove's lowest setting would immediately burn the batter onto it.  I couldn't scrap it off!  Aaron told me to cook the bacon first so that the grease would keep the pancake from sticking.

The bacon turned out great!  There really wasn't a way for me to ruin it.  The boys gobbled it up!

(Photo by Andy)

Then Geoff tried to make some bacon...look at what he did!!  I didn't think that you could mess up bacon....but you can count on Geoff to start a grease fire!

(Photo by Andy)

Aaron made some eggs for everyone.  Or rather...he put the eggs in the pan and gave it to me to cook up.  We had to eat it with our hands.  I wrapped some eggs in bacon and ate it that way.  Like a boss.  I tried cooking the rest of the pancakes but I burned every single one.  I ended up being the only person who would eat them...oh well...more for me.

Look how happy we were after breakfast!

(Photo by Andy)

Once we were full, it was time to get the camp site ready for the rest of the day.  Here is Aaron doing the manliest job!!  Washing the dishes!!  He was such a good sport.  Since I worked so hard burning  making breakfast, he washed most of the dishes (I might have helped a little with that too...but he did the most).

Bambi got sent to "her room" since she decided that she deserved some scrambled eggs.  She did NOT deserve scrambled eggs.  She had already received breakfast.

Oh...then this happened.  Aren't these two perfect for each other?

Oh...then we found a dead snake in the "watering hole" nearby.  We could only see part of the snake and we were debating on whether or not it was a bungee cord.

Then we threw it into our dying fire so that it wouldn't rot in the water...we are so considerate of other animals feelings.

Oh...and then we spent some time goofing off.

T-Rex arms!!!!!  He can't even reach his face with those arms!

Tree dancing!  He is like a little wood nymph.  Except...not little.

The dogs watched on in disgust.

After our shenanigans, Aaron, Andy and I walked the mile to and from camp to drop off half of our camping gear so that we would be carrying less in the evening when we left.  Clarise and Geoff had stayed at camp making all of us our lunches and other food provisions.

Then when we got back to camp we started on our hike.  Before we even started, we saw these boys with their dad hiking up and they were digging around near the watering hole where we found the dead snake.  While on a break later, this same group passed up by and look what one of the boys was holding.

The whole hike we were seeing snakes all over the place.  They were all the same kind of snake that this boy had found so we weren't worried.  But I wasn't about to let Pippen run off and chase them like he wanted.

There were beautiful things to see while we hiked.  All kinds of different colored flowers.  It kind of made me wish that I had lugged my 7D up here with us.

We paused for a picture at what we thought was Nevada Viewpoint....even though we couldn't see Nevada and we were clearly in denial about how far we had hiked.

Please ignore my cleavage.  It was a little ridiculous for a couple weeks.

We walked passed a couple areas that we thought was "Rock Slide Point" but when we got to this area, we were pretty sure that it was Rock Slide Point.  And so we had lunch there.  Beautiful spot for lunch, right?

It was a little more than one mile from our camp....we felt like pansies when we found out that we really hadn't gone that far.

After lunch we decided to throw rocks at other bigger rocks further down.  Don't worry, there wasn't anything for us to make worse.  We could see the bottom of where we were throwing rocks and there wasn't a trail or anything.

After the fun of throwing rocks, we headed back.  It was amazing how quickly you get back when you are going downhill the whole way.

But we were dead tired when we got back to camp.  Luckily we were by some running water which was the perfect thing for our feet.

Geoff decided that he wanted his whole body to be in the icy cold water.

Look at this crazy polar bear.  Seriously this water was frigid....like melted snow frigid...because it was probably melted snow.

Then we settled in by the fire and made tin foil dinners (by Clarise!!) full of yummy veggies!  Then Clarise pulled out some apples and taught us how to roast them and make them taste like apple pie on a stick!

And after this, Andy, Aaron and I packed up the rest of our things and left Clarise and Geoff in the woods.  They were the only ones who wanted to camp both nights.

But a crazy drunk man (and some friends) wandered into their camp site at 1:30am with a knife and was acting insane.  So they hiked the half mile out of the camp back to the car and drove back to our place in Ogden.  I was pretty surprised to find them on the door step at 2:30 in the morning.  But we got to hang out with them all Sunday which was nice.