Backpacking 2011

I posted most of our photos from the weekend on Facebook, but I also wanted to write a little on the blog about our camping/backpacking trip two weekends ago. That tells you how busy we have been since it has taken 2 weeks to get this onto the blog.

We didn't really know exactly where we were going to go for our trip until the night before. That's how good of planners we are. We had a couple of ideas, but we didn't make the final decision until the night before. I had the 18th of August off work so it gave us one extra day off to be able to go somewhere. Originally we thought Wind Rivers. Every year we say that we will go to the Wind Rivers if I'm not pregnant, and every year I haven't been pregnant and we still haven't made it there yet! Will has been to the Wind Rivers a couple of times and has wanted to take me there. It is a pretty strenuous hike and so we decided this was not the year for it since we are nowhere near in good enough shape to be able to do that and enjoy it. So after checking out library books about hiking trails around Idaho, we decided on Trinity Mountain. We drove to the top of the mountain where Big Trinity Lake and the trailhead are located. We got to drive my parents' Tahoe that had 4WD which made it super nice and more roomy which made it easier to load our packs in and out. We didn't get gone until Thursday evening from our house. We ended up having to get a few things done here before we left, like mow the lawn, show some houses to clients, laundry that had been neglected, get a new battery for our car, not to mention get things together and packed for the trip. So even though I had that Thursday off, it was mostly spent preparing for the trip instead of beginning the trip.
These are some of my favorite pictures from the trip that I downloaded to this post. Mostly I just hate waiting so long to download so many pictures so I decided to keep it brief. We hiked approx. 3 miles each way to where we camped: Big Rainbow Lake. We did take a brief .25 mile hike to a lookout point. The hike was mostly low incline except for several areas. It was more uphill than I usually like but it was good to get to the top and look over the beautiful mountains and valleys below.
We packed our fly rods along with us and fished at Big Rainbow. We each caught several rainbow trout. The water was so crystal clear and so we could usually see the fish coming over to our flies before we would hook up with one. So beautiful!

I love wildflowers and there were lots of those everywhere. So pretty.