Saturday, June 11, 2011

Not all those who wander are lost

Bettie, Katie and I went backpacking this weekend. It took a lot of convincing to get me to go...I am not a huge fan of camping. But Bettie has some awesome powers of persuasion and I went. It was a very relaxing and fun 3 days.  We always knew exactly where we were (Right here! What more do you need to know?), even if we didn't always know how to get to where we had planned. But in then end, we made it to our original destination. 


Our first destination: an unplanned but decidedly perfect detour to Nambe Lake. Great waterfall on the way. The lake was surrounded by impassible mountains so we knew it wasn't the lake we expected. But we loved it.


That night we spent in a nearby meadow. It got kinda frosty and the next morning we considered cutting our trip a day short because our toes (and everything else) were freezing in our sleeping bags.


But after we got up, ate, and packed up, we decided we could handle it and were ready for another day of hiking. That is Katie, me and Bettie. We found some friendly hikers to take our picture for us.


This is the sign that caused our detour. The path we wanted was not labeled except for the no camping sign. There were not nearly enough signs to point the way. Also, our map didn't even come close to showing all the paths we passed by. But we never felt despair and we found our way.


This lake was our favorite of the three we saw. We missed the lake Bryce told us to find but found this one instead and we loved it.


Our second night was in a field full of so many kinds of trees, plants, flowers, and bugs. This was my favorite tree, which we camped under.


And this picture shows the answer to why anyone would want to backpack:


There were so many butterflies and flowers. (Lots of bees and flies too, but we'll just forget that part.) So many butterflies, big and small. And lots of amazing flowers.


This was the end of our trip. (I'm in the blue shirt.) We were supposed to have a car waiting here for us so we could drive home. Our husbands were worried because they hadn't heard if we ever found the right trail (the only time the cell phone worked was when we were camping that first night) so they were waiting around in hopes of our contacting them to tell them where we ended up. When we didn't find a car waiting for us, we continued on our way and hiked almost 5 miles until Bettie got the attention of a couple of cute guys ;) with cars full of kids and they pulled over and picked up these three dirty hitchhikers.


The end. :)