My Favorite Trips

Backpacking-The First Time

It’s one of the few activities in which your anticipation to start the trip matches the intensity of your excitement to return from a trip. The prospect of departing the routine and mundane of everyday life combined with fresh air, physical challenge, wildness, and exploration forces mindfulness and living in the moment. It’s hard have anxiety about the future or regrets about the past when you have thirty pounds jostling on your hips as you stare up at the stunning scenery ahead with miles of trail and thousands of vertical feet to go. You focus on your senses and the present. I’ve had a lot of great experiences backpacking and had the privilege of exploring many places with only what I could carry on my back-the Cascades, the Mojave, the Colorado Desert, the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, and the Olympics. Of all those trips, one still really stands out--the first time I went without an adult.

I grew up in Washington and explored the North Cascades on my first backpack without my parents. It wasn’t without folly. The first day over Cascade Pass went well, my friend Matt and I made our mileage goal, got to camp before sunset, and had enough food for dinner. Day two we made it to the washed out road where a Forest Service shuttle took us to the town of Stehekin. We paid the shuttle fee and ate like kings at the Stehekin Pastry Company. Why not spend the rest of our money on ice cream, cinnamon rolls, bread, and sandwich? After all there would be nothing we could buy on the hike back. All was well, our packs proved to have been stuffed with everything we needed after the first night, and now we had bellies full of town food and the stroll back to shuttle was easy.

That’s when things went south. It turned out the return shuttle wasn’t free after all. It cost $10/person and we had no money left. Matt and I pleaded that they should allow two sixteen year olds to ride for free since we were minors and had made our spending decisions at the bakery based on misinformation. The shuttle driver refused and we began hiking along the road we had expected to be driving upon. This first setback put us quite a bit behind schedule, but when the shuttle driver passed us for the third time late in the afternoon he took pity and drove us to the end of the road. We’d hiked ten more miles than we thought we would for the day and ended up at the campsite well after dark. It was then that we realized our second mistake. We'd packed one less dinner than was required, oops. No worries, we were resourceful teenagers we thought, let’s look around this wilderness for some sustenance. We stumbled through the dark for a half an hour with nothing to show for it. Then Matt’s flashlight caught shimmering figures in the stream. The It was Kokanee trout--landlocked sockeye salmon that had long ago been stocked in Lake Chelan and swam up the creek to spawn. The fish seemed to be attracted to the light, but we had no fishing gear. Our hungry bellies didn’t let us give up so easily. We tried coordinated efforts to shine the light and lead the unsuspecting fish into the hands of the other person. Easier said than done; this method proved wholly unsuccessful. I was ready to retire for the night and live off the memory of our ice cream and pastry lunch. Matt asked for my pocket knife and began whittling a stick while I walked back to the tent. A short time later I heard a guttural, but triumphant scream. Matt ran back to camp grunting with an eight inch Kokanee flopping on the end of his hand carved spear! We "enjoyed" campfire blackened oily fish that we found to be raw on the inside. The hunger from miles of hiking provided the only seasoning.

The next day we got a late start. A very late start. We humped our gear up to the crest of the Cascades and arrived at the high point an hour after sunset. At least we had saved our last dinner. Based on the time and the rumors of the recent return of the Grizzly to the region, we decided to chomp our ramen uncooked while walking. The going finally eased as the grade turned downhill and we arrived back to sweet sight of my 1989 Toyota Camry in the parking lot shortly after midnight. It was in the days before cell phones so we stopped at a gas station and used a pay phone to allay the fears of our worrying parents and asked them to call our respective summer jobs to let them know that we were going to be late for work that day.

The trip made for my first real exposure to genuine type two fun and for stories told over and over. The mishaps and poor planning were overcome by feelings of accomplishment, memories of wild beauty, and a desire to do it over again. I wanted more, next time I wanted to go farther, and to replicate the feeling of freedom that came from depending only upon what I could carry on my own back.

Recommendations for Backpacking

Van

• Go minimalist and keep it simple by renting our AWD Toyota Sienna with 6 inches of clearance to get you to the trailhead. Include the bed option so you can transport up to five people, sleep at the trailhead inside the van the night before or after your trip, and still have plenty of room in the back for your backpacking gear.

Gear

You can rent our backpacking equipment if your are flying in or new to the activity. We choose the best in lightweight equipment:

• Women's Deuter Backpack
• Men's Zpacks Arc Haul Backpack
• Thermarest Neoair X-lite Pad
• REI Igneo Sleeping Bags
• Zpacks Duplex Two Person Tent
• REI Half Dome 3 Person Tent
• MSR Pocket Rocket Stove
• Jetboil Camping Stove

Local Destinations

We are happy to share more details when you get in touch:

• Lost Creek Wilderness
• Indian Peaks Wilderness
• Rocky Mountain National Park