4th of July snowball fight

[soberups]

We went camping for the 3 day weekend at a favorite spot of mine up in the high Cascades just to the west of Mt Jefferson. This is "dry camping" in the wilderness at an unimproved (no running water) campsite next to a tiny mountain lake on a gravel road about 10 miles above the main highway between Salem and Bend. Very few people know about this lake, and even fewer are willing to make the drive and deal with the challenges of "dry camping", so it is very quiet and secluded even during the summer season.

The spot we go to is at about 4200 feet of elevation. It was perfect weather, about 80 degrees, clear and sunny....and there was still SNOW on the ground in the shady spots between the trees. We were able to have an honest-to-God snowball fight on the 4th of July in shorts and T-shirts and swimsuits. My wife's family came up to join us so there were a couple of children in camp who thought that a snowball fight on the 4th was waaay better than the fireworks (no fireworks allowed in the woods due to fire danger) that they would have been doing back in the city.

 

[moreluck]

So, when there's still patches of snow, but warm weather.....does that 'trick' the bugs or are they still around........like mosquitoes & those kinds??

 

[soberups]

So, when there's still patches of snow, but warm weather.....does that 'trick' the bugs or are they still around........like mosquitoes & those kinds??

The bugs were pretty bad in the evenings, I think they had just hatched. Once you get a campfire going and spray some mosquito repellant on, its no big deal though.

Here is a picture of the lake. In the far left corner you can still see some of the snow. It is beautiful up there.

 

[moreluck]

We used to camp all the time when the kids were little.....at FallBrook, just outside of Idaho Falls. It was actually an area where the ranchers would bring their cows for summer pasture. There was a great stream for rainbow & brown trout.....we cooked fish over the campfire. The best meal was breakfast and the smell of bacon frying outdoors. We had a 2' square metal cooking piece that mounted on a stake and could swing over the fire. Some metal worker in Montana made them for campfire cooking.

Once the bacon was fried, then there was grease......threw in the hashbrowns and lastly did the eggs. Everything tasted soooo good up there.
Mosquitoes were kept away as best we could with the products available at that time. I was always more worried about deer ticks.

Also saw our first (non-caged) moose at the stream.......ugly as hell, but interesting.

There were no facilities......we had 50 gal. of water and it had to last....easy on a short weekend, but harder on those longer holiday weekends. The 4 mile road to where we camped was just dirt.....15MPH tops.