View allAll Photos Tagged backpack
Everyone has a place or two that they want to keep secret. This is definitely one of ours. Paul and I went back to an old stomping grounds for a week long backpacking trip to celebrate his 50th birthday. Our original route was cancelled due to a fire in the area, but Plan B turned out great. We caught some cutthroats, saw 5 black bear, 5 rattlesnakes, osprey, eagles, big Chinook salmon and the Perseid meteor showers. The weather was warm for carrying heavy packs, but at least a couple rain storms drenched us. There was a microburst that came through the area one afternoon, like a freight train, that had us watching multiple trees busting over. Luckily the tall cedars, douglas firs and ponderosa pines at our camp bent, but did not break. An awesome trip in an amazing place with a great friend.
The Backpacking Adventure for Teens began with 2 days of classroom, practicing with gear, and hiking near Los Alamos.
Over 130 students came to the Career Services Backpack to Briefcase event participating in speed networking, real part time job interviews, and enjoying the Theater groups presentation of Interviews Gone Wild.
We followed the trail out of Rock Harbor heading southwest along the shore, aiming for a little campground called Three Mile. Three Mile is, not surprisingly, three miles away from Rock Harbor. I feel like most Isle Royale backpackers think a three-mile hike from Rock Harbor the first day is a little wimpy, so the majority aims for a campground another two miles past that called Daisy Farm. This leaves the lean-to shelters at Three Mile for wimps like us.
If you've been following this page for a long, long time, you might recall that we've tried backpacker camping a few times, and it's almost always ended in disaster. We had some success when we came to Isle Royale in 2011, but that just involved going to Three Mile and back. (And then getting stranded an extra night because the boat didn't run.) Any real attempt at backpacking resulted in pain, either because we tried hauling 50-pound packs five miles up a vertical cliff or because we spent a night getting attacked repeatedly by storms while trying to sleep in a leaky tent. We're not really good at true backpacking, and we have almost no experience at anything lasting longer than a night.
But our past failures have taught us some lessons, and they're teaching us more all the time. For instance, that pack on Robin's back is about 10 pounds lighter than it was the last time we tried this, coming in at 31.49 pounds. My own pack weighed 40.37 pounds. I still think we could shave about 20% off those totals if we tried for less redundancy, but that's better than it was before.