Salmon

Cory couldn't wait any longer. He's been dying to go camping since the middle of February. So we packed up our gear and headed out last weekend. We stayed in North Fork (that's really the name of the town - if you can call it a town). The campground was really pretty - it backed up to the Salmon River. Note that it still looks like winter around here. Snow on the ground and no leaves on the trees.

The purpose of the trip: to scout out possible bear hunting sites. Yup. He's determined to get one this year. So we trekked through the wilderness, encountered some snow-covered trails and hit a rock that had fallen from the mountain onto the highway (I'll come back to this later).

We saw this herd of wild sheep. They look pretty malnourished from the winter. Good thing there's some grass for them to eat now!

And I had to document Cory's first "waste dump" effort. Yuck!

We left the campsite around 7:30 p.m. and headed home. Around 10:30, in the middle of nowhere, the front tire blew. Remember the rock that we hit earlier? Apparently it really damaged the tire. Thankfully, Cory managed to keep control of the truck so the trailer didn't start rocking too bad. We left the truck running for about an hour while Cory was changing the tire (because he was afraid of the battery dying). The spare tire was pretty flat and Cory tried to convince me that it just looked a little low since we were sitting on an angle. Whatever. Don't patronize me. I know a flat tire when I see one. But we didn't have any choice but to carry on. We didn't have cell service and we hadn't seen anyone pass by to help us. And since we had left the truck running, we were about out of fuel. So we limped down the road to Lone Pine - the sign said it was 44 miles away and we figured we could make it that far.

Well, we did make it to Lone Pine but it turns out that Lone Pine consists of a gas station with a little diner attached. They have one gas pump (no diesel) that doesn't take debit cards and they were closed by the time we got there. The next closest town, Mud Lake, was 33 miles away and we were really low on fuel at that point. We decided to stay in Lone Pine and attempt the drive to Mud Lake in the morning. We figured that if we ran out of fuel, someone would see us and stop to help. But when we went to crawl into the trailer and go to bed, we realized that the keys to the trailer were missing. Sweet! I seriously started praying so hard to find those stupid keys. I was exhausted and cold and couldn't imagine spending the night in the back of the truck when we had a perfectly good trailer to sleep in. After some serious digging (and praying), we located the keys. They had lodged up underneath the cup holder. Whew!

I'm happy to report that we did make it to Mud Lake on Sunday morning. I think we blew into town on fumes. We got fuel and air for the tire and finally headed home. Not bad for our first camping adventure of the summer. :-)