Bree at camp with Bubbles, the pony.
Liya at camp with Rocky, the horse.
Anya and Liya are doing a parkour camp this week. (Parkour = a sport where one jumps, climbs, runs, etc., over or through various obstacles.) By mistake, we’ve signed them up for the “Basics Plus” class, one notch up from the beginner’s class. They do fine in it the first day, so they’re allowed to stay in it for the week.
In the camp, they do a great deal of jumping and other physical activity. They’re a bit sore the second morning, and by the end of the second day, they’re so sore that Anya complains about having to step into the car, or climb down a sidewalk curb onto the street.
Anya and Liya ponder the question: if two worms both want something, but only one of them can have it, how do they peacefully resolve the dispute? Humans sometimes play Paper-Scissors-Rock, but worms don’t have hands. However, the worms can probably arrange their bodies into distinctive shapes.
This gives rise to a game that even humans can play called “Wuh-uh-urm” (like “worm”, but stretched out to three syllables). On the “urm”, both worms (or humans) arrange their bodies (or index fingers) into one of three shapes. These are: “stick” (straight out), “hill” (bent), or “camel” (pressing down on something to make a pointier shape than the hill).
Anya and Liya cannot, however, come to agreement on which shape beats which shape. Liya believes, for example, that stick must clearly beat camel, because a rider can beat a camel with a stick. Anya maintains that camel beats stick, because a camel can just step on a stick to break it.
The fact there is no agreed-upon definition of their precedence rules for this game does not deter Anya and Liya from playing it numerous times.
Anya and Liya end their week of parkour camp with an outdoor day at Volunteer Park. Liya’s favorite move she learned this week is called “Cat to Cat”: a jump from a hanging position on one wall that ends in a hanging position on an opposing wall.
Liya sees Jan using the digital kitchen scale, and is interested both in its precision and its ease of use. She sets about weighing all her stuffed animals, recording their weights, and looking to see who’s the heaviest and lightest. Here she weighs Caramel the bear, who’s pretty heavy, but Rainbow Octopus turns out to be the heaviest of them all. The tiny green sea turtle named Peaceful is the lightest.
While Liya and Bree are spending the days this week at a bouldering camp, Anya’s at home finding various ways to keep herself amused. She decides to try printmaking on her own. She draws a picture of a whale that she wants to print in three colors. She transfers the drawing to pieces of foam, and mounts the pieces on cardboard, taking care to position everything with respect to a reference corner so everything will line up. She then uses stamp pads to ink the three foam/cardboard blocks in blue, black, and silver ink, then presses the inked foam on a white piece of paper. She ends up with a fairly nice whale on the first try. The lines from the corrugated cardboard show up, but that only serves to get the final print a bit of texture. She happily prints a bunch of whales.
Jan does a two-night solo backpacking trip to Spectacle Lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. He recently read a newspaper article about the Pacific Crest Trail, a north-south trail running from Mexico to Canada across California, Oregon, and Washington. To his knowledge, he’s never hiked any of the PCT in Washington, so he wanted to see some of it. He starts at a trailhead north of rustic Roslyn, WA, and stops for lunch at Pete Lake, a popular family campground. After that, the trail fords Lemah Creek, and makes its way south along the PCT up to a ridge. Jan meets some PCT section hikers: people hiking the PCT in pieces, rather than all at once. Spectacle Lake turns out to be as beautiful as its name promises. Popular, too — there are at least 30 other people camped out on a small peninsula sticking out into the lake. While numerous trip reports Jan read before the hike had strenuously warned about clouds of mosquitos, by mid-August things have happily dried out enough that the bugs aren’t bad at all.
Jan’s friend, James, celebrates his birthday with an “Escape the Room” event. This is a puzzle-solving challenge in which a group of people (in this case, 10) are physically locked in a large room filled with clues. They are given one hour to solve the clues and find a hidden key that will let them escape from the room. The puzzles turn out to be pretty interesting, and the group manages to successfully escape from the room in about 52 minutes!
Morning at Spectacle Lake.
Heading down from Spectacle Lake, the Pacific Crest Trail crosses the Lemah Burn: an area burned in a 2009 forest fire. The remaining trees are all standing, grey sticks, but there’s now a carpet of wildflowers beneath them.
Liya takes Jan on a hike to Rattlesnake Ledge. Even though it’s one of the most popular hikes in the Seattle area, Jan’s never been — but Liya has. A few weeks ago, she did a hiking camp run through her school, and on the last day they did the Rattlesnake Ledge hike. It’s not far, just under 2 miles each way, although it does climb quite a bit. Along the way, Liya stops to exercise her bouldering skills on some large boulders. The day starts out cool and cloudy, then clears as they get to the ledge. After exploring down in “The Crevice” (a large crack in the rock), they hike a bit further up the trail to a second, higher ledge, where they eat lunch.
Liya enjoys bouldering. At the end of the Rattlesnake Ledge hike, she leads Jan over the Rattlesnake Lake, where a huge boulder sits at the water’s edge. She manages to climb, traverse, and scramble up on top.
Sabriya’s week of art camp ends with an art show.
A watercolor by Bree.
We head to Sierra Camp for our third year of family camp. We fly to Sacramento, then drive a little over two hours along a beautiful road up into the Sierra Nevadas to Fallen Leaf Lake. The trip goes smoothly, and we’re a bit early for check-in. As soon as we’re in our cabin, we unpack everything, then head down to the boat dock for the first paddling around on the lake. It’s fun to be back, but it’s slightly bittersweet — each of the girls has a good friend from the past two years who was unable to come this year.
Angela tries water skiing for the first time. During the twenty minute lesson, she starts to get the hang of it, but doesn’t quite manage to get up.
Jan and Angela do a hike to Aloha Lake in Desolation Wilderness. Getting there is half the fun: our hiking group drives to Lower Echo Lake, then takes a boat taxi across Lower and Upper Echo Lake. The two lakes are separated by a tiny river, and the boat has to navigate very carefully to get through. It feels a bit like Disney’s “Jungle Cruise”. The hike itself is nice, and includes a bit of the Pacific Crest Trail. Aloha Lake turns out to be surrounded by bare granite rocks, giving it the appearance of a lake on the moon.
Sabriya loses her first tooth! It’s been wiggly for a few days, and finally pops out as she’s standing on the boat dock.
Anya tries water skiing — and gets up the very first time. Her instructor has her hang off a boom alongside the boat for a few minutes, and she seems so comfortable, they quickly switch to having her try skiing behind the boat. She pops up the first time, no problem, then does it again.
Back in the boat, Anya’s elated — and shivering. (The lake’s pretty cold.) Her instructors, Marcus and Annabah, are delighted with out how quickly she got up; they say it’s the best lesson they’ve done all summer.
Angela takes a second shot at water skiing, and is happy to finally get up out of the water.
Wednesday at camp is family Beach Day.
The only problem with swimming out to a floating dock is, if you climb out to dry out and enjoy the sun, there will come a time when you have to get back into the clear, chilly water.
Bree wading at the lake’s edge.
Liya gives water skiing a try too. One of the instructors, Kevin, gets in the water next to her so he can coach her as she rides out on the boom. She has fun, even though she doesn’t end up spending any time behind the boat.
Bree gets some time behind the boat on an inner tube. She likes the bouncy parts, not the get-sprayed-in-your-face parts.
Jan takes Bree and her friend Rani on a walk / very short hike to Lily Lake. Rani’s parents join in, along with Rani’s sister, Jaya. Liya comes too, and brings along her friend, Claire, making it a hiking party of 8. Jan decides to attempt the back route to Lily Lake, which starts behind our cabin. When we tried this two years ago, we got a bit lost. This time, we get to the same spot where we lost the trail — but this time, a GPS and mapping app help us pick up the trail again. The trail is faint in places, goes across a stream, and finally comes to a giant puddle we have to walk around, but we make it to Lily Lake just fine. We return to camp by the main road.
Jan joins this week’s “Long Hike”, 12.5 miles to Jabu Lake. Here the group stops to look back up Desolation Valley to where we started at Fallen Leaf Lake (visible in the upper right).
Jabu Lake, one of the highest alpine lakes in Desolation Wilderness.
Liya turns 11! She celebrates her birthday at camp once again. A group of singing counselors deliver her preferred camp dessert: a pie.
Before leaving camp, we make a final walk around the south end of Fallen Leaf Lake to the marina. On the way to Reno to catch our late afternoon flight, we stop in Carson City at a nondescript roadside Mexican restaurant called El Charro Avitia, which turns out to be fantastic. After lunch, we still have gobs of time before our flight, so we spend some time at the Reno Barnes & Noble bookstore before finally making our way back home.