Jan and Lyn drive down to Salem, OR, to help Skye and Jared celebrate their 15th wedding anniversary. Skye and Jared host a square dancing hootenanny at the farm Jared manages. There’s a small band that includes a caller with a fiddle. Chris surprises Skye by coming up from California for the event. Everyone has fun dancing.
The party is also a chance for Skye and Jared to celebrate the half-birthdays of their sons Leif (5½) and Auden (2½).
Uncle rides are hard to beat.
Skye joins Jan and Chris for a short morning walk in Salem’s Riverfront Park, then Jan, Chris, and Lyn make a little midday trip out to Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast.
We have dinner in downtown Salem at an upscale pizza restaurant called Basil & Board. They have a nice rooftop dining area that has room for Leif and Auden to run around. Although it was pretty hot in Salem during the day, in the evening, it cools down nicely.
Angela, Jan, Liya, and Cheng-nan drive up to North Bend to pick blueberries at Bybee Farms. We each pick a small bucket of berries, and end up with 19 pounds. Now we have to figure out what to do with 19 pounds of blueberries.
The berry farm sits at the base of Mount Si. The clouds made the lower slopes of the mountain look pretty cool.
Jan and Bree take Cheng-nan backpacking to Baker Lake. Cheng-nan’s never gone backpacking before, and E-moon thought he might enjoy it. Jan picks an easy 2-mile hike up the east side of Baker Lake.
Jan, Bree, and Cheng-nan get to the Anderson Point campground. There’s no one else there (it’s a weekday), so they have their pick of spots. They set up in the northwest corner of the point looking out towards Mt. Baker. The morning clouds dissipate as the day wears on, and the sun warms everything up. The three go for a swim in the chilly lake.
We have a decent backpacking dinner of pasta bolognese and fresh skillet bread, then light a campfire and toast marshmallows. We read for a bit before getting ready for bed. Just before we get in our tent, we hear voices on the lake — a group of four kayakers are paddling around. They come close to our site, so chat with them. There’s a nearly-full moon tonight, so they’re going for a moonlight paddle. They point out that, although the moon isn’t hitting us yet, moonlight is already lighting up the top of Mt. Baker.
We have a perfectly clear morning, with a great view of Mt. Baker to the west and Mt. Shuksan to the north. We eat a breakfast of blueberry pancakes made with the fresh blueberries we gathered a few days ago, then pack up camp. The hike out is straightforward, and we stop in the small town of Concrete, WA, for lunch at Annie’s Pizza.
After 2 years, Jan and the girls finally complete the video game, “The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild”.
Jan had started playing back in the spring of 2017, and the other girls had started taking turns playing as well. That summer, we were in a position to finish the game, but all three girls wanted to be present when Jan fought the final battle at the end of the game. During a busy summer, it proved hard to gather everyone together on the same night. Meanwhile, the girls would continue to play on their own to collect more and more weapons and other gear that might be useful in the final battle.
However, once Jan had stopped playing for a few weeks, he lost interest in the game. And the passing of time meant that the muscle-memory required to fight effectively gradually wore away.
For the past two years, Bree would occasionally ask Jan when we were going to finish the game. Jan wasn’t sure he cared whether we finished the game or not. But when Nintendo indicated that the next Zelda game would pick up where The Breath of the Wild ended, Bree and Jan both agreed it would be good to finally complete the game. With Anya home for the summer, Jan decided to start playing again a little bit to remember how to play, with an eye towards finishing the game while Anya was still home.
This evening after dinner, Jan and the girls gather in the family room. Liya takes the controller and gets the main character, Link, equipped with all of the best weapons the girls have collected. Jan then initiates the final battle.
After two years, the final battle is predictably anti-climactic. It isn’t even particularly challenging, especially given the massive firepower the girls had amassed. The battle has the usual hallmarks of our collective Zelda playing: Jan mashing buttons trying to hit something, and the girls variously screaming out warnings, suggestions, or critiques. The enemy eventually dies — and then comes back to life in another form, and so has to be killed yet again — and then finally stays dead. We watch the credits, and then we are done.
Having just seen the completion of “The Breath of the Wild” video game yesterday, the girls become nostalgic for it. They decide to reset the game, and begin playing it all over again.
Jan and Chris reunite for their annual backpacking trip. Since we’ll be visiting Sierra Camp near South Lake Tahoe, the brothers come up with a plan to hike to camp from Donner Pass, some 52 miles along the PCT.
The weather in that part of California is always sunny and dry this time of year, which makes for easy camping. In lieu of a tent, Jan brings along an extremely small 4 oz. tarp, but even that turns out to be unnecessary.
Chris prepares a Moroccan couscous for dinner — and suprises Jan by pairing the couscous with a pinot noir wine. (The wine comes in a can!)
Jan and Chris hike to camp, day two. The pair continue their southward hike. The hiking is mostly along a high ridge that has occasional views of Lake Tahoe to the east. At various points, they cross the tops of ski resorts like Squaw and Alpine Meadows.
It’s a warm day. There are plenty of streams where they can fill up their water bottles, but in a dry stretch, it’s nice that they can fill up their bottles with snow. The Sierras had an unusually heavy amount of snowfall this year, so there are still patches of snow in late August, and the recently thawed meadows are full of wildflowers.
The notes Jan has for the trail describe an “epic” campsite on the edge of a alpine bowl facing Lake Tahoe, so they push for that site. The site is happily unoccupied, and indeed has an epic view.
Jan and Chris hike to camp, day three. As they hike south on the PCT, the brothers meet a fair number of PCT thru-hikers. Many of them started at the Mexico border and hiked up to the Sierras, but found the snowfall too heavy to proceed through the mountains. So they flipped up to the Canada border, and hiked south. These hikers are now a few weeks away from finishing their thru-hikes. Jan and Chris meet hikers from Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, and England, in addition to many U.S. hikers.
The pair stop for lunch and a swim at Richardson Lake, then make their way into the rocky lake district of Desolation Wilderness. They make their camp for night #3 on a bluff overlooking picturesque Lake Fontanillis.
Jan and Chris hike to camp, day four. The brothers have a nice breakfast looking out at Lake Fontanillis. They’re visited by a cheeky chipmunk intent on getting some breakfast scraps.
After breaking camp, Jan and Chris make their way up to Dicks Pass, the high point of this section of the PCT at 9400’. From there, it’s downhill to Gilmore Lake for a swim and lunch. They hike a final bit of the PCT, then leave the trail highway for the smaller Glen Alpine Trail that leads to Sierra Camp.
They make it to our Sierra Camp cabin around 3:30. Angela and the girls have already checked in, so we can all enjoy a little reunion.
Jan and Angela help Anya and Liya get packed up with gear for tonight’s Teen Overnight. Anya insists she’s got everything she needs. Later, after Anya and Liya leave for the overnight camping trip, Jan and Angela discover a small paper bag sitting on the floor in the middle of our cabin — it’s Anya’s lunch, which somehow didn’t make it into her pack.
Jan drives Chris back to his car at Donner Pass, then returns to camp.
Anya and Liya’s Teens group goes to “The Pots”: a beautiful river with cool swimming holes. Liya’s a little disappointed with the destination, because she’s been there so many times, but the destination was picked because it’s only a short walk and one of the teens is injured.
In past years the counselors prepared quesadillas for the teens. This year, they cleverly created an Iron Chef-style cooking competition — the teens have to cook quesadillas for themselves and the counselors, and the counselors will decide which group did the best. The original evaluation criteria are: Presentation, Taste, and Creativity. Based on experiences earlier this summer, the counselors add two more criteria: “Did you clean up?” and “Is the cheese actually melted?”
Anya and her friends cook up their quesadillas.
Bree is pretty happy with the set of girls in her Midorees kids’ group. She’s not thrilled with the group’s planned activity for today: a short but steep hike to Angora Lake which Bree has now hiked many times.
Jan offers to take her on a hike instead. The two of them also adopt Jan’s friend Greg, who missed the early departure of today’s organized “Long Hike” to Lake Aloha.
Jan leads Bree and Greg up the Glen Alpine road to the Tamarack Trail, and the three begin climbing the long, steep, rocky trail that climbs to a high ridge. Bree didn’t a great night’s sleep, so she’s more tired than usual, and has to keep stopping to rest a bit. We finally come out on top of the ridge, and connect up with the PCT.
When they stop to have a snack overlooking Echo Lakes, Jan and Greg ask Bree whether she wants to head back down to camp (3 miles) or continue on the planned loop (5.5 miles). Bree says she wants to keep going.
We hike a bit up the PCT and then down to Lake Lucille. Jan and Bree go for a swim. The lake is shallow, so it’s a nice temperature — but the lake bottom is about a foot of mucky silt, so getting in and out is not as fun. We have a lunch in the sun.
From this point, Jan’s plan is to locate the “Lost Trail” on the far side of Lake Lucille. A camp hiking leader had once taken Jan on a hike down the old pack trail, but it’s known to be a bit hard to find and follow.
As luck would have it, as we’re packing up from lunch, in walks the Long Hike hiking group that Greg had originally planned to hike with. The hiking leader, Tony, is surprised to find campers hiking on their own to such an obscure location, and with a plan to hike down the Lost Trail on their own. He’s also surprised to see a 12 year-old on such a challenging hike.
We follow Tony down the Lost Trail, and it immediately becomes clear how difficult it would have been to follow the trail on our own. At various points, Tony suddenly turns between some rocks to the right, or heads off between some bushes to the left — making important turns in the faint trail that we would never noticed on our own.
And when we reach the Glen Alpine trailhead at the bottom, Tony again proves helpful in leading us on a shorter back way into camp. We’ve tried to find that way several times, and have often gotten lost.
Jan and Bree celebrate completion of their hike with soft-serve pineapple ice cream from the camp’s soda fountain.
The Teens group goes sailing on Fallen Leaf Lake.
Anya has to leave Sierra Camp early to go back to Choate. Classes don’t start until next week, but Anya is going to be a dorm prefect (essentially a dorm adviser) and had to be there early for some training. We’re all sad to see her go.
Lyn joins us for the second half of camp. Jan picks her up in South Lake Tahoe. After settling in, she joins Jan and Liya in “Funyak” kayaks for a paddle to the mouth of Glen Alpine Creek.
Liya turns sixteen!
Angela joins the “Long Hike” group on a fairly challenging route: a scramble up Horsetail Falls, then a long walk all the way back to camp.
Bree and her friend Rani enjoy an inner tubing session on Fallen Leaf Lake.
Jan and Lyn walk to Glen Alpine Falls.
Bree waits for the start of the end-of-camp-week tradition, Capture the Flag.
Jan does a morning hike up to the summit of Mt. Tallac.
Liya, Jan, Angela, and Lyn paddle over to the “Jumping Rocks”. Liya swims over and jumps off the rocks.