This past weekend, Chris and Kevin tagged us along with their backpacking trip. We decided to do 1 night backpacking trip.
This was my first backpacking trip after a long time.
To get to the trailhead, Trent, Tsali and I rode with Chris in his 4×4 truck. This was also the first time for me to go 4×4 off-road kind of ride. It was very shaky and fun. My van won’t be able to get even 10 yards on this tough terrain road. Then all of us including Chris switched to Kevin’s Tacoma truck when the road was getting too skinny to fit Chris’s truck. It took us more than an hour to get to the trailhead on this 4×4 road.
Then the real hiking began.
The trail is an in-and-out trail and considered a hard trail on All Trails. And I now know why. You will only be on the trail for the first half… then after that, you will no longer find the trail because of the down trees from old ages and previous avalanche. You will have to go free style and find your way without the trail for the second half of the trail. Because of that plus how hard it is to get to the trailhead, we didn’t see a lot of hikers on this trail. We only passed one young hiker that went up there for an early day hike.
Surprisingly during this time of the year, we spotted all kinds of mushrooms on this hike. I hiked even slower than usual trying to spot and pick up edible mushrooms.
More than that, with Kevin’s help, I saw 1 mountain goat with his binoculars. It was amazing.
We spent a night right in the valley next to North Apostle peak. The view was stunning. Chris cooked some rice and chicken soup. We put Porcini mushroom I found on the way up in the soup and we all enjoyed that soup for dinner. We had some good selection of booze from Whiskey, Tequila, to Scotch to keep us warm before going to bed.
The next day, I hiked up from our camp site to look around and found mountain goat hair on a bush. The hair was surprisingly soft. On the way out, we spotted 2 moose.
We did a total of 11 miles on this trip.
