Life with the Conleys

I know what you are thinking, "Great, another post about hiking. Don't they do anything else?" Well, no. We don't do anything else BUT this isn't just a hike post. We went camping too. :) And thanks to me, the camping part is a story worth telling. Since our attempt at an overnight on Labor Day weekend was a bust we were determined to make it work this time.  It gets dark too early now to leave work and have enough time to backpack in, so our plan was to car camp near the trail head and do the hike the next day. I started looking at different places to camp and found out that a burn ban was in effect, which means that you can't have a campfire unless you stay in one of a few designated campgrounds. Campgrounds are not my favorite but we really wanted to have a fire because camping without a fire is crappy, and we needed a fire since foil dinners are tough to manage without one. Friday after work we set out and arrived at the campground around 7:30pm. We drov...

Last weekend Josh and I planned on an overnight backpack trip. Sadly neither of us could get off work early on Friday and hiking in the dark to a new place that may or may not have had available campsites seemed like a bad idea. In retrospect we should have gone up on Friday night because the trail was easy and there were plenty of places to camp. Oh well, it was still a delightful day trip. We started hiking just after 8am and it took an hour to get to lake. Josh started fishing as soon as he could. He caught some fish (3 to be exact) but they were all real small. The weather was beautiful while he was fishing and the sky was nearly cloudless. After an hour or so a few clouds started to come in so we decided to hike to the top of peak on the side of the lake to try and get a nice view  before any more clouds came in. Turns out we should have hiked to the top of the peak and then fished because by the time we made it to the top Mt Rainier was partially hidden in clouds. It was sti...