Blanca Lake

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 drove around until we found the campsite that I had reserved and someone was in our spot! The nerve of some people! I grabbed our reservation paperwork to confirm that we were at the right campsite only to notice that I had made the reservation for the wrong weekend. We drove around to see if there were any open, unreserved campsites. Nope. Not a single one.

We looked up some other campgrounds on Josh's phone and went off to try and find one with an open spot. The next place was quite a way off the main road, which we were hopeful would mean open campsites. We drove to where the map said it should be and nothing. No campground. By now we are both starving and the idea of cooking the food in pot over our camp stove sounds very appealing but we haven't given up on having a fire. That means was HAVE to find a campground. So we try again. We drove to the next spot and again, no campground.  At this point desperation sets in and we care less about a fire and more about finding a suitable place to set up a tent. So Josh got out of the car and did a bit of exploring. Turns out there were some camping spots a little way off the road so we started setting up camp. It wasn't a designated campsite so we couldn't  have a fire, but by this time neither of us cared too much about that. We set up camp in the dark, cooked dinner over the stove, and went to bed. I should note that although Josh had plenty of reasons to be frustrated with me he never got upset. In fact he seemed to handle the whole situation better than I did. Thanks Josh!

The next morning we broke camp and did a 7.5 - 8 mile hike with over 3300 ft of elevation gain. It was a little rough. We chose the hike because Blanca Lake is a really cool color of turquoise/blue. About a quarter of the way up the mountain we hit a cloud bank and we were hiking in the clouds for the rest of the hike. When we got to the lake it was so cloudy we could barely make out the water. The clouds retreated a bit so we could get a partial view of the lake, but we could never see the whole thing.

Thanks to my poor scheduling skills and some thick clouds our weekend turned out a bit different than we had planned but it was still fun.

First view of the lake. Or rather a view of where the lake should be.

This is the clearest it ever got

Us

Josh found my attire amusing. Color layers are white, purple, red, blue, green, and purple fingernails. 

Wish we could have seen the entire lake but what we could see was pretty nice