Hey buddies guess what we did last weekend? That’s right, CAMPING AGAIN! Get ready for another 423847284 pictures of dogs and nature. Here’s Joshy and I all clean-faced and excited at the beginning of our easy 2 mile backpacking hike to Hyas Lake, a beautiful teal lake we have been to a few times before, in 2013 and 2014.

Cathedral Rock looming overhead on the trail. My pack was an easy-peasy 15 pounds, I think Josh’s was somewhere around 60. Maybe less! We have new lightweight camping chairs that we paid WAY TOO MUCH FOR at REI that have saved us a lot of weight.

Maggie and Bear Cub cool off in the gorgeous lake. I’m crazy about that teal color. The weather  was a little cooler this past weekend, less than 90 degrees.

I occasionally find heart-shaped rocks while camping, but on this trip I found a whopping three! During the end of our arduous hike uphill on Sunday I started to think that I saw even more heart-shaped rocks, but I suspect I was just beginning to hallucinate from exhaustion. You know how it is!

Thanks to near-constant sprays of spf 30 and “Off” bug spray (the scentless kind, which turned out to be practically useless), somehow Joshy and I avoided getting sunburnt. What this happy little sunbathing photo doesn’t show are the hordes of giant biting black flies that surrounded us the entire time, good Lord. Remind me to Google how to keep those awful things away if we decide to go to this lake again. It was ridic.

The flies were all over my poor little black pets as well. We took refuge in the lake often.

You put up with things like huge biting black flies when the view is this gorgeous!

Hot black pets. A hiker passing us on the trail on Sunday remarked, “You couldn’t have painted them white for the weekend?”

Maggie demonstrating her new “diving” technique for sticks. It’s a cute trick, but what she hasn’t figured out yet is that any stick that is on the bottom of the lake isn’t suitable for playing fetch with! Too waterlogged. Oh Maggie dog.

We had camp set completely up by 2 o’clock, so then for the rest of the day there was swimming and floating and reading and “hugging” and it was lovely. There was a huge number of cars in the parking lot, and we were concerned that the lake would be packed, but lucky for us most of the cars belonged to people more adventurous, willing to hike further to the many other lakes in the area. GO LAZINESS!

Of course, we’ll eventually get to those lakes, too. I promised my crazy Gonzo husband that the next time we drive up to that area, we could hike another 4.4 miles to Tucks Lake. As long as my pack weighs 15 pounds!

Saturday was the 4th of July, and despite all of the fireworks bans around we knew it would be nothing but CRASH BANG BOOM at the house and it seemed like a great idea to get out town for that–thinking of a certain Cub and her hatred of loud noises. No fireworks at the lake–the fire danger signs posted all around were at “Extreme”.

Sunset on Cathedral Rock, with perhaps a little “Toy Camera” filter thrown in.

More “Toy Camera”. I think I also pumped up the saturation. It only took me 1.5 years to notice that my camera has filters built in, bah ha ha siiiiiiiigh.

I noticed an orange lighter in my car, and before we left the car in the parking lot I asked Josh if he had packed a lighter. He said he had, but when it came time to fire up our little portable gas heater to heat up water for dinner there was no lighter to be found. We had some matches…that resisted being lit on any available surface. Josh actually strapped on his running shoes and ran all the way back to the car, and back, to retrieve the lighter. Oy vey. When in doubt: always bring a lighter.

We had freeze-dried lasagna (could not compare to my father’s lasagna in any way), and I had a caramel-covered Luna Bar and Josh had a Payday candy bar for dessert. I had purchased some tiny gold sparklers earlier in the week in Snohomish (one of the few cities where fireworks were permitted this year), and figured when the sun set, I would stand in the lake, swirl around a sparkler, and yell “HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!”

That was the plan, mind you. What actually happened is that I was so worn out I passed out at an unprecedented NINE THIRTY AT NIGHT, no Trazadone, no Xanax, just sun-and-hike-and-Old-Lady wiped. Josh’s plan to sleep on the beach was foiled…because he froze his cute round butt off and crawled, shivering, into the tent around midnight. HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

I’ll be back with pictures from day two, and maybe a few videos too.