uinta adventure v1.0

well, we're way behind in blogging! the next few posts will be about our july adventures. we've had tons of fun! and we have more adventures planned.

for the 4th of july weekend, dal had work off, so i took friday off as well. i'm sure ya'll remember dallin's little featurette about the adventure tent. well, we decided that it was time to test it's strength and character. see if it really belonged in the barker family. on july 2nd, after work dallin and headed out, USGS maps in hand, to conquer the unknown wilderness! little did we know how our camping trip would turn out. it was really INTENSE! but seriously, it was IN TENTS! (or tent. one. singular. we only took one. laugh fades...)

we drove up above kamas in the uintas to the mirror lake recreation area. we parked the car a little ways from Washington Lake and packed in. we planned to hike until it got dark and set up camp in a flat spot off the trail. i'd forgotten about dallin's superhero powers (ask my mom about those) until he pushed a tree down to make room for a campspot! we set up the tent that night, blew up our thermarest mattresses, and boiled water for hot chocolate over a whisperlite stove.

the next morning, we woke up early (that's the only way you can wake up camping, since it gets light before 6 a.m.), made breakfast and headed out to go fishing. the night before as we were walking, we thought that we'd made it down to the end of washington lake and planned to hike further down to tail lake and some others to fish, but once we got to the trail by the lake, we realized that we'd actually camped by tail lake the night before. the weather was a little chilly, so we kept our jackets on as we fished for a few hours. dallin caught 2 fish, but i didn't have much luck.

(i know this is getting a little long, so if you can't take it anymore, just scroll down to the bottom for pictures... we know that's all you want anyway!)

after a while, we headed back to the tent for lunch when it looked like it was going to rain. we cooked lunch on the whisperlite again and made it inside just as it started to rain. of course sitting in the tent made me sleepy and so i took a little nap. dallin was bored after about 10 minutes of course, so he just went back out fishing. i woke up an hour or two later and walked down to the lake to fish with him. he'd found a really clear spot that was pretty shady and the fish were jumping like crazy. dal caught another fish without me and then caught fish #4 right after i got there. after a few casts and moving around a bit to find a better spot, i finally caught a fish! and i'm proud to say it was bigger than all of the fish he caught! it still wasn't really that big, only about 8 inches long, i think. well... maybe it was a little bigger, like 2 feet long. yeah, i'm pretty sure i caught a 15 pound, 2 foot long fish. and we named it theodore. and then theodora.

well, to cut the story short, after we fished, we sat in the tent for about 2 hours because we couldn't think of anything else to do. we hadn't brought cards, or books, and we couldn't't go outside because we would have gotten eaten alive by the worlds most vicious mosquitoes. seriously, the were vicious. they bit through our clothes and left our bodies riddled with their deadly mark. (it looked like the chicken pocks on my back.) we decided to pack up and go home that night so we could celebrate the 4th of july with friends and family.

we think our trip was a success! the tent handled the rain beautifully and it is excited for our next trip.

we'd like to give a special thanks our sponsor dad/David Ellis Barker for all the gear he let us borrow and making this adventure possible! (i'm pretty sure the only thing we took that actually belonged to us was the tent...) someday, we'll actually own all the gear it takes to go camping, but until then, we thank the dad/the dave.