Monday, June 17, 2013

Memorial Weekend

Once again, we ended up at Beavercreek for Memorial Weekend, in Twisp.  3 of the last 4 years have been here, but we really like it and since we were going horseless, we knew there would be some good hiking.

We had invited a few different sets of friends to come along, but none of them could make it, but we had a great time with our horse club friends that did go.  We struggled getting ready to go the week prior..  as we realized our camper was too small for our truck!  Didnt think that would be an issue until we put it on the truck, and saw that the cabover section was touching the roof of our truck!  After some creative thinking, we got it squared away.  But FYI, an upgrade in campers is now on our short-term list.  Which means we will most likely sell our camper this summer and have to be without for a few camping trips  :(  Oh well, we are perfectly capable of "roughin" it!

Our goal for Memorial was to hike the Pipestone.  We had ridden it 3 years prior and knew it would be a great hike.  I was feeling some apprehension about it though as I was fully aware it would be a 4+ hour venture.  Friday I was just not feeling in the mood to get out, legs felt tired and weak.. probably because I was up until 2am Wed night preparing for our trip on Thursday..  Things just were not coming together on Wed, had my WW meeting, my phone died, camper had issues.. so what was I to do?  I still had all that food to prep and clothes to finish washing before heading out the next morning.  :)

Derek went off hiking on his own for a while on Friday.  I dont know how long he was gone, I was lazy and hung out in the camper, nodded off for a while with Cooper!  It was nice having some down time, just me and the dog.  I was sad to have left Ellie behind that weekend but it would not have been right to leave Russell home alone.. poor guy is getting blinder and deafer by the day!  :(

Saturday morning was the day.  We were going to hike out to the Pipestone.  We got directions on which trails to take to get there and headed out.  We dropped down into Death Valley, a completely different vibe walking through there vs riding a horse through.  We had Cooper with us and decided to teach him a new command "follow" as we wanted him to learn to walk on the trail behind us and not running off into the snake filled bushes!  Coming back up out of D.V. was a steady climb, we stopped often for mini-breather sessions and at the end of that climb, realized we had just hiked the backside of Pipestone and missed it completely!  We were at the far West end of it, so we hiked up another section to get to the top of Pipestone which gave us a great view of the entire area.  So we did still hike to the Pipestone, we just didnt end up following the trail ALONG the Pipestone.  But thats OK as we had done the trail horseback and this route we took was one we had not seen before and the lookout where we stopped for lunch, was not an area we had explored on horseback either.
These are some horses that came from a barn around the other side of this hill.  They are on a trail that connects into the top ridge of the Pipestone trail.  They actually took a right and headed down to the intersection of the trail on the backside, which is the same way we had walked up.

Overlooking the Pipestone.  That big hill in the background is the one the horses had come around.  It was really windy up here, but it felt nice and we had an amazing view.
After a nice break and some great pictures, we headed back to camp.  We followed the old ditch-line above camp on the way back and then had to drop down to the campers, so we did a big circle hike, took us 4.5 hours!  Again, AMAZINGLY my back was NOT at all sore the entire hike!  I'm sure the 4 Ibuprofen I took was part of the reason, but that was a very long difficult hike and I was pretty proud of myself.  :)  The weather was not as hot as Burke Lake, it was perfect.

I think we wore Cooper out more than ourselves.  Poor dog tried to jump off the tailgate step that evening and his legs buckled and he fell on his face!  Overall we had a really great weekend.  Cooper still has a major infatuation with fires and at times have to really watch him because he has almost gone in!

At the time of that weekend, I think I was down almost 35 pounds.  Today I am down 37.  Not a lot of change lately, its been an up/down rollercoaster for me.  Good decisions, bad decisions...  But I continue to work on it and am proud that I've lost that much so far.  I continue to work on re-training myself, its a daily battle.

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