There's a Reason its Called Adventure

We really like to go on adventures.  There is something really fun about heading off on your own, having to make your own decisions, being free to be spontaneous.  Erin and I have never been fond of tour guides who ensure you have the optimum experience, public camp sites that try to be wilderness but take away all the wild, or any of those things.  We'd rather have an adventure.  We have had lots of wonderful adventures, but the thing about adventure, sometimes it just doesn't turn out.

Our plan was to go camping this weekend.  We have been busy and hadn't had a lot of time to plan out a spot, but picked beautiful lake kind of last minute.  We headed out in the Jeep this afternoon and drove up to Fall River Road and from there left the beaten path and headed out the Rainbow Lakes 4x4 road to Chinn's Lake.  It was a nice drive up to the lake, a little bit of a rough road, but no challenge for the jeep.  We started to get nervous though as we saw lots of people camping along the side of the road.  This was supposed to be a wilderness experience, right?  Well, we arrived at the absolutely beautiful lake (it really was beautiful) to find probably a hundred people camping around the lake and some idiot shooting a fully  automatic (really) rifle at a rocky hillside (bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang)  At least his girlfriend had ear protection...  We took one look at the pretty lake and got the heck out of there.

Although somewhat thwarted, we figured we could handle this.  There were lots of other 4x4 roads in the area, with nice streams running along and crossing them, there had to be some great camping spots around.  So, we headed out of the madhouse back to Fall River road and took a different turnoff.  We were immediately relieved to find no one around.  We headed up a bit more challenging 4x4 road in search of the perfect camping spot.  We passed a few likely spots, but  had scoped out a few areas that looked good on the map so we forged ahead.  This is where the adventure part comes in.  We had a map, a good map, we had a compass, we even had my blackberry which gives GPS coordinates.  We had so many different roads going in different directions that weren't even on the map, we were lost.  The thing about our map, it didn't label any of the roads, and didn't show a lot of the roads that were there.  How could we get lost, as "prepared" as we were?  Well, when we got home I found this map from the forest service that shows some of what this area looked like.

Even this map doesn't show all the roads, fortunately there is also this handy table...

Somewhere in there we took a wrong turn.  After 5 hours of driving, we still hadn't gotten where we wanted to be and found ourselves back on a major road, unsure of how we had gotten there, but finally not lost.  Erin looked at me and said, "Let's go home."  I thought it was a great idea.

So, dinner was had at our neighborhood playground, and Xander ran and played and slid down the slides and laughed.  It was a great evening.

We will go camping next weekend.  Maybe somewhere we have been before, maybe somewhere new.  Regardless, it is sure to be an adventure.

-Jake