Backpacking causes joy & pain at the same time! yes, folks it is an anomaly.

On Friday, Audrey and I woke up at 4:15 a.m. to get a good start on my day off. We were all packed up and ready to head out. Where were we heading you ask? About 3 hours from Kemmerer, to the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. We loaded up Maya (our husky) in the back of our Expedition and set out at 5:15 a.m. after we stopped at Maverick (a great gas station) to get some coffee.

We arrived at the trail head around 8:30 a.m. and started hiking into the wilderness at 9:00 a.m. Our plan was to hike into "Mirror Lake" spend the night, and then hike out the next morning and drive home to Kemmerer, so we could get cleaned up and ready for Church on Sunday. We saw a few people hiking out as we were going in, and they decided to enlighten us that they had seen plenty of bear tracks right around Mirror Lake. Awesome, I know.

It only took us about 2 and a half hours to hike in. The wind was very chilly even though there wasn't a cloud in the sky and the sun was out. We had some lunch (Tuna Lunchables) and then I wanted to try my hand at some fishing. Since I had bought a 0ne day license ($14 bucks cause I haven't lived in Wyoming for a year) I needed to catch some fish to get my money's worth.

After about 4 casts I had caught my first Rainbow Trout of the year! It was pretty good size. We fished for a while longer and I caught one more (and had 3 more on, but they got off). So we decided not to spend the night up there, because we would like to not get mauled by bears. The hike out when pretty quick and we decided to sleep in the back of our Expedition and cook our fresh Trout for supper.

Supper was fantastic. We had trout, pasta, corn, green beans, and coffee. A hot meal tastes so great up in the mountains. We got ready for bed, we have some sleeping bags that I bought on E-bay, which was a bad idea cause they were super cheap and now I realize why. The temperature dropped down into the lower 30's, and we were basically sleeping with nothing over us because the sleeping bags were so bad.

We had to keep starting the Expedition every once in a while so we didn't freeze to death. It also didn't help that we had hiked 10 miles in a day with packs on, we were sweaty, sunburned, and chilled to the bone. The morning didn't come soon enough. We decided to get up, change clothes, and drive to Pinedale to get some coffee. The heater and fresh coffee never felt so good!

All in all it was a great trip and I'm ready to go back when it's warmer at night! Basically next year!