Skills Hike 1 2009

Day 1 was the departure from Talapus trailhead to Talapus Lake for a sack lunch. That leg of the trip was torture as every one got accustomed to their heavy back packs. We continued hiking to Olallie Lake where we set up tents for the first night. The weather was perfect and we continued to get lucky with great sunny days for the rest of the trip. Dinner was teriyaki chicken and rice and it was the best.

For fun we played a card game called Village Idiot and it was a hit. One other funny part of this campsite was when one of the Scouts lost the tip of his fishing rod in the lake. (He probably didn't think it was so funny though). It broke the line as it was cast and it was long gone. He continued to fish the rest of the week with a much shorter rod. Not sure I ever saw him catch anything.

On day 2 we took the goat trail to reach the trail to Pratt Lake. The view from the trail back to the lake was super. We could also see Mt. Rainier in the distance. We had a delicious pizza bagel lunch at the lake but we hurried it because the flies were driving us nuts. One interesting sight on the trail was a crew maintaining sections of it. They did a nice job rebuilding it and clearing the trail of brush. We crossed the notorious Devils Club Ridge (part 1) to arrive at lower Lake Tuscohatchie. The Scouts grabbed all the good tent sites and as a result, the adults went looking for a bigger site. We moved the tents to the "swimming hole" on the north side of the lake. It was great. Dinner was a bit of very well done mac and cheese and hot dogs. We also took our first swim and felt nice and clean after two days of hiking. The top two inches of the lake were the warmest and we tried to make ourselves very flat and float.

Day 3 started with a hike and climb to Lake Melakwa . This was the clearest lake I've ever seen. We traveled around the lake to the group site on the far side. This is also the prettiest lake of all that we visited. The setting is awesome because it is surrounded by peaks. Everyone jumped in the lake as soon as possible. It was sooo cold that it was all we could do to get out as quickly as possible. Dinner was an Alfredo noodles with chicken. It was really good. After dinner we read The Legend of Melakwa (you'll need to make the trip to know more about that). The weather continued to be great so a few of us slept out under the stars and watched the satellites pass by and even saw a couple of shooting stars.

Day 4: That exciting day started off with a good breakfast of oatmeal, hot apple cider, and hot chocolate. At around 9:20 am, we decided to do a little day hike up Melakwa Pass, almost 1,000 feet vertical from Lake Melakwa. While climbing, we saw many views of Melakwa, Upper Melakwa, and the mountains. Also when we were hiking, we came across many ice patches where we used carabineers to scoop out ice for our bottles. After climbing for about two hours, we finally made it to the top of Melakwa Pass, where we saw from there not only what could be seen before, but two whole new lakes which one had lots of ice left in it (you think Melakwa was the coldest lake you would see).

On the way back down, we all decided to take a tree path down at first than taking the boulders, where we saw a one person campsite in the trees. Instead of taking a path west of the pass, we just took the actual pass down. Almost there, we saw a woman hiking up to Kaleetan Peak by herself with a day pack on. Once we got back to our camp, we ran into the other group and shared stories with them. Apparently, their pita bread for lunch had mold on it. We didn't have mold, but we had pita and summer sausage and dried mangoes for lunch. What we did were jumping into the lake, swam to a little rock island, caught frogs, chatted, worked on advancement, and fishing, but no luck.

Both of the groups had tortillas, rice, southwest chicken for dinner, and pudding for desert. I have to say that our cooking was really good. After dinner, we had things signed off for our books, cleaned up, and pumped gallons of water. To finish off the night, we did a little astronomy and shared stuff about the stars. After that, we all went to bed in our tents, and that was the great 4th day.

Day 5 started out strangely. We were all woken up about 7 am by a helicopter flying through the basin. It appeared to be looking for something but we couldn't tell what. After a quick oatmeal breakfast (again) we packed up and said good bye to the second Skills Hike team (they arrived yesterday). We hike down Denny creek to the trailhead and a stop at XXX Root Beer Drive-In for giant burgers and shakes (a foot high!).

Overall this was a great hiking trip. We all learned lots of new skills (cooking, cleaning, LNT, setting up and breaking down camp, how to make s'mores over a stove) and had fun doing it. The really really nice weather was a bonus and we all made great progress in our Scout Handbooks. - JPH and JTS

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