Pingree Park

Our first camping outing of the year was to the Pingree Park / Comanche Peaks area north of Fort Collins. We chose the location this time because there are several good car camping spots.

As the first trip of the year, it was time to try out some new gear. First, the new tent:


It's a Black Diamond Skylight. The tent sets up a little weird, because the poles go on the inside of the tent. There's no separate fly, instead there's one attached that covers the front half (mesh part) of the tent. (The rest of the tent is made of the same material as the fly, and is waterproof.) So far so good. The tent is a little bigger than our old one and the walls go a little more straight up which means that you don't have a tent wall right up next to your face when you're sleeping.

Next, a GSI Double Boiler:

One of our motivations for trying the double boiler was to see if we could use it for baking. On this trip, we made some cornbread. It worked okay, but we'll need some more experimenting.

Finally, we tried out our new MSR DuraLite Frying Pan:

Pancakes are effortless with this pan, which is a huge improvement over our attempts last year. Chocolate chip pancakes were killer this morning.

One other goal for this trip was for Christine to learn how to fly fish. It's something we figured she could do even with a bum hip, and I'm excited she wanted to learn. Saturday evening, I gave her some instruction and we practiced casting in the grass near our camp. Sunday we found some water that she could practice casting on and she's picking it up quickly. Sometime soon I hope we can get out and catch some fish.