Backpacking - Clear Lake

There aren’t a lot of places you can go in Colorado and be completely alone. Last weekend, Christine and I enjoyed having an alpine lake all to ourselves.

I had hiked to Clear Lake in the Colorado State Forest State Park solo last year when Christine was in Paris. I chose it then for the same reason I chose it this time: It’s the furthest lake out in that park and that hopefully discourages crowds.

What's missing? No sleeping pad
attached to the dog

We took a half day off on Friday to give ourselves time to get to the trailhead and get most of the way to the lake. The first few miles of the hike are pretty bland as you follow a dirt service road for a while. Christine stopped to stretch after a few miles, and I noticed that Kuzca’s sleeping pad was missing from the top of her pack. Uh-Oh. Neither of us could remember the last time we saw it on her, but we speculated that she lost it when she disappeared into the brush briefly a while back. We decided it was worth while to locate the pad, so Kuzca and I ditched our packs and jogged down the trail while Christine did some more stretching. Miraculously, I found it after about a half mile of backtracking. I wasn’t expecting to start my cyclocross running training so early. :)

On my recon trip last year, I made note of a nice camp site along that way. We were starting to run out of daylight so we decided to make use of that site. My guess is that it was set up by/for people who were doing trail work in the area. I wouldn’t generally talk about backcountry camp site amenities, but this site was well set up. First, there was a really nice flat spot on soft ground for the tent. It’s rare to be able to get all the stakes in our usually rocky soil. There was an ample supply of chopped wood, including some chopped logs that made great seats and work surfaces. There was even a small table. All this, and there was easy access to water in the nearby stream.

Tacos

For dinner, we decided to try making tacos. I packed in a package of frozen ground beef which stayed pretty frozen during the hike. We also brought some spinach, tomatoes, and some zucchini. Zucchini isn’t something we’d generally put in taco, but we had lots available from our garden so we thought we’d give it a shot. It ended up pretty good.

Christine hangs out by the lake

Saturday we bid a fond farewell to our campsite and hiked the final couple miles to the lake. It’s only a couple miles, but they’re pretty steep so I’m glad we didn’t do the whole hike in one shot. We got there before lunch and snacked before hanging out by the lake.

Ryan Fishing

The lake sees very little fishing, I’d imagine, because we were catching fish left and right. It was awesome. Christine caught her first fish on a fly rod. Pretty exciting. Even better, there was a perfect rock for the two of us to sit on together while fishing. Later, I caught a couple fish that we cooked over a fire for dinner.

Brownies

For an after dinner snack, we made brownies. As we wandered around the grocery store Thursday night looking for food ideas, we came across some Betty Crocker Warm Delights. They seemed perfect for some camp baking because they come in a couple small servings and you just need to add water. At camp, we added water and mixed it inside the packet. Then we put the batter in some silicon baking cups. I found these great Wilton Silly-Feet Baking Cups a while ago and they’re prefect for steam baking. The feet on them hold them out of the water and off of the bottom of the pan. The end result was a tasty, simple dessert. The only problem we ran into was that cleaning the silicon cups isn’t easy. We just packed them in a Ziploc and took them home dirty.

The highlight of the trip was the complete solitude we enjoyed. After we got to the trailhead on Friday, we didn’t see any other people until we started hiking back on Sunday. It’s rare to have a beautiful area like that all to ourselves, and we enjoyed the hell out of it. The weather was great, wildflowers were in bloom, fishing was awesome, and we even found some wild raspberries. Life is good.