September-October, 2021
Ah, the first morning in a campground always feels good. I’ve always had a good night’s sleep. I’m in a new place with new things to see and do. This morning I got up, got dressed, and even before breakfast I stepped outside my door to see my world. The lake was gorgeous (as you saw in the last blog post). When I turned to walk the 30 feet or so back to the trailer from the edge of the lake, there was Towhee the Trailer (and the big white truck), waiting for me. What a great spot.
So then I had my breakfast. 🙂
And then I walked over to get my friends who were camped here too, so we could go for a little hike this morning. In the photo below, Towhee the Trailer and the big white truck are way on the left side of the photo. My friends and their big white SUV and their Escape trailer are on the very far right side of the photo. And the path/road out into the wilderness was behind where I was standing to take the photo.
Let’s go!
And so … off we went! It’s always fun walking out a path or a road into the wilderness when you don’t really know where it goes. State park signs along the way made us feel comfortable. But it’s still an exploration into the unknown. And it was so pretty.
Photo below … looking back towards Pearrygin Lake. Look real close and you can see some small white dots in the very close extreme far right corner of the lake … that’s our campground.
Pearrygin is pronounced either “PARE-uh-jin” (with a soft “j”) or “PARE-uh-gin” (with a hard “g” as in “get”). I heard it pronounced both ways by people I thought were locals.
Walking along, looking at everything, eventually we came to a fork in the road and took the road/path leading past the old building below, with a single stand-alone gate under a tree but with no fence in sight.
Just past the old building was one tree and an old yellow truck. Heaven knows how long that truck has been parked out here, but I bet she has stories aplenty from many years of work from long ago.
We explored that area a bit, and then found a single track path that led up around a hillside that overlooked the lake. We figured there must be a connection with another path leading back to the campground, but we weren’t at all sure of that. That was fine with us. The countryside and the plants here on the eastern side of the Cascades are so different than what we’re used to where we live on the west side of the Cascade Mountains that we were fascinated by this new environment.
All of that was so pretty and so interesting. I know what some of the trees are, but I don’t know what any of the shrubs or smaller plants are.
As expected, we made more choices about which path to take when the trail forked. By and by, we ended up on the same road back towards the campground that we had used on our way away from the campground.
We weren’t really worried since we were in a valley with the stream that fed the lake so we couldn’t really get lost. But, if we had gotten lost, this little fellow below (Finn) who is part of the family of my two friends (you know how pets are, they ARE family) … anyway, I turned around at one point to find Finn herding us back to the campground.
What? Is it lunchtime Finn? Time for a nap? I’ll vote for both of those!