Outdoor Travel Geek

Category: camping trips

  • family camping

    For those who read this blog on a regular basis (all two of you), it’s probably pretty obvious that I don’t post very often about my family. I think the last post about family was from Christmas, when I went hiking with my parents. On that day I had resolved to go on a trip…

  • convict lake

    This weekend I was originally planning to go to Yosemite with some people from my church. We had a permit for Half Dome, so a group of us were planning to do that epic hike. In addition I had some friends who wanted to do Cloud’s Rest. So I was looking at something like back…

  • lewiston lake

    Fourth of July fell on a Thursday this year, so most people took Friday off to make it a four day weekend. With the weather being so hot lately, a camping trip at a lake sounded like a good idea. We ended up at Mary Smith Campground on Lewiston Lake, which is just outside of…

  • lassen peak revisited

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    This weekend I went to Lassen National Park with a few friends. We left Friday after work and got into camp pretty late at night. The campground was pretty crowded and the campsites were pretty close together, so I guess we were a little too loud for the people around us who were trying to…

  • hat creek

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    My friend Joe and I have been talking about doing a fishing trip to Lassen for a couple of years now. We finally made it happen this weekend. We went to Hat Creek in the Lassen National Forest. Joe caught a pretty nice sized trout. Todd caught a pretty nice trout. Ray caught a pretty…

  • training in tahoe

    In a couple of weeks I have a permit to hike Mount Whitney, which is the highest point in the continental United States. It’s a pretty long hike– 22 miles round trip and about 6,000 feet in elevation gain. So lately I’ve been trying to hike more to get into shape for this grueling hike.…

  • cloud’s rest

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    Last year I finally got to hike up to the top of Half Dome, crossing one of the world’s epic hikes off of my bucket list. I was hoping to do the hike again this year, so at the beginning of April I applied for a permit. This year they changed to a lottery system,…

  • glacier national park

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    Often when car camping for multiple days in a row there’s a bunch of leftovers. Those leftovers are great when thrown into a pot with some ramen noodles. In this case we had some leftover seafood soup from the Korean restaurant we ate at outside of Seattle. It made for a really tasty breakfast. It…

  • crater lake

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    I think part of the reason why I like road trips is because my family used to go on them when I was a kid. I have good memories of road trips in our family minivan. My dad would be driving, my mom would be riding shotgun and my bro and I would each have…

  • lava beds

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    Tonight we’re staying at a campsite at Lava Beds National Monument. The drive from Burney Falls to Lava Beds was pretty ridiculous. The GPS kept wanting to take us on dirt roads, and for a long time I kept trying to force it to recalculate by continuing on paved roads. Finally I just gave up…

  • burney falls

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    A long journey began today. Gid and I went to the Sacramento airport to pick up a rental car for a long road trip. We had reserved a compact car, but we ended up upgrading to a Prius V. My first impressions of the car are that it accelerates really slowly and the handling is…

  • emeralds, rubies and hobos

    emeralds, rubies and hobos

    I have been to Emerald bay a few times now and the experience has been different each time. This time it was with some friends from college. I first started going to church in college, so these were among my first church friends. I’m not sure why this area is called Emerald Bay. Maybe it’s…

  • curry cabin fever

    I think most people know that I love to be outdoors. One of my favorite places to go is Yosemite. People come from all over the world to visit Yosemite and for good reason– there’s few places in the world with so much amazing scenery packed into such a small place. The problem with Yosemite…