father's day weekend camping

for father's day weekend, we went camping up around mt. adams in southern washington.  it was a gorgeous weekend with perfect weather and good company.  it was nice to get away from the busy week and spend some time in nature with the family!  

mt. adams in the distance

we went on a hike around mt. adams up to a lake called "no name."  it was only about 6
 miles round trip, but it had some fairly steep areas.  there is always a few groans
but we made it!!  only emma got 1 blister. 

i loved looking for the wildflowers.  and i didn't have to look very far, they were
everywhere in full bloom!  i was in heaven!

we had to leave our path and walk through this meadow to make it over to the lake.
i thought it was a perfect spot for a little family photo shoot!

william did great snapping this one for me.

beautiful lake with a little island. even though the lake was really pretty, we didn't stay too long because we
were getting attacked by mosquitoes.  it was so bad!! we had put on bug spray
but we all got eaten up!  poor william had  10 bites on his face alone.

more pretty wildflowers.

hunter and ned waded out to the island.  

smiles at the end of the hike! success!  

issy loves to use her pocketknife!  

we found a pretty empty campground for father's day weekend. 

relaxing in the hammock.

issy loves the campfire and insisted that ned tell us a scary story! 

totally scared, can you tell?

one thing i love about camping is that ned does most of the cooking.
he loves to cook up meals in the dutch oven and even does all the clean up.
he made us some yummy breakfast mush(eggs, sausage, potatoes, cheese) and
some delicious corn on the cob in the fire. 

while we were sitting around the campfire in the dark, a elk came right into

camp.  it wasn't scared of us at all!  it was pretty wild.  it was a doe and she just walked

around looking at us and eating grass and then slowly walked out of camp.

i took a picture but it was so dark you can't even tell it's in the picture.

beautiful mt. adams!

love our matching hair.

  

we went on a fun adventure of spelunking this camping trip.
 a few of us had some reservations at first, but it ended up being quite
a bit of fun! 

there were quite a few rocks to climb over and some water to dodge but
thankfully NO BATS!

we crawled out from under this rock....

we found a stalagtite.

this picture was taken by hunter in complete darkness.  we turned off our head
lamps to see how dark it was and he took a picture with the flash on.  

this was without the flash and our flashlights on.

on sunday after our camping trip, the kids cooked ned steak, mushrooms and corn on the bbq along with
a delicious fruit salad.  i made ned pie for dessert and some homemade raspberry ice cream with raspberries from our
bushes. SO YUMMY!!!
we love you daddy!