Early Season Backpacking at its Finest

Another month, another outing.
Ironically, the weather was better for our February outing than our March outing.
This time around we decided we would get a taste of some easy backpacking. The perfect place for this is Elkhorn Campground off the Dosewallips River Road. Several years ago the road was washed out about one mile from this campground, isolating what was once a drive-in campground.

Since it's on a road, it's easy to hike to. The first part of the hike has a little bit of vertical while you get around the washout, but once on the other side, it's easy road grade. I had hoped we would be at a low enough elevation that we wouldn't encounter snow, but it turned out my hope was in vain. It's alright, though, since that is part of the adventure of scouting. Since we all had work and school and stuff, we didn't get out until late afternoon Friday, so we did our hiking up to Elkhorn in the dark. We had plenty of headlamps and flashlights, so it wasn't very tough.

 

Originally, we were planning on staying Friday night at Elkhorn, then walking further up the road Saturday morning. I read that near the Dosewallips ranger station there is a great waterfall and some of the boys wanted to try reaching it. However, since this was our first attempt at backpacking, and the weather was worse than we thought it would be, we decided we'd had enough fun and packed up to head out.

I think it was a successful outing and I know pretty much everybody learned something new.
Stay tuned for more adventures!