1000 Lakes Wilderness

Up in the mountains to the west of our home you can find Thousand Lakes Wilderness.  We tried taking a trip up to Thousand Lakes Wilderness earlier this year, but its pretty high up there in elevation and the snow kept us from getting too far.  Yesterday we decided to try getting there again.  What's nice about this wilderness is it is literally across the highway from our house.  So we jumped in the truck and drove 9 miles up a dirt road to the Tammarack Trailhead. 

We weren't too prepared knowledge wise for this hike because all the information I read was pretty vague on how long the trail was.  Our hope was to make it to Eiler Lake, which is the biggest lake in the wilderness, but we really didn't know how long it would take us to get there, so we weren't sure if we were going to make it to our destination or not. 

Infact once we got to this lake, which was more like a pond, we had decided we had had enough.  It wasn't the big blue beautiful lake I had imagined... instead it was more like a swampy mud puddle... but we settled.

Lucky for us though, a Wilderness Patrol Man happened to be hiking the trail too, so we were able to ask him how much further Eiler Lake was.  He said less then 5 minutes!  Can you imagine how mad and disappointed I would have been to find out that we turned around to go home less then 5 minutes from our destination??  So we packed up our lunch and tromped on to find this....

B-E-A-UTIFUL!!!

And of course our experience wouldn't be complete if Bo didn't go swimming....

Happy Boy!

By now it was starting to get late and Brodie was starting to feel like this:

So we decided to head home.  Turns out we hiked 3 miles in to get to this lake, so inevitably, we had to hike 3 miles back out!

Bo gets the Dad of The Day Award for carrying Brodie like this for the whole 3 miles back to the truck so he could sleep