Salmon Lake Hike + Camping

Corey, Britta and I went hiking and camping this past weekend. Corey and I hiked about 20 miles which means that Brit Brit probably went 24 miles or so and the pic above was the end of the second day...she has so much energy.

Salmon Lake is a great hike, long, but good! Another plus is that it's relatively close to D-town. You just go to the Silverthorne exit, go right, take a left at the Wendy's and follow the hill up to Buffalo Mountain Drive until it dead ends, take a right up the hill and look for parking.

We let Brit out of the car, let her off her leash and she was off sniffing and running, SHE LOVES HIKING!/she loves being off leash. I wish she acted so good in the city, I guess there's just too much going on in Denver for her to roam off leash (i.e. squirrels + cars). The first meadow that we came to was FULL OF SKEETERS :( They ambushed us, all of a sudden they were all over us, we walked/ran for 5 minutes....and then realized we were too out of breath to continue at that pace so we slowed down. But the skeeters were still there. They eventually thinned out but never really left us alone, damn mosquitoes! We didn't have very good directions to Salmon Lake and we were in an area that had many trails all going off in different directions. Corey made some very educated decisions and got us on the right path, woo hoo!

At about mile 6.5 we started scouting out places to set up camp and we found one where we thought there were fewer skeeters than the rest of the forest ;)
We set up camp, grabbed some snacks and continued to Salmon Lake (another mile and a half). When we arrived there was nobody else on the entire lake! It was awesome! Before I even realized we were at the lake I heard Brit Brit splashing around in the water. She had run ahead (like she always does) and jumped in the lake and just started swimming around. SHE LOVES SWIMMING!
We had some snacks, tried reading, took photos, played with Brit and fished. Salmon Lake is most definitely worth the long hike in and up. The panoramic were amazing. Corey attempted to fish for some din din (who doesn't love trout pizza?!), but Britta kept jumping in the water and scaring all the fish off...Brit and I thought it was hilarious, Corey on the other hand...he really wanted to catch a fish. We stayed at the lake until mid afternoon, we still had to hike back to camp. On our way back we ran into bunches of people, some had goats carrying all their camping equipment, it was so funny....made me want to get a goat.

Corey had to be creative while hiking with a fly fishing pole and big pack on!

Once we got back to camp we set up or fire pit, made some benches to sit on, did some reading and card playing and then made din din. When we were packing our packs the night before our trip we had some red beans and rice and other "normal" camping food, but then we decided to live on the edge and bring a bunch of food to make pizza with. What a good, fun idea! we cooked all our veggies first, then browned both sides of our pizza crust then put all the ingredients together to make some fabulous pizza. Tomato, Broccoli and Pepper jack pizza while camping, what a refreshing change from red beans and rice or ramen noodles! It would probably be hard if we had a whole group of peeps trying to make pizza (it was a little messy), but for just Hayes and I, it was great.

Once dinner ended it was getting dusk, we put Brit in the tent (she fell asleep instantly) and we stayed out until the fire died checking out the stars that we don't get to see in the city.

The next day we woke up early/Brit woke us up early because she wanted out to go chase ground squirrels. We made some b-fast, packed up camp and hiked over to Willow Falls where we ran into 2 IOWANS, it's a small world out here in CO. At the falls we leashed Britta b/c there were a lot of drop off cliffs....I'm an overprotective doggy mama I guess. When we hiked back to the car Britta ran through the parking lot into a shaded area by our car and laid down and tried to fall asleep, all in about 30 seconds... she was a pooped pup. Her papa was pretty pooped too...so was her mama. I love doing hikes that really take it out of me, they're the best!