So...I will not be hired anytime soon to be an outdoor hiking guide. Of course, this does not come as too much of a surprise to my friends and family, but the stake leaders who called me as the 4th year leader at Girls Camp are probably realizing their growing concern with my ability to keep these sweet girls alive.
First off, they wanted me and the other three ladies that have been called with me, to take the girls on a overnight backpacking trip...not my comfort area! I simply do not enjoy camping. I find it a lot of prep work and more work during camping. If I am on a vacation, I would like to be able to take a little break from cooking and cleaning. I do not consider dirt in my ears, between my toes and other places I won't mention, fun...not relaxing at all! Don't I just scream Girl's Camp material to you? :)
For this overnight hike, one of our stake members was requesting that we go on a 5 mile hike with framed backpacks carrying our own tents, water, food, etc. Due to a time restraint and without going into too many details, we came to the conclusion to just take the girls on a 5 mile hike with backpacks, but no overnight. So, with that problem solved, we began looking for a good hiking spot that everyone would enjoy. After a few site changes, I heard of a awesome hike just north of Spokane that would be perfect.
Friday night was the big night. We met the girls at the stake center and drove out to the hiking site. We had nine of our twenty girls with us. We were prepared. We had our hiking shoes, backpacks, water and the biggest necessity...bug repellent! I had printed out very descriptive directions for the hike. The directions told you exactly what to do. They went something like this...park on the right side of the parking lot. Cross the street to the trail head sign. Go 0.8 miles and turn left at the trail head. At 1.2 miles, you will reach a large rock formation...etc. These directions went on like this for the entire 5 mile hike.
Here is the big rock...it was impressive!
A girl in my ward had been on the hike recently and told me how easy the hike is if you just follow the directions. To even be a little more safe, I took our GPS to use the odometer. It all sounds easy enough, right...wrong. At 1.7 miles into the hike we got lost! Due to some illnesses, two of the other leaders were not with us, so it was my friend, Carolyn, and me who were leading these fine girls. Carolyn and I were so confused by the directions. We were looking for this trail that we were suppose to take that led you up a switchback to the top of the hill. We could not find it anywhere. We ended up dragging these girls through brush, water, a tunnel caves (which happened to be very cool), over bridges, up and down a hill to find nothing. After wasting nearly a hour of searching everywhere for this trail, we came back to the original spot at 1.7 miles to figure out what we should do. As Carolyn and I were reading our directions and looking at the marvelous GPS, I looked up and said, "Oh my goodness!" There in front of us, no more than six feet, was this groomed trail. We had completely overlooked it. This just shows what great guides we were. When we had reached the 1.7 mile mark, Carolyn and I quickly took to a bench that we saw and began reading the directions to see where to go. As we were sitting, we were looking around for this trail it is saying to take...not knowing that it was DIRECTLY behind us! We had stepped past the trail to get to the bench!!! It was no more then three steps from where we had been sitting. Once the girls found out about this MINOR error of ours, their faith in us came into question.
A cool spot we found while lost!
Luckily we were with great girls who went with the flow. We decided to hike up the hill to the top. It was beautiful scenery overlooking the river and trees. Our only problem though, was since we had wasted so much time being lost, it was getting dark. Carolyn and I absolutely did not trust ourselves to go further into the woods so, against the girls desires to go forward, we had to turn around and follow the Centennial Trial back to our vehicles. We wished we could have finished out the hike...it was absolutely gorgeous. Fortunately the girls had fun and even want us to take them back another time to finish it out! Can you believe that...they would trust us again to lead them! We ended the evening with chocolate dipped ice-cream cones and some good memories and laughs. Now the countdown to camp is on....fifteen days!
