Spring Break Camping Trip

Posted On May 20, 2021

Early spring and late fall are some of our favorite times of the year to go camping to truly get away from all but the most diehard outdoor enthusiast type of people. The latter doesn’t matter too much anyway because they won’t be camping near other people to begin with so it is not a problem. Temperature swings are definitely more dramatic at these times of the year so be prepared for freezing weather potentially snow at higher elevations. The fall time is what many people refer to as an Indian Summer and the spring is also very similar to that other than the day time highs are lower.

The views of the land are better in the spring before the leaves come out so you can see great views from many places where those are hidden during the summer and fall. Fall camping offers great colors in some areas, but the views are obscured by the leaves so there is a tradeoff. We go camping year-round when we can so both are good to us. There are far more campers out and about during the summer, but in all fairness, we probably only run into about 4 people on the average during the busy weekends and holidays so it really isn’t too big of a problem. Our camping, riding, and shooting spots are a long way of the typical beaten path so that really helps as most public campgrounds and areas are still far away from where we go. With the popularity of Google maps and other programs more and more people are finding these areas unfortunately.

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This was a trip we took during the school Spring Break before we got our new camp trailer. Tent camping is fun, but it can get cold and wet during this time of the year. Plus, the ground gets harder and harder as you get older so a camp trailer is a nice option if you have one and can take it to the area your area you plan on going to. We picked the highest ground clearance trailer we could find each time and added a solar panel to it so we don’t need shore power. This does mean that both my wife and I have to take both of our vehicles, me towing the camp trailer and her towing the car trailer with the quads and Gator so we can ride around. We did look at toy haulers and finding one that was big enough to load both quads and the Gator into was very expensive in addition to being very long and heavy so it just wasn’t practical for us because it would get high-centered somewhere on a logging road heading into our campsites.

A gravel pit makes a good camping spot for trips like this where you bring all of your toys with you. There is ample room to turn the trailers around and lots of parking for everything. Campfire safety is another non-issue in gravel pits as you can build a campfire far enough away from everything that can burn so that is another perk during high fire danger times. Starting a forest fire on your camping trip would most likely ruin your weekend and probably your finances for years to come so keep that in mind as the woods dry out. Gravel pits also have great earthen backstops for shooting so you don’t even have to leave camp to go shooting. Oftentimes we just sit around the campfire in our camp chairs shooting targets so that very convenient when you don’t feel like moving while relaxing.

We arrived Friday night after work and setup for the weekend plus the couple extra days for spring break. We have the 3 burner and 2 burner Camp Chef stoves so we do most of our cooking outside to keep the mess outdoors so we set one stove up along with an outside table for cooking. Generally, we don’t do much on the first night we get there because we are tired so just unloading and setting up everything is enough for the day after work so we went to bed early.

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It froze overnight so a nice hot cup of coffee was great along with bacon and eggs for breakfast on Saturday morning. It had been a long week for all of us so the cold just gave all of us an excuse to do nothing for a while so we could go for a ride without getting too cold. We don’t mind a cold quad ride in the fall while we are hunting as the next grouse dinner makes us forget about some of the cold, but when you’re riding just for fun it is a different story. My wife is warm blooded and opted out of a morning ride so just my son Jeff, my Daughter Jessica, and I went. We have ham radios in the Gator and the camp trailer so Hannah said she would give us a half hour heads up to get back when it was time for lunch so that left us with about two hours of riding time. We rode to the top of the ridge and checked out a few roads to see if they had been opened yet because of all the trees that had broke off and fell due to the snow load over the winter.

We encountered a few snow broken trees across the road but we lucked out and someone had cut the bigger ones out of the way already so we didn’t have any problems. We found some smaller pieces of wood that were semi-dry so we loaded those into the back of the Gator so we could have a campfire that evening. Finding dry campfire wood is challenging so we grabbed the driest wood we could find because we were not going to use any of our home firewood for camping. We usually keep a bundle of dry kindling in the camp trailer to start campfires with and we did bring an extra can of diesel so starting a fire would not be a problem. It was a cloudy day and it started getting darker so we were already headed back to camp when I got the call on the ham radio that lunch would be ready soon. It started snowing on us so none of us complained about heading back for a nice hot cup of coffee or a hot chocolate.

Meals are usually kept simple with burgers, steaks, brats, fried potatoes, and other dishes that do not require lots of ingredients. We do fix a few more intricate fancy meals on extended camping trips or on a vacation camping trip just so we don’t suffer from meal boredom before we are through. The Camp Chef barbeque box that we bought is very handy for trailer camping. It sits on top of one or two stove burners and essentially turns your stove into a propane barbeque so your food gets the savory cooked flavors without the need of packing a full-sized propane barbeque. We have a small charcoal briquette stove too which in my opinion adds even better flavor to your foods, but again we don’t pack that unless it is at least a week-long trip. We relaxed for an hour or so after our “gourmet” cheeseburger lunch to let the weather settle down and dry out.

After lunch had settled all of us went on a ride to a subalpine lake that we had not been to since last fall. We were not sure if we could make it or not as there were still many areas with several feet of snow that had not melted off yet. Anyone has tried driving across this late season snow knows that it really isn’t “Snow” anymore and is really a frozen top crust with loose snow underneath it. If your ATV or UTV break through this crust you are stuck and this oftentimes leads to digging yourself out. This digging usually leads back to the last solid spot that will allow you to make a run to get your speed up so you don’t instantly break through the crust again cause you to repeat this entire tiring process so it really is not worth chancing it if you really really don’t have to.

There were still pockets of snow on the road and many side roads still had up to a few feet of snow, but we kept going anyway to see if we could make it on the main road. We stopped to let the kids play at a few spots on the way and they did manage to find enough fresh snow on top of the crust to make and throw a few snowballs at each other. We finally got to the lake and it was still mostly frozen over so we just looked around. There are trout in there and the extremely clear water makes catching them difficult but we usually just fish the rivers to make life easier for us. The ride to the lake took us about three-hours because of all the extra stops and going slow to help keep windchills down in the high 30-degree weather.

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We checked out more scenic areas because you always find new spots while there are no leaves left on the trees and bushes. After riding around and checking out a few more areas we made our way back to camp so we could get a campfire started and eat before it got completely dark. It still surprises us on how many people have never seen complete darkness if their lives and can’t sleep without some light somewhere. It was a cloudy day with no moon that night so we knew it would be 100% dark as there were no towns, streetlights, houses, or any other sources of light for miles and miles in any direction, which is just perfect for us. Conversely this also makes for excellent viewing of the stars and meteor showers when the skies are clear because there is no light pollution.

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The campfire is always a welcome sight once you get it going. It stayed dry, but cold, for the evening so the kids rode around the gravel pit on their quads. Night rides are always fun too as long as you know the area because being lost in the dark would not be much fun. After a good brat dinner, we relaxed for a while and the kids kept riding only pausing occasionally by the campfire to warm up with some hot chocolate. Eventually they got tired enough and joined us by the campfire until bedtime.

Shooting is always a fun filled family activity and no camping trip in the woods would be complete without it, unless you hunting of course. We have some steel gong targets, but the empty cans seem to get the most attention as they bounce from place to place when you hit them. Jessica got to shoot her .22 while we mainly got some plinking in with various handguns. No shooting practice would be complete without getting a hand cannon out at least once. Jeff loves shooting one so he got some extra practice in with it. We have a Nikon D3300 digital camera with a high-speed shutter so I took some great muzzle flash photos with it. Capturing it involved a lot of luck with the shutter time so it took a few tries. The muzzle flash is even impressive during the daylight so one photo did capture it very well even though I underestimated how far the flash extended from the barrel. This was from back in the time where ammunition was plentiful so I doubt we will be repeating this amount of shooting any time in the foreseeable future.

The next two days were filled with riding and shooting as we were blessed with dry weather for the remainder of our trip. After burning through about a combined total of a case of ammo and a few gas cans of ethanol free gas it was time to start packing up and heading home. We always get bummed out as we head home and getting ready to return to work as living in the woods for a few days is truly tranquil making the return to civilization a major culture shock. We also experience culture shock when we have to go to any big cities and see all the people and traffic jams so I can only imagine that this shock is thousands of times worse for them if they had just escaped for the week.