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When you're backpacking with kids, options are somewhat limited. In our case, I knew our kids
could reasonably hike up to about 6 miles a day. Since we did a 3-day trip last year, I wanted
to stretch that out to a 4-day trip this year. With those parameters in mind, I searched all
my sources and discovered what seemed like the perfect trip - an 18 mile trip from Meeks Bay
to Eagle Falls in which no day would be more than 5.5 miles.
With the trip route in hand, I waited. I knew that permits for Desolation Wilderness were
not available until the third Thursday in April. When that day arrived and I finally called,
they said I'd have to wait another week - they'd changed it to the fourth Thursday in April.
So, I called the next week and grabbed my spot. There's a minimal fee for the permit. There
is a quota system in place, and half the quota can be reserved while half is left available
for first-come, first-served visitors. When you make your reservation, you only need to tell
them where you'll enter and exit, and where you plan to camp the first night. The other nights
you are free to go anywhere in the wilderness.
A couple weeks before the trip, I started to re-evaluate our equipment. I knew that with an
extra day we'd have to carry more food and fuel, and the extra weight would be tough to handle.
Also, the bear canisters we had were too small to carry all the food we needed in one canister.
Rather than carry two, we decided to finally bite the bullet and buy the larger Bearikade, which
despite being larger was actually lighter than one of the older canisters we had.
We also decided to purchase two new sleeping bags which were over a pound lighter than our older
bags. I spent a lot of time looking into new sleeping pads. I was worried because I remembered
not being all that comfortable on our last trip, and I was considering getting a larger, 25-inch
wide pad. Unfortunately, I only found two such pads and I found reasons not to get either.
First, there was the Big Agnes Insulated Air Core wide long, but that came in at a whopping 2 pounds
4 ounces. Second, there was the Therm-a-rest NeoAir large, a tidy 19 ounces (lighter than the one
I had). After trying it out in the store and reading reviews, I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
It just felt too flimsy and some reviewers reported problems with it deflating during the night.
Plus, some people said it sounded like a bag of potato chips, and I didn't want to keep my 3 tent-mates
up. In the end, I decided to just stick with the ProLite 4 that I had.
The other big task was figuring out what food to bring and how many calories. We had taken a
little over 12,000 calories on the 3-day trip, and I estimated about 21,000 calories would be
good for our 4-day trip. However, when I added everything up it came to about 27,000 calories.
I wasn't sure what to cut, and I was concerned that our kids would have bigger appetites than
last year, so I just pretty much left it at that, possibly carrying a little extra food.
Planning our food before the trip
Thursday rolled around and we left the Bay Area a little after 1pm, encountering almost no traffic.
We arrived in South Lake Tahoe around 5pm and checked into our bed and breakfast. After dinner
with a friend, we went back to the bed and breakfast and finalized our packs and did the final
weigh-in. I was a bit concerned when my pack weighed in at 61.5 pounds, the most I've ever
carried and 3 pounds heavier than even my Rae Lakes pack. But with two small kids we couldn't really
distribute the weight more evenly, so I just figured I'd be strong enough to handle it.
You can see a
list of everything in our packs.
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