One last camp out before back to school...

We decided to do one last camp out before I head back to school next week. I got a nice backpack for Christmas and hadn't yet taken opportunity to do a backpack type camp so we headed up to Mill Flat on Friday afternoon for an overnighter. Paul was good enough to carry the airbed in his pack. I took the tent. We had great weather for the hike. It was a little cooler than it has been lately. It was beautiful as always with water in the stream most of the way up. We did a little service project en route. A big aspen had fallen recently and they had cut it in pieces and moved all but one piece out the the trail. That last piece was smack in the middle, so with Paul's skills and supervision we levered it up and to the side and wedged it with rocks. It was a lot cooler than we expected when we got to the top, so we ate a quick dinner, set up camp and headed to bed pretty early to get out of the cold. It was about 41 when we woke up, so we opted to eat breakfast in bed and didn't strike camp until about 8 am. Then we searched around and found the trail over to Anderson Valley. We cached our packs and just took water and headed over there. The Forest Service had done some work on it so you could actually find it. It's between 2 and 3 miles. We visited that site and then checked to see if they had done any work on the trail from there down to Browse. It looks like they have. We had no time to do that, so we headed back to Mill Flat and ate lunch and headed back down. We saw quite a few people on horses and one guy camped out training his hunting dog. We had several deer hang around camp during the evening. We met up with one rattle snake when we were just about back to the truck, but he just skuttled on out of the way. All in all we did about 18 miles and it was a great break-in-my-backpack trip!