Camping Fools!

We went camping last weekend for our friend Jason's birthday - we had such a blast. They had picked a great spot just past Idylwild and it was gorgeous up there! Great weather, it was sunny and fairly warm during the day and not a cloud in the sky for perfect star viewing at night - good times were had by all.

The birthday kid scouting out the joint:
The drive up was so pretty with all the changing leaves in full force -

of course I had to have camping Grover with me as always:
although unfortunately he met an untimely camping demise while I was away from our campsite hiking. Jerkies! Don't worry, Rob got him down for me and this actually made me laugh pretty hard :)

There were some great rock formations around our campsite - even cute Georgia got into scaling them, and she's getting to be quite a "mature lady" in her old age!

We totally lucked out - campfires were banned because it's fire danger season - so warm and dry - so we'd totally prepared ourselves for no s'mores and fire at night...but then we got there and the ranger told us the ban was lifted that day! Perfect timing - great times sitting around that fire every night.


Tara carved a great jack o' lantern:

We ate a ton of great camp food - here's Rob as breakfast chef:
Jeff and Randy were quite impressive with their camping culinary skills - ribs, curry, tacos, tons of fancy beer - camping with them is dangerous! Here the guys enjoy the beer:


While we chics lounged in the sun:

At least we hiked it all off - we did a super steep hike down and back up, it was gorgeous but super tiring in that high elevation!



Fresh air, tons of dropped campfire food, lots of lovin': the dogs were all in doggy heaven:

And on our last night, we hiked up to the highest rocks and watched the sunset.

Of course, everybody brought their cocktails with, and 2 of our party got a little lost along the way (thus Jason's Donner party comment)...don't worry, we eventually found them.

This video slays me: trying to get poor Georgia up the last of the rocks...she's such a trooper.

The views were so worth it, we stayed up there a while. I'm not sure if it's the LA smog or what, but the sunset was especially gorgeous that night! Good times...