Family Hike Series - Part 3

Sunday was the third hike in our Family Hike series: we went up to Eklutna Lake and spent a very pleasant 2 hours walking around the shores of one of the most beautiful lakes I have ever seen.

I met Mother at the parking lot for the Thunderbird Falls trailhead and left my car there – after transferring all the stuff back and forth, of course. It seems there’s always stuff that I need to pass on to her, and she always has stuff to pass on to me!

Once that was all taken care of, I climbed into her truck and we took off together from there. The trailhead for the Eklutna Lake trail is about 10 miles from that parking lot, heading up the hill a good enough distance that our ears were popping.

Coincidentally, my brother Stewart had worked the job that paved that road. He has pictures of it on his website:
http://nopeople.com/homepage/Eklutna%20Project/Eklutna01/Eklutna%20Project.html

Once we got to the trailhead we parked the truck and got our gear gathered together. I keep my backpack loaded with all the stuff I need for each hike, like my plant book, my tree book, my animal tracks book, my trail book, my bear spray & whistle, my bug dope, my camera, my binoculars (yes, it is a tad bit heavy) but there always seems to be something missing. This time it was my water. Again. You’d think I would learn to have a bottle in there, since it seems I’m always forgetting the water.

I did have a new toy to play with: my friend Rikki had given me a compass for my birthday, so I had that out and was walking around the parking lot while waiting for the rest of the gang to show up. Mother would ask me, “Where do you think the bathroom is?” and I would reply, “I don’t know – but North is that way!”

Very helpful, I’m sure.

Right on time, Rachel and her family drove up and parked right beside us. David, her husband, and Elly, her daughter, were all very excited to be out with us that day. It was Father’s Day, and this was his choice for celebrating it. My kind of guy!

It had been many, many years since anybody in our little group had been there, which meant that nobody really knew which direction we were supposed to go – so we just chose a path that looked interesting and took off. We ended up back by the dam, which was really cool. I had hoped to be able to see that – although, I must admit it wasn’t as impressive as I’d thought it would be.

Eklutna Lake is where Anchorage gets it’s water & some of it’s power from – so I thought the dam would be this huge powerful thing. It actually was quite small, and looked like any old concrete bunker that just happened to have water on one side.

The lake itself is very large; if we had walked all the way around it, it would have taken 2 days (or so my trail book says)! We just went part of the way, and had fun identifying plants as we went.

Yes, I got to use my books!