50 Miler, The Actual Trip

So, when all was said and done, we had 4 leaders and 8 boys on the trip.  We had one other leader who wanted to come, but since he hadn't gone on any of the practice trips, AND he has bad knees, I told him we couldn't take him.  We were planning on backpacking 50 miles in 6 days and we needed people in our group that had some experience and could make it.  If his knees gave out part way through the trip we'd be in trouble.

We planned on getting 3 goats, but when we went to pick them up, we were told that we could have 5 for the price of 3 because the other 2 needed some exercise.  The names of the goats we took were: Oreo, Tethys, Buck, Eclipse, and Telesto.  Below is a photo of Tethy's and Buck loaded up with their packs, with Kings Peak in the background:

Tethy's and Buck

So, we were told to not worry about the goats keeping up with us, because they'll do better than us.  Unfortunately, that wasn't totally true.  On the first day we hiked 12 miles and totally wore out the goats!  They got to where they would just lay down any time we stopped for a breather, and it was hard to get them going again.  So, we probably should have eased them into the trip I guess with a little less mileage the first day.  Below is a photo of Red Castle:

Red Castle

Other than that, the goats did fine on the trip.  We didn't end up taking them all the way to the top of Kings Peak because we didn't want them to get hurt boulder hopping - though their owner said that they've done it before.  So we hiked up to the base of the boulder hopping part and tied them off with some food and water while we bagged the peak and hiked back down.

Oreo

We ended up with way more food than we needed, and ended up taking home a bunch of food with us.  But one of the best things we did was to make a bunch of jello and put it in a gallon zip lock bag in a snow pile to cool.  We ate the jello after coming back from bagging Kings Peak, and it was so good!  It was a cold, sweet treat that you don't get usually when you're backpacking!  I made 4 packs of jello and probably could have made twice that much and still eaten it all.

High Uintah's

We ended up doing a loop.  The first day we hiked to Red Castle Lake (long day), then we hiked over towards the trail to Kings Peak in the next 2 days, then we hiked Kings on Thursday, and then worked our way back to the vehicles.  It was fun because it wasn't just a straight in and straight out hike, we got to see different scenery almost every day.

We brought water filters, and iodine tablets.  Good thing too, because our filters got so clogged that we ended up using the iodine.  Unfortunately, one of the bottles that we got out of the stream to put iodine in, didn't ever get the iodine in it, and one of our leaders drank it.  Fortunately he didn't suffer any ill effects till a week or so after our trip, so he was somewhere he could get help.  He said it was horrible though.  He wanted to die - so try to be good about getting everything filtered and sanitized.

We had 3 filters, next time we should probably bring up a filter for every 2 people, AND the iodine tablets as backup.

We caught a couple of fish, but never did get very many because we were pretty tired by the end of the day of hiking and taking down and setting up camp.  We did however hike over to a waterfall for a shower twice. It was freezing cold water, but it was so refreshing!  It would be good to take some Croc's or some type of lightweight shoes/flip flops to wear around camp and in the shower.

The mosquitoes were horrible! Check out this photo of the mosquitoes in the air:

Mosquitoes near Red Castle

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