Labor Day Weekend Family Meet-up, Winchester Idaho

Labor Day weekend found us winging our way to West-central Idaho to camp with our friends (and former Lincoln neighbors) J and K and their kids. They live out nearish Portland so we picked a spot about halfway in between.

First we fueled up. See how the sliding door is torqued a few degrees counterclockwise? The gaps are bigger at its upper right and lower left corners. Yeah, we need to fix that.

On the way to Missoula Thursday evening we drove into this smoky sunset.

The smoke was lingering from the mostly-out Lolo Creek Complex fire, a burned area of which is immediately ahead in this picture. 

It burned a few houses, including this one. Too bad it didn't consume that astounding ugly fence as well.

As we climbed we got past the burn area and up over Lolo Pass into the Gem State.

That has got to be the absolute worst song by The Beatles.

Further into Idaho we shanghaied a campsite for lunch, hoping a ranger or camp host wouldn't come and charge us for day use. No one did.

L-wig took on more fuel in Kamiah ("KAM-ee-eye"). E has really become wary of having her picture taken.

At Kamiah we left US 12 and, basically, the Rocky Mountains. This is Idaho's Camas Prairie which is pretty much just the Palouse with a different name because it's on the other side of the Snake River.

Our companions had already been encamped for a few hours by the time we arrived. 

What's Labor Day without some labor? After sitting for a while at the campground, I noticed Ludwig's right carburetor was drip drip dripping gas again so I tore it apart. I am getting so sick of that carb. The guy who we paid to rebuild it seems to no longer offer that service, which is a good thing. Before long I'll probably post about what exactly (I think) was wrong and what I did about it.

Okay, on to lighter stuff. We told E that there'd be canoeing at this park and she insisted she'd never ever ever ever ever do it, but after thirty seconds on the water she said she wants us to get a canoe of our own. Victory!

The next day we all went to the Wolf Education Research Center, which is basically a holding compound for a small pack of wolves, "ambassadors" for their truly wild cousins. I heard them howling our first night: Wolves are freaking loud. Surprisingly, no one else in our group heard it.

After paying for admission I asked the lady to give us some odds for us actually seeing any wolves. She blanched a little, admitting there was a good chance we wouldn't see any at all. Luck was with us though, as XayXayx ("high high") trotted up to check us out.

In the parking lot at the wolf place, the two older boys each were stung by yellowjackets. Back at camp, E and C made this yellowjacket trap/jail, as some kind of warning I guess. Here she's explaining how it works.

All in all, it was a fun long weekend brought to us by Ludwig...

...and Ria--that's what I tried to dub her anyway. It might've stuck.

Heading back home along the Clearwater.

Yeah...

...no kidding.

We didn't have to even one time.

 Tater Tot slept through it.

Melissa steered through it.

Idle thought from the passenger seat: if you figure (conservatively) that there're 50 unique rocks for every foot-wide slice of the Lochsa/Clearwater; and you notice that the road basically parallels the river; and you drive upriver from Kamiah to where US 12 diverges from it like we did--about 95 miles worth; then you've driven past over 25 million rocks. An average of a little fewer than 3500 rocks per second. 

 This Land Rover didn't make it past the winding to the top.

 Ludie did though, about the dozenth time for this pass.

We stopped at the visitors' center for some free hot chocolate. At the ranger's advice, we hiked the trail to look for huckleberries.

We managed to scrounge a decent haul, given that we weren't really trying.

A very successful weekend. Thanks J&K and kids. And of course Ludwig.

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elevation profile--only shows outbound; inbound is the mirror image