Camping At Cave Mountain Lake

The wife and I have often remarked that we used to go camping and go on all these amazing adventures, but life turned into chaos (recession, Ph. D., wedding, moving, new jobs...) one day, and we've had serious trouble leaving town for a weekend. For something like 3 years. We finally found a 3 day weekend we both shared, circled it on the calender, and made it happen.

I want to emphasize that last point, as after 3 years and as many moves, it was extremely challenging to locate gear and remember exactly what equipment and selection of vittles to take. We also had to figure out where to go, again, since we've moved three times and had little clue where to start. We're on the east coast... it's not like there's vast amounts of public land to work with here.

Originally, we considered some locations in western Maryland and West Virginia, but the weather prediction showed it to be very wet, so we made a last minute change to central Virginia, along the James, where it was not slated to rain for the entire weekend.

Packrat and I rarely had trouble fitting everything we needed into the ChevOldsmoBuiac. A long weekend worth of food, caving, and camping gear could fit nicely in the back of the car. You know, without effort to minimize the amount of airspace in the trunk. In contrast, getting everything for just camping for the weekend seemed unusually hard. Sure, we were taking a larger tent and bigger pots and pans, but that's peanuts compared to a large pile of caving gear.

Then, I realized: we have a dog. The backseat was occupied by a big hairly smelly oaf, not my sleeping bag. Dogs don't stack up on end like people, and so a single one uses most of the backseat, and they don't stack with other things vertically, so packing is limited to the floor space, and the tiny portion of the seat the dog isn't flopped on. I suppose I'll have to consider that in the future, and cram more carefully.

The sky throughout the day.

Roasting marshmallow. Fortunately, there was some wood left at the site by previous campers, though it was a little damp. Getting it lit was hard... since we were in an established camping area, it was not possible to resort to foraging for low hanging dry limbs like they teach you in survival classes.

The trees were just barely turning. One of my favorite times of year, because the forest looks like stained glass.

We grabbed deadfall that was laying across the trail after our hike to kindle our next fire. We had much less trouble getting that started, though we completely burned both arm loads of wood.