Camping: Flat Top Wilderness

Cold Springs Campground, Flat Tops Wilderness near Yampa, Colo.

We took the kids camping for one night this weekend — get this — for the FIRST TIME EVER! I can't even believe it. Me. The woman who camped more than 200 days in 1998. We drove about two hours west to the beautiful Bear River valley at the entrance to Flat Tops Wilderness — where all the mountains are ... flat!

We camped by a clear blue/green pond w/waterfall.

The last time Scott and I camped like this, we didn't have Sawyer and Arden. We went camping a handful of times with Justin in Virginia — winter camping once, beach camping two or three times, and camping with the boat twice. I have a negative-30-degree down sleeping bag that I've owned for almost a decade and this was the first time I actually slept INSIDE of it.

Scott's custom marshmallow roaster travel with us everywhere.

Other than the sleeping bags, most of our campgear is 15 years old. We pulled the trip together on a last minute whim when I had a Labor Day, "How-has-an-entire-summer-flown-by?" revelation that I had not fulfilled a promise to my kids to take them camping. In the rush to pack, I didn't check the camp stoves. Despite my expert skills at disassembling and then reassembling Whisper Lite stoves — the VW of all camp stoves — our fuel pump appeared to be shot. We resorted to cooking our meals, hot drinks and dessert by campfire. Scott did a fabulous job. Never has saltless ground beef/red potoato/carrot scramble tasted so good (uh, remembered spice kit, forgot to replenish it). Eggs and bacon at breakfast were to die for. (The 7-year-old Tabasco sauce would have made my parents proud — separated and chunky — that stuff could survive nuclear warfare, just not 7 years in storage.)

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In the blank space above should have been a photo of Scott circumnavigating a small lake with a bundle of four long dead trees trunks hoisted on his shoulders. It was a total Survivor Man moment. As much as I laughed at the time, I was glad to have all that wood by the fire ring.

Kids enjoying a cuppa before bedtime.

Camping – with all its wild and elemental experiences — can test the most traveled adult, not to mention play with the mind of a preschooler. Arden slept and ate like a trooper — basically the perfect camper. She hardly complained about being cold (even when it was). Sawyer, on the other hand, had a harder time — eating/being cold/pooping/falling asleep. I eventually pulled him out of the tent so he could have that post-dark camping experience sitting by the fire roasting marshmallows, playing with headlamps and watching the stars emerge.

It was — hands down — the starriest sky I've ever seen. And I've slept under hundreds of night skies. Snuggling by the fire with Sawyer, stargazing and just talking, was one of those intensely special kid moments that make me wonder: why don't I stop and enjoy this more often?

Keeping us safe from small, high-alpine varmints.

There was one thing that completely shocked me when the stars came out. Low on the eastern horizon there was an object so intensely bright that I thought it had to be man made. So intensely bright — it nearly blinded me in my right eye — that I figured it had to be the International Space Station. Which I've never seen before. It was only beginning to be constructed in 1998 and was barely visible when I moved east, where you are lucky to even see a star in the sky at all. So I googled the International Space Station and tracked it. Turns out, it couldn't have been the space station.

Which leaves only one possibility: It was JUPITER! Read this Earth and Sky article. Jupiter is closer to the earth that its been in 60 years.

Happy summer's end everyone!