Well it doesn’t look like it here, but it was quite a climb to get on top of this peak in Montana’s Cabinet Mountains Wilderness. This is the only way I could situate the camera to take a picture of all of us while still giving a sense of the terrain. From the left it’s Becca (12), Emma (13), Old Homely, and Katie (10). To our left is a fifty-foot drop to rocks, the way we ascended. Behind us is perhaps a 200-foot drop and then a steep slope hundreds of feet down to Copper Creek. But in front of us is a gentler descent to level ground, our backpacks, and the trail.

Friday evening I burst out of work like a rock from a sling. I buzzed home, gobbled supper, tossed backpacks, kids, dogs, and chain saw (just in case) into the Jeep, and we were off.

An hour and a quarter later, we swung around to a stop at the trailhead. There is something in the silence between cutting the engine and starting up the trail. We dismount, stretch, look around. Then comes the gathering of stray items, shrugging into our packs, checking the map, and always (with me) a picture of the Start of Adventure with my camera perched atop the Jeep’s spare tire. Finally, with a crunch of gravel, we start up the trail.

Between that first ascent and the tired doffing of my pack (and Becca’s, of which she’d grown tearfully tired half an hour before), we got lost. This trail is not maintained by the Forest Service, has no number, and consequently does not show up on our map. Also it meanders over rocks and under a great deal of snow—making it more than easy to lose one’s way. We wandered hither and yon in the sunset, saw Copper Lake half sheathed in ice three hundred feet below us, and wondered if that was our lake. (No natural feature bears a clear floating sign in the wild, like it does on a map or even on Google Earth. You have to deduce where you are.) But we couldn’t find our way down to it. The sun went down and the kids were tired, so we headed back up through the trees to find a camping spot.

And lo, we found the trail! It curved up over the hill and there, like a mirror facing the sky, lay Cliff Lake. We descended happily down, found a spot, and made camp. We built a smoky little fire, made s’mores, pitched our tent, and retired to our sleeping bags as the stars came out—all six of us, including the wet dogs, who’d gone swimming and wouldn’t let us sleep if they’d been left outside, in my roomy two-man backpacking tent.

Tune in tomorrow when you’ll hear us learn to yodel.