Camping with Chris

My little brother Chris and I decided that we were going to go camping and thought that we would backpack up this river and find a cool spot. We started out at Deerlick Falls and hiked up the river until it was completely impossible to go any further. Unfortunately, there was no place to set up a tent on the entire stretch that we had hiked, so we had to hike all the way back down the river (almost all the way back to our car). It was a pretty crazy trek too (as you can see in the picture above there were some obstacles). In fact, on the way back we had to lower our packs down with a rope because it was simply impossible to climb back down with packs on our backs. Megan wasn't too happy when she saw these pics... oops. In my defense, there was water below us had we fallen!

I don't even know how many times we had to cross the river in order to make our way up it. It was hot out though, so the water felt pretty refreshing. Anyway, Chris and I thought that it would be pretty fun to try and practice some survival skills, so we made some homemade fishing hooks and spears and tried to rustle up some grub. Our hooks and spears were pretty sweet, but our efforts were unsuccessful. We hadn't brought a whole lot of food because we wanted to give ourselves incentive to obtain our own food. However, since we were unsuccessful in catching any fish and had only managed to rustle up a few pathetic wild strawberries (that we scarfed down) we were forced to ration our food out. In reality there were plenty of bugs to eat, but we weren't quite that in to practicing survival skills. haha it would have been pretty funny to watch us... Chris and I probably looked like savages. At one point Chris and I saw something thrashing around at the top of the water and thought it was a snake. Immediately, Chris grabbed his spear and ran over to it in hopes of spearing us some dinner. Nevertheless, he got there too late. It turned out to be a fish and by the time he got to the thing it had disappeared back under the water. In dismay, Chris and I turned our efforts toward searching for crayfish, but there were none to be found. By the end of the night we were completely beat. Even so, for some reason I couldn't fall asleep and ended up only getting about 1-2 hours of sleep. The next day we went to the South Umpqua Falls (below) to swim but the water was so stinkin' cold that we couldn't take much more than jumping in and getting right back out. So... there wasn't much left to do. We were both tired and hungry and bored so we decided to just go home early. But, after driving about an hour toward home we saw our other brother, Jeff, and his wife Hilary driving toward us. So, we turned around and met up with them. They talked us into going back with them and we ended up having a great time. Although the water was still pretty cold, by the time we made it back to the South Umpqua Falls it was so hot outside that the water felt refreshing. Chris had recently gotten a new digital camera that can go about 33 feet underwater, so we took some cool videos of ourselves sliding down the waterfalls and swimming behind them. When I get the videos from Chris I will post one for everyone to see.
Although it is hard to tell in the picture, the center portion of the waterfall is probably about 12 ft off of the water. It's really fun to slide down them... The pool is probably about 12 ft deep and is often full of treasures that people lose while swimming here. In fact, I found the sunglasses that I am wearing in the 2nd picture here last summer! (on this trip I found a frisbee golf disc, a shoe, and some pocket change--my bro found a necklace).

Megan liked this picture and wanted me to post it. I think that it looks kind of funny.
Anyway, I was planning on attending summer school but am no longer going to (which means that I am now the homemaker in the family). Aside from that, I have some school stuff to do over the summer like start applications for grad school, apply for internships, study for the GRE exam and start research for my honors paper. So... even though I am not officially in school, I should keep pretty busy. At any rate, I'll keep yall posted.