Salmon La Sac & Cooper Lake Camping Trip

Salmon La Sac & Cooper Lake Camping Trip (3 of 20), originally uploaded by seattleforge.

I really hate that I've neglected this place.

This weekend has been absolutely fantastic. I took Henry camping along with my pal, Forrest. We were originally going to go camping near Skykomish but after looking at the weather report I thought we should go camp somewhere in the rainshadow. The trick is that neither F or I know the area well so it was a bit of a guessing game.
Friday night we headed up, grabbed dinner at The Brick in Roslyn (a town once made famous by Northern Exposure) and then made our way north on Salmon La Sac toward Cooper Lake. We wanted to get settled in before losing our light so we weren't too picky on our campsite. We did okay finding a place with enough wood to gather, a bit of privacy and good ground to put our tents down. The downside was that over a bluff from us was a rather large group of middle-aged wankers blasting bad 80s music. The local rangers did tell them to kill the music at 10pm and apparently someone in their party, who was quite drunk, promptly fell in their giant campfire on his way to telling the rangers off. They were quite quiet for the rest of the night.
Henry LOVED gathering firewood, tending the fire and cooking over it. He stayed up quite late with us and basked in the testosterone.
Henry was a HUGE help getting the tent all set up. I certainly had a lot more stuff in there than I would have if i was on my own. But he was pretty brilliant at arranging everything in the tent while I fed it to him from the car. Actually, he was incredibly helpful through the whole trip.
We both had as decent a night's sleep as you can have sleeping inches off the ground and woke up hungry as hell.
We got up a bit earlier than Forrest so we got out for a hike. Checked out a nearby creek, looked about some of the other campsites and marked a few places with the GPS in case we wanted to come back on our own sometime. When we got back F had a wee fire going and the campstove set up on the tailgate. Henry got his first camp breakfast of bacon, eggs and deformed hotcakes. We broke camp and decided to head for Cooper Lake proper.
Cooper Lake is further north and quite close to the snow line. After dicking about the fire roads for a while we settled in a spot not far from the lake just off a creek that feeds it. It was a brilliant spot. Well above the creek with good creek access. Loads of accessible firewood, trails, deadfalls to climb, etc..
Henry got a full day of romping around the woods, over the creek and down trails with his slingshot in hand. He was absolutely filthy and happy as hell. We were at a much higher altitude than the night before and it was COLD that night. Colder than we really packed for. But our sleeping bags are great and we survived the night with a sense of humour.
Sorry I can't make this more interesting. I guess you had to be there. It was a great thrill for me having Henry along and a bigger thrill that he liked it so much and wants to do it again. I can hardly wait. I think our next trip will be a mid-week trip to Spencer's Spit on Lopez Island. Clamming, crabbing, fishing, etc.. Good times.