Tiny Dancers

After having to backpack fat-baby Carter six miles up to a Sierra lake...and back down again, I instituted the no-baby-campers rule.  He was three at the time, so I set the minimum age at four.  Sasha and Piper, as suddenly as that happens, turned four this summer.  I organized their first adventure "out there" to be as intriguing and low-impact as possible.  The cafe makes it hard for me to be gone long, so Skye and Shawn came to take my place, and the four kids and I scrammed out of here for Mono Lake.

My family has camped in the mountains around Mono Lake, all my life.  When I was eight, I collected a wild rose from a high-elevation roadside that I stored in the refrigerator until it was acclimated to sea level.  I had that rose until just a few years ago, and noticing it from time to time would take me back to the haunting peace of these mountains and those camping trips. If you get to know me at all, you will visit  Mono Lake with me, sometime.  I  loved watching Piper and Sasha explore the favorite places from my childhood and thought of them sharing these memories someday with their own grandchildren.

We stayed in a little cabin beside a creek, we had a campfire, we haphazardly fished, we hiked (they're more cooperative hikers than Carter!), we picked up pine cones and ate pine nuts.  We passed through flocks of dusty, recently shorn sheep, we ate lots of chocolate, we explored Bodie (a ghost town state park), we climbed on rocks and marveled at the stars.  All of it was new and all of it drew their intense and complete attention.  I noted that their joy was in the freedom to run out ahead; to choose which windows of the ghost town cabins they wanted to peek into, to do things with complete abandon!  They were "dancing" the whole time!