Cabinets awesome, bears and all

There’s nothing like a fast break into the wilderness, even if it has to be shoe-horned into a crammed family summer schedule.

Perhaps our most memorable getaway this year was a quick overnighter my son, Scott, and I squeezed in before family summer plans and soccer weekends took over.

We were thrilled to get to the end of the road near the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, but we were humbled as we headed to the trailhead and read the several BIG signs warning us that we were in bear country, how to avoid bears, how to detect that indicate bears are nearby, how to recognize the difference between a black bear and a grizzly. … Whoa!

We were pretty well worked up about bears by the time we started on the trail. Some of our conversation was about the relative protection offered by the sheer nylon walls of our two-man tent.

Scott, a sophomore at Ferris, is every dad’s dream as a backcountry companion. He can be packed and ready to go in 10 minutes.

Last year, when he was 14, some friends and I took him up Mount Adams. I carried a good portion of the load from his pack. Stronger climbers repeatedly drew encouragement from Scott’s ability to either start or end most sentences with “Awesome!” as he skipped back and forth ahead of us.

A year later, he’s man enough to take much of the group gear in his pack.

This summer’s getaway to the Cabinets was a one-night stand above Leigh Lake, where we intended to launch a scramble up Snowshoe Peak. We didn’t make the summit, but we’ll never forget the slightly sleepless night of listening to the wild animals pawing and snorting just outside the very, very thin layer of nylon around us.

You’d be surprised how much a half-dozen mountain goats grazing next to your tent seems to sound just like a huge man-eating grizzly bear.