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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Lack of planning turns last-minute kid-free weekend into solid adventure

A hiker steps off Lookout Mountain overlooking Priest Lake in North Idaho. (Rich Landers / The Spokesman-Review)

Sometimes I forget outdoor adventures don’t always require a lot of planning. Last year, after my wife and I realized we would have a kid-free week when our son and daughter went away to camp, we decided to organize our own summer trip. We talked about backpacking in Yellowstone or whitewater boating in Idaho, all big outings that required planning and long drives. Then the reality of responsible parenting set in.

“What if something happens while we’re gone?” my wife, Juliet, asked. “The kids will be fine,” I said, trying to put away memories of late-night emergency room visits for stitches and broken bones. As much as we didn’t want to admit it, we knew we couldn’t be out of cell phone range for too long or more than a day’s drive from the camp in Olympia. All those long wilderness trips disappeared from our conversations.

We had a hard time replacing those imagined adventures, shooting down one idea after another until spring turned to summer and it looked like we would spend our first-time-in-10-years-kid-free week working. Then a friend of Juliet’s saved us. “Hike Mount Roothaan, then get a beer at Cavanaugh’s,” she said. So after we came back from Olympia, we threw the dog, our hiking boots and a day pack in the back of the pickup, a change of clothes and a copy of Rich Landers’ 100 Hikes in the Inland Northwest in the cab, and headed off to the lake. We checked into a small place on Cavanaugh Bay and the next day Juliet and I headed to Mount Roothaan.

The drive to the trail head was its own adventure. The Idaho Department of Lands manages most of the lake’s east side for timber and the roads showed it. They started rutted and rough and got worse the farther into the mountains we went. It was a slow trip. Coming over a water bar, I misjudged the route and heard the pickup’s skid plate grind into the dirt and rocks. I shifted into reverse, but the truck wouldn’t come free. Finally I put it into four-wheel-drive and managed to get going again. At some point we missed a turn, had to backtrack and we weren’t sure we were on the right road until we reached the trail.

The hike starts at 6,000 feet and even though the forecast in Spokane called for highs in the nineties, the air in the mountains was cool and dry. Juliet and I made fast time over a mostly level trail that passed through thick stands of fir and lodgepole pine for the first 30 minutes.

We paused at a mound of snow turned watermelon pink by an algae that grows in summer snow, something I hadn’t seen since my daughter was born. I love taking my children outdoors, and I suspect they don’t dislike our outings as much as their complaining might make it seem, but I appreciated a chance to hear the sounds of the mountains and of my own breathing.

I felt the altitude a little by the time we cleared the trees. Out in the open, our destination looked a long way off, or I wanted it to look a long way off anyway. The trail climbed through a meadow to a saddle, with Mount Roothaan just to the saddle’s left. Lupine and Indian paintbrush flowered purple and red beneath a canopy of blooming beargrass. Pale-yellow pollen from the spikes of the creamy-white beargrass flowers brushed onto our arms and legs and faces and mixed with our sweat so that by the time we reached the saddle, we looked like pilgrims who had just finished some ancient ritual trek.

From the saddle it was a quick scramble to the top of the mountain. The whole hike had taken maybe an hour-and-a-half. I had hoped for something longer – the price of not really planning I supposed.

So we lingered. We ate. We took pictures. We admired the views the way you are supposed to admire views from the top of a mountain. Then we hiked back through the flowering beargrass that smeared us with pollen and past the algae pinkened snow.

That afternoon, we canoed out to an island, swam in the cool lake and in the evening went to Cavanaugh’s. I had a beer, a burger and a huckleberry tart for desert because at Priest Lake you should always eat something with huckleberries. The next morning we checked out, had huckleberry pancakes at a place in Coolin and talked about what to do next.

We hadn’t planned anything besides the Roothaan hike. I didn’t want to go back to Spokane in the heat, so I drove north along the lake while Juliet flipped through the guide book. Although I’m not sure why, we settled on a hike up Lookout Mountain.

Branches crowded the trail and scratched at our legs. A downed tree blocked the way, then another and another and I began having doubts we were on the right trail. I wished we had a topo map. The trail was flat though, so even with the obstacles, we made good time and soon found ourselves following a small creek that leads to a small lake at the base of a big cliff.

The lake was smooth and held onto the green of the trees and the gray of the mountains that surrounded it. I expected to see a moose standing in the water, head down eating, but there was no moose, only the bark of a squirrel upset with our dog. We picked our way around some boulders so the dog could drink, then worked our way back to the main trail and followed it until it intersected with an old jeep road. We talked about heading back. A sign on a tree behind us pointed the way to Tower Mountain and we took that for what is was and set off.

The trail switchedbacked out of the trees and into a swath of huckleberry bushes, but the berries were still green, so we had no excuse to stop. I started breathing hard. My legs hurt. As I walked, I took my sunglasses off and wiped the sweat from my face before it could run into my eyes. It had become a real hike.

By the time we reached the jeep road to the summit, Juliet and I had slowed down, but then we caught a glimpse of the fire tower at the top and pushed on. At the top, we walked around the base of the tall lookout built in the 1970s, then around the small white shack tied to the rocks with cables that had served as the original lookout in the 1920s, both vacant and unused, before we sat to rest and eat. A steady breeze kept us cool.

A marmot stuck its nose out of its rocky hole, smelled the dog or us, barked and ducked away, then a few minutes later did it all over again. Even with the smoke, we could see Priest and Upper Priest lakes to our West, Chimney Rock and Mount Roothaan to our South, the Selkirk Crest to our east, and Canada to the north.

It was a good view even if I hadn’t known where I was going when I woke up that morning.