Knee Surgery + 5 Weeks =

Finally! Backpacking!

Last time we went backpacking Jared said he wouldn't go with me again unless I got my knee fixed. See, my knee does this thing, occasionally, where I'll be walking along just fine, and then suddenly and without warning, something shifts and I can no longer bend my knee or bear weight on it without excruciating pain. Then later in the day or the next morning or a couple days later it will shift back and everything will be fine again. Very mysterious.

Now, walking around normally, this is no big deal; I can go home and rest it until it goes away. But of course, this doesn't usually happen when I'm walking around normally, it happens most times when I'm doing something active. Like, say, backpacking. And in fact, we were once backpacking in Joshua Tree National Park when it happened, 4 miles in. Joshua Tree is, may I remind you, a desert, and so having a finite amount of water and an undetermined amount of time before we get more was a little nerve-racking. We had to stop and make camp in the wash right there, I took as much ibuprofen as I had in my first aid kit, and hoped it would "sleep off." I was able to gingerly walk in the morning and hike out (if you can do anything "gingerly" with a 40 lb pack on your back).

Anyway, that was the trip Jared said he wasn't doing it again until I got it fixed. The problem was, no one knew what was wrong with it. Pokes and prods by my favorite orthopedic surgeon plus MRIs at various angles showed nothing. And so no one was quite sure how to "fix" what ain't broke. But I had a standing offer from the doc to go in there and take a look anytime. 5 years later, finding myself a) desperate to be able to recreate the way I used to, b) not pregnant, and c) not breastfeeding, I decided my window of opportunity was now, and called up my old doc to schedule "the procedure."

Bless his heart, Dr. Weintraub found a floating piece of cartilage in my knee that didn't belong. It was not the kind of thing that an MRI would pick up, and since it was literally floating, unattached to anything, it would explain how the pain would move around and be totally unpredictable. I guess it could just get wedged into various parts of my knee joint - and then feel kinda like somebody's jabbing fork between my bones.

So anyway, now it's gone (yippee!), and though my knee is far from better a mere 5 weeks later, I was able to go on my first little backpacking trip, without worrying about my joint freezing up on me at random.

Since we were going with Jared's sister and her husband and their 2 month old baby - and bringing our own toddler who is, just this year, really too big to realistically pack in in a carrier - we were looking for a short, easy hike. Where to go?!

A few years ago, just after we got our GPS, we decided to do some adventuring by picking a spot on the map and seeing if we could find it. I once found a tiny blue smudge on a map that looked like a mountain lake and thought it would be fun to see if we could get there. After much twisting and turning on dirt forest service roads we got about as close as we figured we could by car, and bushwhacked the rest of the way there. Indeed, we found not only a beautiful, shallow, warm, idyllic, natural mountain lake, but a trail, just north of where we'd been bushwhacking, that would have saved us a lot of time and scrapes on our ankles (and arms, this being Oregon, after all). There was also a firepit and good campsite on the north side of the lake, and I remarked on our way back that this would be the perfect place to bring friends or family members who were a little leery of backpacking, because it was such a short, easy hike to a secluded beautiful place.
So we decided to try and find it again. Of course, we couldn't remember a thing about it. Not what it was called, not how we got there. We couldn't even agree on which National Forest it was in. So we almost had to give up. Then Jared had the brilliant idea of getting out the old GPS and seeing if we marked any points on it. And after searching through our marked waypoints, converting the coordinates and finding a map I could plug them into (did you know you can plug GPS coordinates into Google Maps? Works flawlessly. Awesome. Took me ages to figure that out.), we found our spot.
And so with in-laws and kids in tow we headed up there on Saturday morning to see if it was still there.

And so it was....The rest of the pics...

2009 Cripple Creek Backpacking Trip