STILL WORKING ON THE DAILY PLANET

Backpacking With Superman

By Russ Schneider, Guest Writer, 9-11-06

	ABOVE: Superman on a mountain he can leap over. BELOW: Superman in a building he can lift with one hand. Photos by Russ Schneider.

Recently, I had the pleasure to backpack with Superman (aka my son Casey). Casey is 5 years old and has been hiking, but had never done a backpack trip. We picked Boulder Lakes in the Kootenai National Forest as a good place to start as the trail is short and without much climbing.

When you ask Casey what he wants to be when he grows up, he reliably always says "a superhero." Well, of course, don't we all. And, on this particular trip his mom had said he could wear his Superman costume backpacking, and I couldn't think of any good reason why he shouldn't other than it was a little hot for a full-body nylon suit.

So Superman and I started down the trail with questions like, "who do you think would win between a Grizzly bear and T-Rex." I thought about it and said, "I would have to say the T-Rex" "How about a Grizzly Bear and a Tiger? Do they live together, who would win?" This was a bit tougher....."Well I'm not sure, I suppose the tiger, but lots of times tigers live in jungles and grizzly bears generally don't, but some types of bears do, but they aren't as big, so probably the tiger."

We made it to Boulder Lake (under 3 miles with the road closed, probably closer to 2 3/4 miles) in about two hours. Remarkably, on Labor Day Weekend, we had the lake to ourselves. Superman helped me set up the tent and assured me it was ok while I missed the branch with my rope to hang the food. I did finally get that rope over the branch and food hung and we set out for a hike up the ridge to Boulder Mountain Lookout as noted on the map. From Boulder Lake it is about 3/4 mile of switchbacks at a nice grade to the top of the ridge, then a relatively flat up and down walk for another mile to where you veer off the trail to the top of the mountain. There isn't much of a lookout there anymore, just some collapsed logs and a good pile of rocks, but Superman didn't seem to mind....as you can see from the photo of Casey Schneider on top of Boulder Mountain.



Superman also spilled my dinner, decided that marshmallows are better than smores (we had to cook smores over the camp stove because of fire restrictions), and we did have to have the discussion in the tent about if bears ever come into people's tent and get them. I punted a little on this one with "not around here that I am aware of," which is true, I am not aware of any bear encounters involving tent campers in this area. There aren't many bears in the Yaak yet as far as I know although we did see some old sign.

Personally, I would never hike in a full body nylon suit on a sunny Labor Day weekend, but its hard to get Superman to take his suit off, if you know what I mean.

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