Camping
On the day before my birthday (Saturday), we planned on going camping. Sunghee had heard about Silver Lake, which was a mile or so hike from the camp she used to work at. I popped Silver Lake into my the GPS and “Silver Lake State Park” came up. Alright! Lets go! Now, the camp Sunghee went to was in Ripton, which normally we would get to by driving north up Rt. 7, the GPS wanted us to go east on Rt. 4, then north on Rt. 100. I figured that the State Park was on the other side of the lake or something. After we ended up in Bethel I concluded that whoever told Sunghee that you could hike from Ripton to this Silver Lake was out of their minds. It was about 50 miles or so away. We had arrived at about 7:30 and the State Park was pretty well filled up with campers so we looked at the map and found that yes, indeed, there are TWO Silver Lakes in VT. One is near Bethel, VT and the other is near Lake Dunmore. That’s not too confusing. It was about 8:15pm and we were running out of day light rapidly. I popped in a randon Ripton address in the GPS and started off. We were directed up over the mountain on some dirt road. Quite exciting.
We were driving along the Green Mountain National Forest and found one pull off with a trail head on it that looked pretty good. We hiked about 1/4 mile into the woods looking for a nice flat place to setup camp when I thought I heard police sirens. “Wow, I thought we were out in the middle of nowhere, but I hear sirens”. Sunghee then said “No, those are coyotes.” And yes, they were. Lots and lots of coyotes. We quickly turned around and went back to the car. By this time it was 9pm and I wasn’t too keen on hiking to Silver Lake from Ripton on some unknown trail so we headed back towards Killington and decided to get on the Long Trail at Kent Pond, the we decided to forget the long trail and setup camp in the picnic area since it was almost 10pm and we were tired. I cooked some ravioli over the stern-o stove placed on the concrete picnic table and Sunghee make ramen noodles. Such is “roughing it” in our lives. We were awoken at around 1am by someone driving down to the pond then turning around. Also awaken at 3:15am by someone driving up with a boat, putting it in the water, then taking it out and driving off. I think they came back at 6:15 and actually left the boat in the water this time. We got up at this point and tore down camp in about 5 minutes (love the new tent!) and headed back home.
