T.M.A.F.I.

TMAFI has come and gone already...i already want to go back. this year was quite interesting. at 12:00 the night before (or i guess morning of) our trip i was jolted out of bed with a desire to check our reservations for the campsite. i usually print it out to have in case anything goes wrong and i hadn't done that yet. to my horror i found that i had actually booked it for the weekend before!! i didn't know what to do - i had around 15 people coming up and needed to find something to accommodate all of us, but there are only 2 group sites in the whole area and they both usually need to be reserved a year in advance. we just decided to get going...we left at 5:00a.m. and i couldnt call until 8:00 - i called the reservation line and to my surprise the other group site was not reserved so was now a first come first serve site...we made it to the site around 11:00 and were able to secure it so crisis resolved, except that i needed to find a cell phone reception area to let everyone know. it was quite stressfull, but i guess all my prayers were answered and it didnt turn out so bad - in fact some of the people liked it better than Table Mountain because there were no mosquitoes...

Anyway- we clocked in lots of fishing hours - i did not end up winning -i thought i could redeem myself this year, but Katie B. a friend of my sister's pulled in a 3 lb trout on a nightcrawler that ended up being a tagged fish in a different Bishop derby (she won $100!).

One of the best parts/hardest parts was our hike up to Tyee lake. we hiked for about an hour and a half - straight up. it was a workout, but worth it when you reach a lake with beautiful brown and brook trout. The picture on the right below is of the Tyee Lake that we hiked to. all the fish were small, but gorgeous and the lake was peaceful and no one else was there. We decided it would be good to do a hike every year to some of the lakes you can't reach by car.

it definitely gave me the camping bug and i need to start planning our next trips. it was so nice to be somewhere where our phones didnt work and there wasn't email and you had no other entertainment save the fire and your bubble bobbing.