About five weeks ago my brother called to ask me if I was interested in going on a backpacking trip with him and two of his buddies. I was absolutly interested, but admittedly a little nervous because I had never been back packing before, and wasn't 100% sure how it would go. The trip just happened to land on my 34th birthday so it appeared that the stars were aligning for a trip of destiny. Luckily for me, my brother had an extra set of gear so I didn't have to rush out and spend $1,000 on supplies for the trip. Our destination was the Stuart Fork Trail in the Trinity Alps Wilderness. I left our house at 4am and drove out to Weaverville where I meet up with my brother and headed to the trail head just west of Trinity Lake. We started hiking around 7am with a plan to hike nine miles that day so that we could camp out at Morris Meadows. Once we got to the meadows we found a perfect spot right next to a swimming hole and we set up camp. We spent the rest of the day exploring the meadows and failing to catch even one singe fish! The next morning we packed up camp and hiked five more miles up to Emerald Lake. This was by far the hardest section of the hike because the CCC hadn't cleared the trail yet. We crossed paths with them on Friday as we started our hike, and they warned us that they had cleared the trail to the meadows, but hadn't yet cleared the path from the meadows to the lake. Suffice it to say, we were moving much slower on Saturday as we were having to crawl through certain sections of brush, create new creek crossings, and simply finding the trail in certain areas where the snow had covered it up. Once we made it to the lake we found a great spot next to the damn where we set up shop. The rest of that day we chased waterfalls, relaxed a little and watched an osprey hunt for fish for about an hour. The next morning we hit the trail pretty early as we had 14 miles to hike back down to the parking lot. I'll be honest, I underestimated how difficult backpacking would be. Don't get me wrong, it was one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had, but I just didn't realize that backpacking was equal parts vacation and physical workout. I now look at it as a weekend trip to the gym, well, the most beautiful gym in the world that is. I can't recommend this trail enough, it had so many different beautiful features and landscapes, I look forward to doing it again some day! | 
