We got to Klondike Park a little bit before dark. Klondike Park is a pretty new park, I think. It used to be a sandstone quarry.
The quarry part in the middle is now a lake. There is a trail that goes around the lake and over a corner of it on a bridge. For some reason, the lake reminded me of Yellowstone. It's a little bit other-worldy around the lake, because there's a lot of fine white sand underfoot and the vegetation is a bit odd. I didn't take any pictures of it, though.
Like I said, Klondike is a pretty new park, and its camping facilites are fairly luxurious. You can rent, in decending order, a conference center, cabins, deluxe tent camping sites, and basic tent camping sites.
For some reason, Klondike calls the deluxe sites "basic", and the basic sites "primitive". The nicer of the sites has a picnic table on a concrete slab with a metal roof overhead. I didn't see the "primitive" sites, but I think their picnic table is uncovered. Personally, an uncovered picnic table is not really "primitive" to me, but I don't know much about camping.
There are ten so-called "basic" sites, and we got No. 9. One thing that's weird is that the tent sites were all clustered fairly close together. I guess that's nice if you're camping with another family. The family next door in No. 10 was a couple with a maybe 3-y/o girl, and they were nice and quiet. Some of the other campsites were noisier, but 9 and 10 are slightly set off from them, so it didn't bother me.
We got our tent set up before it got dark. Our tent (The North Face Tephra 22) was certainly the smallest in the campground. Then, I tried to get a fire going... a couple of false starts and a lot of blowing, and we had enough fire to roast some hot dogs. I put some pre-doctored baked beans on the propane stove while the weenies were roasting.
We ate in the dark wearing LED headlamps.
After hot dogs, I cleaned up in the very nice camp kitchen located on the side of the bathroom/showers building. Then we made S'mores. Then I cleaned up again, and we went to bed.
Our chocolate bars had become totally liquid on the ride down, but I laid them flat on our metal pot lid and the chocolate hardened by s'morestime.
Jacob (with a few tips from Dad) was a masterful mello toaster. He perfectly browned every one.
The picture above is two really bad pancakes from breakfast. Maybe I'll BLOG about that tomorrow!
view of the lake
The mighty Labadie power plant is across the river, and we could hear its steady thrum all night long. I pretended it was a soothing drone like the pounding of the surf at the beach.
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