Kamiah, ID

After backpacking in the Enchantments, we continued east a few hundred miles to Kamiah, Idaho. Jaimee's Aunt, Uncle and mom live there. They live along a river on a sort of farm with a large garden and 35 chickens! Jaimee's Aunt keeps these chickens as pets (although she does eat, sell or give away the eggs) and has several different breeds, including:

Silkies

Polish Crested

Red and Black Sex Links

The chickens have a fancy coop which used to actually be a person's house:

(That's the neighbor's dog Ginger in the picture).

While in Idaho we also floated in the river to cool us down from the heat (it was in the high 90s) and we went to the Idaho County fair in Cottonwoods. It was a pretty small fair but we got to see some animals, watch some lambs get judged and had fresh curly fries. They "curled" entire potatoes and fried them fresh:




Maybe not the most healthy thing in the world, but I suppose, when in Idaho...

We also went on a hiking adventure where we climbed two peaks.

Overall, we had a very relaxing few days in Kamiah. We leave tomorrow for Bend, Oregon. We've arranged to stay with some couchsurfers there and on Sunday we plan on climbing South Sister, a 10,000 foot mountain in Central Oregon near Bend.

Peaks 14 and 15

While in Idaho I knew I wanted to climb some peaks as part of my 35 peak goal. I had a hard time figuring out where to hike because I wanted something fairly close and somewhat short since it gets up into the 90s every day and I didn't want to be hiking in hottest part of the day.

Eventually in looking at maps and doing research on-line I found a pair of peaks that fit the criteria.

We decided to climb Gospel Peak and Pyramid Peak. We left the house around 6AM and drove about 2 hours until we got to the base of Gospel Peak. The road was a crazy, winding super-steep drive that got us just below the peak.


There's no trail to the top - we just entered the woods and headed for the top. We got to the top in about half an hour.


Then we just proceeded down, across and back up the ridge to Pyramid:


It took us a little over an hour to reach Pyramid Peak:

Then we circled back down to the road and hiked back to car. Overall, it was a great morning hike and it was exciting to bag two peaks in one day. Here is a map of the area, click the link for a map of all my 35 peaks so far.


View 35 Peaks in a larger map