Capitol State Forest

Wednesday night began the most challenging adventure my internship has yet to present me with. It was my duty to visit the Capitol State Forest outside of Elma, Washington to determine if this would be a good location for an overnight camping trip with the oldest campers. At first this did not seem like something that I would have any trouble with, and took on the responsibility with confidence.

Due to the fact that many of the staff were needed to prepare for the arrival of the campers, and others were needed to great the campers at the Seattle airport I would spend the night at the forest on my own. I arrived at Capitol State Forest around 11pm on Wednesday night and was immediately intimidated by the area. The forest was huge and very thick, and the campsites were extremely under developed. In addition there was no ranger station and no trail maps.

I was unfamiliar with the area so I set up lanterns outside my site in hopes that someone may stop by that would be able to give me a better idea of where I was in location to Capitol Peak. In addition I was unsure about the wildlife in the area, so I set up a campfire in order to get a better idea of my surroundings. Fortunately I was not visited by any large animals during the night, but I did hide my food away from my tent just in case. Only one group of visitors stopped due to the flashing lanterns I set up, and they were of no help. To make matters a little more complicated I had to use all of my drinking water to put out my fire before going to sleep.

The morning came and I was surprised to find that my entire campsite was littered with shotgun shells and ATV tracks. The recreational users in this area were obviously very irresponsible. After packing my gear and preparing to use the GPS to find a trailhead that would take me on a good tour of the forest it began to rain. This was a good thing that I had expected so I collected rainwater from a nearby runoff.

This was the perfect opportunity for me to test out a technique that I had been curious about for some time. I have been told that it is possible to boil water in a paper cup over a fire, and the paper cup would not burn. This is due to the fact that the boiling point of water is lower than the ignition point of paper products. To my surprise this technique actually worked better than I had ever hoped. I have attached a video to this post that I took while boiling the water.

Now that I had enough clean drinking water I could continue hiking around the state forest. The forest was littered with trash, gun ammunition, and overused recreational sites. While I was at the forest I decided to hike to the top of Rock Candy Mountain, but I had already made up my mind that this was not the site for our campout. Due to the fact that I was wearing a newer pair of hiking shoes I also ended up with some terrible blisters on my feet by the end of my eight mile hike.

My pick up ride came around 5pm and I begun to explain some of my concerns for the campsite to the other staff members. Although this was a very challenging overnight trip I enjoyed the test very much. We still needed to find a site for the older campers to have their overnight so on the way back to our camp in Ocean Park we visited Schafer State Park and salmon hatchery, and Lake Sylvia State Park. The hatchery did not have long enough trails or big enough campsites, but Lake Sylvia turned out to be the perfect site. We found a developed group campsite that overlooked the lake, and a nearby trail that provides a view of the Olympic Mountains.

I have also included a link below to a youtube video that better explains the paper cup camping experiment.

http://factoidz.com/how-to-boil-water-in-a-paper-cup/