Camping at Willow Flat w/Bear Lake Day
It has been too long, but we finally made it back to Willow Flat and Bear Lake!
It is a long-standing Jenkins Family tradition to go camping at Willow Flat, near Preston, Idaho. We even talked about the now 6 generations that have been coming here, starting before it even became a campsite.
Another Jenkins favorite is Bear Lake, which straddles the Idaho and Utah border, with the Idaho side being the best 😉. But seriously, the North Shore is the best side!
A few years ago, as families got busy and the area changed, we combined the two trips so we could have the best of both worlds. It makes for a packed but amazing weekend.
~Use arrows on the left and right to navigate the album, or open in Google Photos to view~
Sadly, we couldn’t take any time off, so we headed out Friday afternoon.
This was also our first test of the new pop-up and the reinforced bumper to attach our bike rack. With the X5 loaded up, trailer attached, and bikes at the end, we hit to road!
… and then promptly pulled over at the Love’s gas station. 😄
As we started to speed up on the freeway, the side-to-side sway kicked in at about 60 mph, and we couldn’t keep it straight. Nathan quickly realized that the bikes were not going to work. 200lb of weight at the very back of a light trailer was just way too much weight on the tail. So we switched the bikes over to my parents’ truck and tried again! This time with much more success.
It’s about a 2-hour drive to Willow Flat, with a quick stop in Preston to fill up the trailer’s freshwater tank. We made it to camp around 4, with plenty of time to set everything up before dinner and dark.
Seeing family, eating yummy dutch oven food, and relaxing was perfect!
Unfortunately, the weekend got away from us quickly, so we weren’t able to head up to the springs. Right next to the Willow Flat campground is the Cub River Natural Spring Trail. It’s a half-mile walk/hike up to a natural spring that you can drink from!
For a fun flashback, here is a photo from the first Willow Flat trip that Nathan joined us on in September of 2014, when he asked my Dad to marry me 🥹.
While we haven’t been able to maintain a yearly trip with the rest of the family, we do try to come back every few years.
With any luck, it will be closer to yearly going forward!
On Saturday, we woke up early and packed up for a day at the lake.
Bear Lake is the best lake I have ever been to, and growing up with a family who LOVES water, this was our saving grace living in Utah/Idaho.
North Shore Bear Lake has miles of real sandy beach. Not crushed rock, real and soft and perfect to play in sand. It also has a very gradual slope, so you would have to walk 100+ feet into the water before you couldn’t touch the bottom. This makes it perfect for kids and adults to play with relative safety.
For the last 10 years, my parents have brought the “family” island, which is a 10+ seat inflatable that, while a giant pain to pack around, is always a highlight for kids and adults to hang out and float.
Plus, with the popularity of paddleboards, we had almost half a dozen of them up for everyone to take out as well.
Around dinner time, we packed everything up and made our way to Garden City, where tradition says you get raspberry shakes and burgers for dinner, generally at Zipz.
Once we had eaten, we decided to head back to camp while the rest of the family finished eating. Since it was just Nathan, myself and my parents, so we decided to go for a little adventure and take a new way back to the campsite.
For literal years, our family has been coming here, but we had never taken the “shortcut” over the mountain from Bear Lake to Willow Flat. We always went over to Preston and then up the mountain. So we decided to give it a shot.
We made our way up to Paris, and then the Paris Ice Caves, where you can have a snowball fight all year round! Granted it might not be the cleanest or prettiest snow, but it is always there!
Normally, this is as far up on the road as we would go and then head back to Bear Lake, usually to camp. Instead, we kept going onto German Dugway and E Cub Rd/Franklin Rd.
Up to Paris Ice Caves is a normal forest road that is a little bumpy but still maintained. After the Ice Caves, it was clearly used but not well-maintained. It started much rockier than we expected, and we had to maneuver a little bit of rock climbing.
I should also note that we are in a Dodge 3500 long bed truck. While amazing for hauling and doing truck stuff, it is NOT designed to go off-roading, and it is NOT a small vehicle.
So we keep going, and the road is rough but still manageable. Personally, I hated it, but Nathan loves off-roading, so he was having fun. Though it was my Dad driving, and don’t think he appreciated it as much.
After way too long, and some death grips, we made it to the top of the mountain and had some truly incredible views. With the right vehicle, I would put up with the rough road to see these views.
Fun fact, we were so close to the electric lines that you could hear the electricity going through them!
Now we have to head back down the mountain, where our campground is in the middle of the canyon. This is where a crappy drive turned into probably the worst thing I have ever experienced in my life.
To be clear, this was not anyone’s fault; we had NO IDEA what was ahead of us. My dad truly did an incredible job driving, but NEVER AGAIN.
As soon as we started driving down, the road was so steep and on a literal cliff’s edge the entire time. If we spent 45 minutes going up, it probably took us almost 90 minutes to get down because we had to crawl down the mountain in order to control the giant truck not meant for that road.
I had a death grip on the seat and handle with my eyes closed the majority of the time, or at the very least, refusing to look to my left, which was a straight drop down the mountain. Then about 1/2 was down, we switched, so the other side was a straight cliff down. Still not good!
I felt terrible that my dad had to deal with driving down this road because I would have given up and walked, because let’s be clear, there was no room to turn around even if we wanted to. Thank god no one was trying to come the other direction because I truly don’t know what we would have done.
We finally made it down the mountain and back to camp with no damage or problems, and honestly, I don’t know how we managed to do it, but we did.
Our shortcut was supposed to get us back 30 minutes before everyone else, and instead, we probably got there 30+ minutes after they did.
So after that emotional rollercoaster, we sat by the fire for a little bit, sharing stories and s’mores, and then went to bed for some much-needed sleep!
The next morning, we woke up and made a traditional camping breakfast of pancakes, eggs, breakfast meat, and hashbrowns.
Then we packed everything up and headed out, with an uneventful drive home.
While it had some lows, the weekend had a lot of highs. I am so happy we were able to make this work with our summer trip! Until next year!
