Rooftop Tenting By a Pristine Lake in BC /// EFRT S5•EP22

Welcome to another episode of the Epic Family Road Trip. Hey guys. Every once in a while we take a day like this and come back in from where we are in the wilderness off the grid where we have no cell service and we try to get caught up. So I'll show you around camp and kind of give you an idea of what it's like on our on our editing and working days. The kids are doing some school. Caroline's doing some edits. I'm catching up on emails and all that kind of stuff and we're you know kind of taking it easy. These in BC and in other places these little camp spots are everywhere and it's free camping up to 14 days. It's what we call crown land here in Canada. It's it's public land or you would call BLM land in the states. And this one's, I'll show you around, it's right beside a road here, a logging road, and you can got a little fire going back there. We parked the two jeeps side by side and charge up all our equipment here and then I'll take you over the view. So this is just a few feet from where we're parked and you can see in the distance well it's because it's raining it's kind of hard to see but I'll try to show you if things clear up. But there's a there's a lumber mill over here and then there's a village of radium hot springs where we spent our quarantine month in a condo there. That gives us cell phone access so we have 100 gigs of upload or download on our cell phone and high enough speed with the 3G. So this is good, it's a good place that we can get caught up on everything. How's school going Dan? Good. Getting your done? Yep, staying dry. Wow that's a lot. So the rain has cleared up for a second which is nice but check it over here. While we were getting rain the higher elevations were getting snow. Isn't that beautiful? All right we are packing up. We just spent a day here in this spot uh getting caught up on all kinds of things. So Caroline edited and uploaded a video. I was catching up on some emails. The boys were doing some homeschool. Carol was answering and helping me answer the messages that we missed when we're off the grid. So we try to keep up with them but we do still miss some and if we haven't answered you you're one of your questions yet we apologize we will get to it. But now we're packing up uh just getting a few more supplies and then heading back into the mountains. We've had a bunch of folks that live here drop in to say hi while we're at this spot and point out all kinds of places we should check out while we're here. So the list keeps getting longer and oh man well we're probably going to have to come back here and finish exploring. Can't get it all on this trip as we're heading east not west but between where we are here on the east side of BC and the ocean there is unlimited beautiful land to explore. So another day we'll do that but for now we're carrying on on our journey off road back roads all the way back across Canada. All right so we're heading out again. We're going to be taking the same road but quite a bit further out into the bush. We got uh got suggested to go to this lake can't remember the name um but by like three different locals that saw us parked back there where we can get some wi-fi. Hopefully while we're there we want to uh do some laundry, heat up a bunch of water with the lake. Some other guy that was on a riding a dual sport bike said that you can drink the water straight from the lake. Not many people visit up there and it's a pretty pristine lake so it should be really fun. Apparently great campground and beauty views. So we're just parked up here while we um check out the trail ahead. I don't think we're on the right trail. We're winding through the forest and on GPS we can see the lakes but this trail keeps taking us away from them. At one point it looked like we were going straight towards them and then it went away again so this looks like the end of the trail. Yeah it's me. It looks like the last place they cleared. Yeah. This is just a logging trail that led to this ring here. But we want to look for the lakes right? Yeah looks like we hit a kind of a dead end here. We're gonna have to spin the jeeps around and get back out to the main logging road, go back a little bit and then work our way in. Beautiful little lake we found it. We had taken a road that was a little too far down the road so we came back one one little side road and here we are. So hopefully we can get right down to the lake. It looks beautiful and the water looks pristine. All right the girls are going to go exploring um because there's looks like another lake down the way so they're going to take that little path out and see and they'll radio back um if they find something. In the meantime we're completely out of water and so I'm going to show you how we collect water here in the wilderness. But we found a little site here um it's it's unmarked until you get in but there's uh looks like a washroom and a fire pit and a picnic table so it's glamping. This is glamping for us man this is like fancy. Let's do the water thing. All right we've got our five liter life straw filtering system so I'm just gonna fill this bag in the lake and then drip it into our one of our front runner tanks which are up here on the roof rack. Crystal clear beautiful water here it's pretty full now all you do is fold it over place together so I just got a carabiner to hang this puppy right there on that hook and it's just gravity fed so take a look down here the purified water drips out of that little bit of hole and it just comes in and drip. So we're camping up here in bear country and typically a bear will only attack if startled so the way we handle that when we're hiking is we wear these little bear bells on our shoes the way we're keeping Lando safe because he's running through the forest all the time we don't want him to startle a bear so we've got a bear bell for his collar. Let's get it on Lando come here buddy good boy you get to put your bear bell on yeah you love it don't you makes lots of funny noise when you're running so I'm gonna throw the ball and you show us how it sounds wait wait for it okay ready Lando want to hear your bear bell okay ready go get it that's how that works you can hear them coming and hopefully bears will hear them coming and get out of the way setting up a clothes line we're uh it's a laundry mat day today at the lake Carol's got this really neat washboard that we use to clean the clothes and then we're going to string this up between the jeep and that tree and just let the wind get out of the clothes and they'll be nice and fresh and clean so this is nice rinsing water look how clear that is so we just heat it up when we're washing and then we rinse with this this is this beautiful water this is a really nice all-natural stain remover slash soap and it works really well with this washboard and then these I found instead of the plastic ones that break these really hold up and they go from bigger to small and so it makes it nice and snug so it doesn't fall off in high wind which is great so I'm excited about this and I wish I knew the name of the soap but it works fantastic I got it on Amazon somewhere my water has turned almost green from Daniel's socks they're more like cardboard they were straight I should have filmed it lucky they didn't run away now they'll be nice and clean but yeah they're pretty goody okay one of the questions we get a lot is how do you take a shower and I'm going to show you so yeah there's there's so many different really cool things on the market nowadays but this is a one that we took because it can fold down to nothing some of the other ones take a bit of space so we fill it halfway with cold water it's called a Helio LX if you want to know where did we buy this at REI I think and then we fill the top with boiling hot water and you end up with nice comfortable shower water so we just heat the water up on our propane stove but we did think we were going to be in New Mexico Phoenix and this in the sun by itself heats it up fine we didn't we didn't calculate on being in cold weather we do have a propane tiny little propane heater that is a constant flow water heater but we didn't bring it with us because we also have a shower that runs off the front runner it's basically just a bag of water it's black it heats up when you have nice hot sun and it's gravity feed but we'll show you this one for now so I'm going to put one more bucket of hot water in here and I'll show you where we're getting the water we're just getting the water right out of the lake all right once that's heated up I'm going to get it in the shower by then the water should be the right temperature and then we'll show you how it works all right so once the little tube there's filled with warm or even hot water then we put it in this little pop-up privacy tent and that becomes a shower we set up a little chair and we also have mr heater buddy once you once you're done and you want to dry off and stay warm that keeps you nice and warm but there's a little foot pedal my boots are dirty they shouldn't actually be in here but this foot pump creates the pressure and you give it 10 good pumps and then and the more you pump it the more pressure you're going to end up with and there you got it the shower now I got to clean the floor because I made a mess these are buttermilk biscuits that's for sure wow that's good good purified liquid water it's pretty good good morning it is Wednesday April the 29th and we just spent a beautiful night here in the BC wilderness in an area that has a couple of lakes as you can see in the background they're called the hall lakes and we just followed our gps till we got here and wow what a beautiful spot these lakes are crystal clear pristine waters you can drink pretty much right out of the lake we ran it through our filter but filled all our water buckets kids went swimming even though it was freezing cold the snow or the ice has just melted off here you know this week or maybe last week so the water is still cold but this place in the summer locals tell us is a great place to come and swim in the in the water there and just enjoy the beautiful scenery the big backdrop of snow-capped mountains in the distance and mountains on all sides just a spectacular place in the kootenays of British Columbia Canada stay tuned for next week's video high in the mountains of British Columbia Canada as we embark on one of the toughest snow-covered trails we have ever done oh man the road's blocked that's insane I don't know where to go now we're winching digging probably just gonna set up for the night up here and hope that it's frozen in the morning we're still stuck it's not the best situation one of the most insane mistakes I've ever made on a trail this is the third day now pretty much 10 hours a day has just ended up putting us further into the mountain pass yeah and we're low on gas I've got a quarter tank left and in the we'll see you down the road