Two night backpacking trip to the Hidden Hand Group Campsite on East Bank Ross Lake Trail. The trail was in great shape and mostly flat, short, and great for kids! The Hidden Hand camp is pretty with an upper plateau for cooking and campfire (when allowed). Campsites are on the hillside which is not so flat, but it was not terrible either. It's a short jaunt to the cliffs/water and the kids had a blast jumping off the cliffs into the cool water. The cliffs would be very scary for younger kids, but we had older kids so it was fine with supervision. Amazing scenery and solitude here. Fishing is good too!
The first day we arrived as we were getting situated and our food packed up and ready to hang, a mama bear and three little cubs scampered into our camp from up the hill and scared the crap out of a few members of our group that were around. Mama was not aggressive or getting into our food (just digging around), but the cubs were scared by the our yelling attempt to get them out of camp and ran up into trees in the camp. Once the cubs were in the trees mama was not leaving. We all just backed off and gave them space until they were ready to leave, but it was a bit frightening. I have seen other bears and cubs on Ross Lake in previous trips, so be prepared!
We also had rodents chew through our hung food bags, so I really recommend bear containers for Ross Lake.
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