The Horrors of the Outdoors

[Kitsune]

You might be able to erect some sort of net tent, using PVC pipe as a frame or something like that. Maybe a rectangle like frame with the netting over it.

The tent I have isn't so bad in that you can look up and see the stars through the micro-mesh on the top and sides. This ended up not being possible, thanks to some careful and important thinking ahead: the humidity in the morning caused a lot of dew on the tree above me, which dripped down onto the tent below once condensed in the cool air. The drops were stopped by the tent's raincover that I had put up, as without it the awakening would have been a little damp.

[Slartibartfast]

Originally posted by BryanD
Oh, and another one:

Go camping with 3000+ people (Pennsic Wars ) where there are plenty of fixed and temporary toilets.. but only 3 shower stalls for each gender.

This was back in.. oh.. '84 or '85 so they've probably upgraded the facilites since then.

I was there three or four years ago, and no, facilities haven't changed much from what you describe. There might be one more shower facility, but to get warm water you have to shower at five am. Far better to take a dip in the clothing optional stream and bring a bar of soap.

The rest of the campsite has running water, but it is not potable. In fact, it has some odd mineral content that causes it to turn orange if exposed to the sun.

Pennsic is not typical camping, not by a long shot. I've seen one couple with a king sized bed in their giant 15' diameter ger - a ger being the kind of portable home the Mongols used to live in.

It still counts as roughing it in some ways, as the weather is so variable that you freeze at night and scorch in the day, and the toilet amenities are port-a-johns.

While camping at Pennsic, I saw one campfire with blue, green, and orange flames. Someone from that group had tossed in a copper pipe with some other metal to get that cool effect.

Yes, Pennsic is a camping experience all to itself.

[Slartibartfast]

And I forgot to mention that Pennsic is always in August, which is when the Perseid meteor shower makes its showing. I got to sit outside at night and watch an awesome light show!


edit: one typo. And it is the Perseid, not the Pliedies meteor shower as I had originally written

[Elspode]

Pennsic Wars sounds a lot like tales I've heard of Lillies War...SCA event, is it?

I've had rather a lot of camping disaster tales, but the most notable would be from my backpack trip into the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho back in 1984. One of my best friends had moved out there a couple of years prior with his wife, and so my wife, my best friend and myself drove out for a planned five-day backpack to Leggit Lake, just about eight miles uphill from Atlanta, Idaho (an old mining town with a nice campground and hot springs adjacent to it at the trailhead).

As soon as we got out of the car and donned our packs, it began to rain. We put on our ponchos and started off gamely. The rain intensified until it was a deluge, with rivulets pouring down the trail we were climbing. It was entirely unpleasant, and so when we reached a nice plateau with a sizable meadow and easy access to a fork of the Boise River for water, we hurriedly pitched a half-assed camp site, and hunkered down to wait for it to stop.

It did stop by morning, and we awoke bright and early to a beautiful but soggy day. There was nothing for it but to unpack *everything*, make clotheslines and dry stuff out. It was, however, still decidely cool and dampish, and starting a fire turned out to be nearly impossible. We used a whole tube of that waxy firestarting stuff, to no avail. Finally, in frustration, my friend leaped up, grabbed a camp shovel and a frisbee, and ran screaming into the forest.

We didn't know quite what to make of it, until he returned about a half hour later with the frisbee filled with chunks of pine resin he'd harvested from the base of a standing, dead Lodgepole Pine. He dropped a couple of small chunks into the smoldering mass of damp branches, and within moments we had a roaring fire.

We spent a really great day there, having a family of deer sprint right through our encampment and leaping, tabletop BMX style, over our spread-out tarps drying in the now sunny day. As we finished packing up the next day, we heard the sound of a whining vehicle engine in the distance. Now, this is a Wilderness area, and there aren't supposed to be motorized vehicles, but there had been reports of hikers being waylaid and robbed in recent weeks. We quickly took cover, with guns drawn, and waited. After a bit, a big 4 x4 pickup stopped at our site, and so a couple of us guys walked out, weapons holstered, to talk (we left the women in the brush with the guns still at the ready, just in case).

After a bit of conversation, it was clear that the guy was just a miner working a grandfathered claim on his way up to his mine on up the trail (thus, he still had rights to bring equipment in, much to our later chagrin). He was very friendly, and in due course, our women came out from the bushes, holstering their sidearms. The miner didn't miss a beat, glancing over at them, smiling as he said, "Bushwacking, huh?"

Imagine our later embarassment when he gave us several apples, a few cans of pop, and some good advice: "See those marks up on the tree trunks around here? 'Bout twelve feet off the ground or so? Those are claw marks. This is bear country, kids, and you want to be mindful of that." We assured him that we were quite aware; thus, the guns.

"Ya'll are goin' up into some high country here. You want to watch out for thunderstorms. Mountains ain't a good place to be in a thunderstorm."

We thanked him profusely, and he motored on up the mountain. We finished packing, and started on up the first really steep portion of our journey. The trail got worse and worse. We discovered later on that the reason was because the miner's bulldozer had been hard at work widening the trail for vehicle access, and had gotten stuck before he could quite finish. That was part of the reason he was there...to get the Cat running again. There was a lot of fallen timber that he'd pushed over, but hadn't gotten out from across the trail. Big stuff, four, five feet across...big enough that we had to take off our packs and climb over in some cases.

After a couple of hours of plodding, we'd gotten beyond the turnoff to the mine shaft, and got back into walking nicely forested, loamy trail footing. Late in the afternoon, we came into a large, wide valley, actually the lower extent of an ancient glacier whose remnants still awaited us at the level of the lake which was our goal. It was a rough walk to cross it and get back to the wooded area at its Northern fringe, but we finally pulled in, and set up our second camp.

Just as we'd gotten our fire going and started cooking our dehydrated meals, the bugs set in. There was an incredible variety of interesting creatures. My favorite was what we called a "Mars Fly", a red-bodied, robust insect that looked for all the world like a house fly, except three times as large, and with eerie, golden multifaceted eyes. The only thing that this plethora of buggies had in common was that *they all wanted to suck our blood*.

For most, it wasn't such a big deal. The DEET seemed to keep them at bay, but the deerflies were unbelieveable. Some were as big as the distance from my fingertip to first knuckle, and they could actually bite through jeans! We quickly retreated to our tents until the sun set, and the temperature dropped. The creatures then disappeared. When they were gone, you could actually hear how much quieter it was in their absence.

(Coming up later...the rest of the horror story).

[OnyxCougar]

Originally posted by BryanD
Oh, and another one:

Go camping with 3000+ people (Pennsic Wars ) where there are plenty of fixed and temporary toilets.. but only 3 shower stalls for each gender.

This was back in.. oh.. '84 or '85 so they've probably upgraded the facilites since then.

PENNSIC!!

SCA'er in the house!!

What Kingdom are you in? You still play?

[smoothmoniker]

Originally posted by Telefunken


Just a note: I too have done Philmont. The year was 1990.

No shittin. I think we were there at the same time. It was either 90 or 91 for me, I can't remember.

-sm

[Happy Monkey]

I think mine was '90 or '91 as well - could be '92.

[Scopulus Argentarius]

..ahhh camping...about to do that next week.

Last one wasn't much fun...

2 overactive sons
1 tent
2 cold nights
0 sleeping bags (for me)
2 many activities
0 alcohol
2 many other brats running around
0 sleep
1 pair of underware


prepare carefully

I'm bringing a sleeping bag, earplugs, and extra pairs next week

[xoxoxoBruce]

Never, ever, ever camp in the Everglades.
At the bottom of the Grand Canyon the pitter patter of little scorpion feet across my body.
Blue Ridge Parkway, on a side hill with a thunderstorm induced creek running through the tent, don't hang a Coleman lantern in the tent with a piece of plastic clothesline rope.
In Maine, don't camp on a moose path.
In CA on the mexican border, don't camp next to a dairy farm (flys).
In Hatteras, don't back off the road onto the sand after dark.
In Laconia, don't cut through the Hells Angels camp.
In Alaska, don't forget the Deet and camp well away from the dirt roads that throw up a 30 foot wall of dust when a truck goes by.
In Montana, don't camp where the valley is narrow enough to make the wind triple speed.
Even a bad motel is a welcome respite, sometimes. Unless someone parks a truck with a lonely lamb under your window.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally posted by Happy Monkey
I think mine was '90 or '91 as well - could be '92.

It was '91.

[Elspode]

We were loathe to get out of our tents, because the blood sucking bastards had already started swarming, crawling all over the nylon, but there was little to be done about it. We broke camp, and headed on up the mountain.

Although we had done some conditioning hikes in preparation for this rather ambitious undertaking (I was carrying 60# on my back), the increasing elevation began to take its toll. As the air thinned out, so did the trees. Fortunately, so did the bugs. There was some compensation, though...as the large open areas increased, and the trees decreased, there were vast meadows of wildflowers in riotous bloom. Everywhere you looked, a sea of red, blue, purple, white; spread out in a vista the like of which I have never seen again.

Our goal was only at 8,500 feet elevation, but for a flatlander, that was up where it began to get hard to breathe. The last bit of the hike, up and over the edge of the bowl wherein lay the lake, rose by 800 feet in elevation over a mere 600 feet of forward travel...greater than a 50% grade. It also happened that, as the trek grew more arduous, our water consumption increased, until we were completely out of water with a half mile to go...and the stream along whose valley we had been hiking was by now over 200 feet below the trail, and utterly inaccessible.

Fortunately, my better-conditioned best friend Dan had enough gumption to hurry on ahead, up to the where the remnants of glacier lay, and scoop up enough snow to fill our nearly empty water bottles. I've never had a better drink of water, either before that moment, or since then.

We finally strode up and over the lip, only to turn around and look back from whence we'd come. I have to tell you here and now that I've never been more proud of anything I've ever done. It almost looked like a straight wall we'd come up from the vantage point of the bowl's edge. We could clearly see the glacial plain on whose edge we'd spent the previous night, and it seemed ridiculously tiny and far away.

We were exhausted, but we set up a sturdy campsite, and gathered wood. In the process of attempting to break a large branch off of a fallen pine, weathered white from its exposure on the nearly naked ridge, I leaned, pulled and grunted with all my might, until the brach suddenly snapped clean off, and I fell backward with my full weight. My left arm scraped against a branch stub on the huge log, and ripped a substantial amount of flesh from my forearm. Another two inches to my left, and I would have been wholly impaled on the stub, which was very pointy and threatening.

First aid and whiskey (which tasted like soap...never wash out your plastic hiking bottles with soapy water) fixed me up pretty well, and we spent a really fine evening around a crackling fire, turning in relatively early due to exhaustion. The next morning, my other two male companions decided to scale Leggit Peak, the summit of which was another 900 feet above where we were camped. My legs were like rubber, so I bid them farewell and hunted up more firewood. After a period of time, I heard a faint sound in the near silence, and turned to look up at the top of the peak. I saw them, jumping and waving, small as fleas on a dog, but definitely there. Crazy bastards.

That night, we prepared to feast, and to party, because in the morning, we would be heading back down the mountain and out of the wilderness. I had gathered an enormous quantity of wood (no mean feat as we were right at treeline there, and it was none too plentiful), and we looked forward to a huge, warm fire that night.

The night before had been moonless, and perfectly clear...the blackest sky I have ever seen, and the brightest stars. As it happened, I discovered that you could, in fact, cast a shadow by starlight, something which I had never even considered might be possible before that. This night, though, had been growing ominously cloudy even as the sun was setting, and by nightfall, nary a star was to be seen. Even worse was the fact that the wind was slowly rising, and rumbles of thunder could be heard in the distance.

A storm doesn't sound the same when you're in the mountains. The booms reflect off of countless hard stone surfaces, causing one clap of thunder to sound like dozens - even hundreds - of percussions as each echo reaches your ears at slightly different times. It was intimidating, but exhilirating. We had already lit the fire, and were busily feeding it all the wood we had, but the wind kept rising, so we quickly made even more secure our already well-pitched tents, adding tarps and weighting the bottoms with stone embankments in the direction of the wind.

Spatters of rain began to fall, drops seemingly the size of tennis balls, and we quickly retreated to our shelters. The wind was now a full gale, something on the order of 35-40 mph, I'd guess. The firepit glowed white hot...not yellow, not red, but pure glaring white. A plume of sparks blew fully 35 feet up the stone hillside, making our fire look something like an earthbound comet. The wood was completely exhausted within 15 minutes, and the blaze sputtered out in the now driving rain.

Somehow, through all of this, our tent was staying utterly, completely dry. However, my friend Dan's tent was more of a culvert than a shelter by now, and he grabbed his sleeping bag and dived in with us to ride out the maelstrom. The storm had now come directly upon us, and the lightning and thunder became nearly constant. We could hear lighting strike so near to us that we would then hear rocks skittering down the slope immediately afterward. The ground literally shook beneath us. We were *in* the storm, not under it, and it was frightening beyond my ability to express.

It didn't help things one bit that we shouted to the other couple in the next tent, asking them if they remembered the last admonition of the miner back at our first camp site. I don't know how we managed to sleep, but we did indeed drift off, wondering if we would survive the night.

(Later...the end of the adventure)

[Kitsune]

Elspode, I don't have many words for your story so far, except: Ho. Lee. Shit.

That is awesome!

[BryanD]

Originally posted by OnyxCougar



PENNSIC!!

SCA'er in the house!!

What Kingdom are you in? You still play?

Nah - been out of it for a while. The closest surviving group to where we were is the Barony of South Downs in the Kingdom of Meridies.

[Slartibartfast]

quote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by OnyxCougar

PENNSIC!!

SCA'er in the house!!

What Kingdom are you in?You still play?
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hung out with the Nation of Arendale of the East Kindom for a while. I was even starting to accumulate a few pieces of armor, but I couldn't get into the full SCA mindset for some reason. Anyone want to buy a slightly used stainless steel bassinet helmet?


OnyxCougar, have you been to Pennsic? Have any stories?

[Elspode]

I don't know exactly when the storm subsided. Somehow, all five of us, hunkered down in our marginal shelters, had managed to sleep through the event. I awoke feeling amazingly horny, almost as if something inside me felt the need to procreate before an even more terrifying event befell us. Sadly, my wife refused me (even though Dan had awakened earlier and vacated our tent) on the grounds that some literature we had read before leaving cited bears being attracted to human sexual activity. Of course, we could have seen a bear coming at us for hundreds of feet around (in fact, the imagined attacking bruin would have had to have been quite a swimmer to have approached from most directions), but I let the subject drop.

One of the great things about riding out a storm on a rocky area is that there are no mud puddles to make the morning difficult. All the water had run directly into the lake behind us, and so the morning was freshly washed and sparkling, providing one of those rare tent emergences where you take a single breath and feel more alive and aware than you ever thought possible. We packed up and then set up for a timer photo or two. We lined up five abreast at the crest of the bowl, with the mountains and sky providing a boundless backdrop. The resulting pictures are amongst my most cherished posessions (or rather, they were. My ex has them all), testament to having ventured and risked something real and tangible. These photos are proof that once, I took everything I needed on my back and struck out to be *in* the world, rather than on it. I will never forget the experience as long as I live.

It had taken us three days to get to the top of the mountain. Even without the stopover to dry out on the first day, it would have taken us two. We made the hike back down to the cars in eight hours, and none of us even drained the single one-liter water bottle we each carried. Everything we had seen before, every place we had rested and taken time to absorb went whizzing by, almost as if being played in fast forward. The weather was perfect, the going was easy, and we were nigh on ready to get back to warm showers, soft beds and fast food.

Driving the 70 miles of gravel road back into Boise from Atlanta, we were curiously quiet. Aside from the occasional comment on this mountain, or that mine shaft cut into the stone wall alonside the river, we didn't have much to say. I think we were all absorbing what we'd seen and done, processing just how fragile and insignificant we humans truly are when faced with the uncaring and mighty forces of Nature.

I kept up hiking on a fairly regular basis here in Missouri for several years after that, but as the 90's dawned and my life began to unravel, I stopped, got fat, and have never again been anywhere with my bare needs for survival strapped to my back. I still camp, lugging along my popup complete with TV and PS2, stereo, cell phone, three burner stove, electric fans and lighting, soft comfy bunks, room for my guitar, for our myriad lanterns and lawn chairs and dining pavillion and sun shade...and on and on.

It is wonderful - but it is not profoundly amazing, not in the way that that week in Idaho was. Still, each moment in the out of doors is precious, and it is what forms me, grounds me and fills me with the energies I need to face the rest of the workaday world.

No disaster has yet been too big to put me off of being in the world in some way. I pray that none ever will.