Last summer on the AT in Maine I had a Rainbow Tarptent (a great tent, by the way). Unfortunately, no good tentsites when I got to camp. I slept on a slant several nights in the rain. My thermarest was a boat! Then and there I decided I needed a hammock!
Where do you think my "packing ways" come from? Hauling heavy loads for no more than 3 miles at a time is easy. Like I said before, we would carry in a 50 lb. canvas tent when I first started, and that went in the bottom of the pack with the cast iron skillet. It wasn't about covering territory, it was about a comfortable base camp.Originally Posted by stormcrow
Really? You with a heavy pack?
We tried yelling to each other, but if you have ever been in a canoe in the wind in a snowstorm, a) the wind drowns out everything. b) the waves hitting the side of an aluminum canoe drowns out everything else. c) the snow is also a sound insulator - you can't hear anything more than 20 feet from your canoe, only the sounds you make yourselves or are made next to you. We talked about it the next day, and we were all yelling for each other, but gave up because nobody would answer back. Best to put your head down, and paddle hard. It was actually good that the wind was blowing the way it was, because it gave us some kind of direction to follow. It was literally like being in a 50 x 50 foot white, wet soundproof room. You could see yourself, and anything within 30 feet. That's only two canoe lengths. Everything just faded out after that.
I've been hypothermic twice - the other time was also on an early spring canoe trip, but it was on a river and involved an involuntary swim after a 5 foot drop.Youth, and too much confidence in our ability to shoot a falls in a canoe. I'm cured of that, by the way.
(both youth AND overconfidence.)
Theres a river here Guest River Gorge I want to try to shoot this summer. Really rocky and pretty shallow. Some good rapids and some real technical lines. Take the wrong one and your eating granite boulders. Haven't done much in the way of Yaking but planning on being young dumb and in the company of skilled paddlers when I attempt it this summer.
When I was in college, at the end of every summer my best buddy (registered here as Kurly, but sadly inactive) and I would spend a week up in the BWCA. Most years we canoed, but one year we backpacked.
We had canoeing maps at a pretty large scale that had the trail on it. At the beginning of each day we looked at the map, estimated distances, and choose a target place to make camp. Naturally we were looking for spots where water was available.
So one day well into our trek it seemed that the map and the trail were in divergence, at least with respect to the location of spots with water access. Came a time when we figured we'd just stop at the first place with water we could find. The last rays of twlight were just fading when finally we came to a spot where there was a bit of standing water in a small pond. Set about trying to pitch the tent, but couldn't find the bag of stakes. Stumbled about trying to find some sticks that could be pressed into service, did, but ended up with a pretty sorry sight for a pitched tent. Had to pitch pretty much right on the trail, and I ended up with a rock the size of banana right under me.
It was a bad night for sleeping. Thankfully the sun did eventually rise, and breaking camp we discovered that the banana rock was in fact the
stake-sack!
Kurly never misses an opportunity to remind me of this story...and in retrospect I see now that what I really needed was a hammock. Coulda hung just off the trail, and no banana-rock.
Grizz
I don't know that I'd be so quick to call 75% accurate in the kind of cold you described. There are lots of things that can cause an inaccurate SPO2, but one of the quickest is having the finger probe on a cold finger. Not that I'd know anything about that sort of thing, because I obviously don't. Really.
"If you play a Nicleback song backwards, you'll hear messages from the devil. Even worse, if you play it forward, you'll hear Nickleback." - Dave Grohl
When my daughter was born, a curious nurse used a finger probe pulse-ox meter and got a reading of 95%, and further investigation revealed a problem that was soon corrected, but that's another story. The point is, they told me that a reading close to 100% was normal, but that it could be as low as 65%! I guess that's how people can continue to live while smoking...
- MacEntyre
"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." - Ben Franklin
www.MollyMacGear.com
I had a situation near Steamboat Springs where I almost passed up a spot twice because there was no level ground. The first time, we wanted to stop, but anywhere but the road was a steep slope, and many trees. We went on to a lake where we had to pay I think ~$10 to camp in the established sites there. Funny thing is, we were in such tall grass, that it was pretty hard to find a good spot for the tent. And NO TREES!Pretty lame campsite, all in all.
Then, we had an issue with the water filter, and had to go back to Steamboat to get it fixed. So, at the end of the day, there we were again--sitting in the middle of this steep sloping area with no idea where we would put down, and starting to get too tired to move on. Faced with the proposition of either settling on something around there, or continuing on, we found a large boulder that we found to be flat on one side (not mine!) Everytime we wanted to get to the tent, we had to crawl up the side of this boulder. It turned out that this was a really cool spot, right by a babbling brook. I went to pump water out and I realized I was sitting in a patch of wild mint! Man that was awesome!
But the best part was seeing the faces on the locals as they came down the mountain in the morning to that bend where the boulder (and now us) were sitting. I was up there making tea and toasing bagels, and this lady comes flying around on a mountain bike with this astonished look on her face!I just said, "Mornin'!" and smiled real big! I'll never forget that campsite...
If we would have been hammocking, we could have stopped anywhere along that road because there were trees everywhere. And I could have still used the boulder as a flat area to walk out onto in the morning and still had a chance to mess with the mountain folk!
Hooch I'm missing all but my bottom left lobe of my lung, my normal sat is about 88. Cold finger could have brought it down some though. I'm walking medical abnormality.
one summer i worked as a counselor at a kids camp, one of our big trips was to linville gorge for 4 days. it was a climbing trip, so we set up a basecamp where we spent every night (in one of the main campgrounds). well, turns out it rained all 4 days. all those tent sites were compacted divits that quickly became small lakes, and everyone's tent floor was flooded. it was raining so hard that water was running down my ropes and into my hh. one of my fellow counselors (a ground dweller) actually suggested some kind of drip string, i used socks and it worked like a charm. i had a smile on my face almost the whole time knowing that i didn't have to deal with any of the flooded tents and wet miserable nights the other 15 or so people were dealing with. i even enjoyed laying there in comfort listening to the rain knowing i was high and dry. it was good to be a hanger.
One night back in January two years ago, three friends and I were in Dahlanega (spelling?) Georgia visiting a friend, so we decide instead of sleeping in an apartment on the floor, we would hike up Blood Mountain and sleep there. So we drove there and started the ascent. At this time, I did not have my hiking pack with me, and so i used my school backpack. So I lashed my bulky coleman 40 degree bag on the back of it and we started our ascent. There was ice all over the trail the entire way up. After two hours of hiking we finally get to the top and we go to the shelter. Winds were gusting around 40 miles per hour. None of us were really that equipped to deal with the cold weather. so we tried to set up tarps to cover the windows of the shelter on top but the wind blew down both of those. All of us just had our sleeping bags. Temperatures that night got down into the low teens. There we were, freezing and sleeping on a wood floor- which really made my back sore the next morning. Needless to say when we woke up we were all sore and tired and freezing cold. One positive part about that next morning though was that when we woke up real early, the view was stupendous and almost made up for that horrible nights sleep.
One thing I learned from that trip is that I will never camp when I am unprepared to camp, and I will never sleep on the ground again! Thank the Lord for hammocks
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks