I can't use deodorant?

Saturday, August 14, 2010

I thought I heard music…but that couldn’t be…it was way, way too early. Then my brain cleared enough to connect the sound with my alarm and the fact that I was heading for the mountains. I shut it off and jumped out of bed. I woke Don, took my last shower for three days, put on deodorant…another thing I’d not have with me for the trip…which concerned Don.

“What? No deodorant? That’s….well…uncivilized,” he said.

“Well…either we all leave out deodorant or we leave out dinner one night. You have to pack deodorant in the bear canister over night and I’m not giving up food. Besides, we’re camping right on the water and you can wash up all you want…just not with soap,” I said.

I’m a ‘Leave No Trace’ Master Educator and worked hard at following the principles, which included never putting soap, regardless of its claims for being nature friendly, in any water. I will wash with it and then scatter the soapy water in the dirt, though. I told him all this, but I could see he was thinking he may have bitten off more than he could chew by agreeing to this adventure.

Heidi was up…she’d hardly slept two hours, but figured to make it up on the drive. We had breakfast, packed a cooler for the ride, loaded all our gear into Holly’s van (she hates giving it up for these trips since she then has to drive my Honda, but getting me out of the house for three days…well…take the bad with the good, she figured).

We were in Marie’s driveway by 6:30 a.m., but when she showed me her pack, which was almost completely full from her cotton, camp in the back yard, weigh-in at 20 pounds, sleeping bag, that I said we were returning to our house to get her a bag more appropriate to the conditions. We finally made it to I-90 and were heading west for Utica by 7 a.m. Marie hadn’t slept at all the night before and the girls were out before we hit the entrance ramp.

Don and I discussed life’s most important issues for a large portion of the freeway drive.

“Okay…what’s Yogi Berra’s nickname?”

“Umm….Yogi?”

“No, no…I meant what’s his real name,” he corrected himself. You know…important stuff like that. Oh…and it’s ‘Lawrence’.

We picked our all-time Baseball starting lineups with the idea that the players were part of a team (not just considering offensive numbers therefore) and that they weren’t tainted by the steroid scandal. That took quite awhile, but we did agree on a number of positions. Running, coaching, bears eating campers, falling off of mountains, guys dating our daughters, and on and on and on…

I’d been hearing something banging against the side of the car I thought and asked Don if he heard it. He did, but we couldn’t see anything in the car moving and I didn’t have anything strapped to the outside. When we made our first stop for gas, we discovered Heidi’s head phones hanging out the bottom of the sliding door. They didn’t seem any worse for the wear.

We arrived in the trailhead parking lot around 3:30 p.m. and were packed and on the trail for the 6.5 mile hike in by 4 p.m. We passed over 50 people headed out on our hike…a good sign that lean-to’s and camp sites would be available when we arrived, but it really messed with my serenity. I like coming so much better in the fall when, on a similar hike in I might see 5 people. Oh well.

As always, Heidi struggled with trying to find a comfortable way to carry her pack. She’s tall, but her legs make up most of her body and we never got a custom pack for her…which she needs…and the one we use just doesn’t fit right. By the time we reached the Flowed Lands, she was ready to camp. Normally, I’d have gone another mile, but I totally understood and when we found a lean-to open, we took it. We’d been hiking for two and a half hours.

The first order of business when I get into camp totally drenched in sweat is to wash up with a swim in the creek, which I did. The rest followed…less enthusiastically…then Don and Marie purified three gallons of water while Heidi and I began the process of getting camp set up and dinner ready. I made rice and mixed in chicken pieces, hard salami and covered the whole thing with a navy bean soup. Like everything on a camping trip…it tasted great. I prepared a sardine sandwich as an appetizer and Don bravely tried it, but spit it out as soon as it hit his tongue. No problem…I had the whole thing to myself.

We cleaned up the dishes, repacked the food in the bear canisters and stored them away from camp, and laid around talking for a couple of hours. The stars were out in their thousands, twinkling brightly, with the occasional shooting star passing through my field of vision. Marie nodded off and was snoring, which is good for keeping bears away and we crashed finally around 11 p.m.

Hike duration: 2.5 hours.
Training Heart Rate: 90.
Calories burned during workout: 1500.