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| This is the view from the car window. |
When we woke up on Friday everything was soaked. The tents, the tarps, our clothes from the night before. Luckily, it was a beautiful, bright sunny day and we had the good sense to move our tents out from under the dripping trees to a spot with nothing but blue sky above us. When I say “we” I mean Fred, Eric and me. Matt was totally out until one o’clock.
After we had relocated the tents and had them drying, we set up a long line of rope to act as a clothes line to dry everything out. The line was probably 40 ft long and it required two ropes tied together. This actually worked like a charm and was one of the saving graces of the trip.
Once that was complete, we noticed that the tents were in the runoff area for all of the snowmelt that was quickly turning the ground muddy and sopping. The three of us started by scoring the ground directly around our tents to create small irrigation channels. This quickly turned into a major task which, when completed, would have made the Romans jealous. Our new camp area was just about dry and the big puddles that were left were being systematically drained by the channels. At that point we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. The sun was out, camp was dry and we were ready to make the transition to flip flops.
The set up of camp was complete, Matt was awake and we had already cracked a few cold ones. Realizing that the amount of alcohol wouldn’t be sufficient to last another night, Eric and Matt were going to head into Pine Junction for more. Pine junction was only about twenty minutes each way, so when the two of them left Fred and I were expecting to see them in a little less than an hour.
The clouds started to roll in above camp. Matt and Eric had been gone for about fifteen minutes and Fred and I decided we should start moving our stuff off the dry line and to the safety of our tents. We figured we would move our stuff first and when, and if, it started raining we would move Matt and Eric’s stuff too. Well it did start raining. Almost immediately - and it didn’t stop. Fred and I retreated to our tents to stay dry until the others came back. The shitty part was, they hadn’t come back. It had been an hour and a half and no sign of them. No cell phone service to try and call. And worst of all (for Fred), the toilet paper was still in the car and Fred’s body was telling him that a number two was on its way. So after a hard fought battle, Fred gave in and used a sock as TP in the pouring rain.
When Eric and Matt finally returned, they told us the story about how lost they had been and that they missed the turn back into the campsite and ended up near Deckers. Yea, they added almost an extra hour of time onto their trip. But when they finally got back there was really nothing to do accept stay dry. We figured the best way to do this was to hop into the car until the storm passed. The storm didn’t pass and into the evening we went.
Puff, puff, pass, pull on the bottle, puff, pass, pull - is pretty much how the evening went. There were two notable breaks from this routine. The amazingly clever and inventive game of “trash caps,” and the terrifyingly real tick scare. Trash caps was great. Just the camp trash bag hanging around a tree with a narrow opening at the top as the bag sagged. Just pop open a beer, stand behind the designated line and shoot away. The tick scare on the other hand wasn’t as amazing. Dakota (Fred’s dog) had been kicking it in the car with us and Fred noticed a bug crawling around in his hair. He picked the bug out and it was definitely a tick. He tried unsuccessfully to kill the tick in the car and then somehow managed to flick the live tick around my feet somewhere on the floor of the backseat. Panic instantly set in as everyone in the car suddenly became incredibly uncomfortable.
About ten minutes later, a tick was again spotted climbing up the hair of Dakota. We didn’t know if this was the same tick or not. We did know that it was in the car and we hated every second of it. Fred detached the roaming tick from Dakotas hair and to the best of our knowledge, threw it from the car. The scare was over for the time being, even though later Fred would find a tick sucking blood out of the inside of Dakota’s ear. That is pretty much how the night went and one by one we left the car for bedtime.
