Baldy through the fog |
We broke camp as quickly as possible. Our tent is absolutely soaking wet. It holds up very well while it's set up, but it has water everywhere when you take it down wet and it is still raining. At least one person's sleeping bag was wet. We reviewed the signs of hypothermia before leaving camp: shivering, chattering teeth, and so on.
We stopped for breakfast pretty soon. No one wanted to eat in the cold and the wet, but the rain was showing no signs of letting up. Everyone was hungry and needed the fuel to keep warm.
We hiked for awhile, snacking out of pockets and trying to keep everyone together in a group. The fog reduced visibility, and the conditions made it imperative that we stick together. It was hard, because our slow walkers walked even slower, while I could feel that I needed to keep moving vigorously if I was going to keep warm. Two boys started shivering, and when the shivers got worse, they had to change shirts. Their rain gear was soaked through, as were their dry clothes. Luckily, some of us brought jackets and kept them dry. (I kept my jacket in a compression dry sack.) That seemed to help them. We kept moving until we reached Copper Park.
There, we stopped. I put on more clothes, and several others changed into dry shirts. Three layers and my rain jacket was much better. We heated water and everyone drank coffee, apple cider, or just hot water.
Pretty soon, we had to move on. We climbed up the switchbacks from Copper Park, the same ones we had hiked down yesterday, and could not see Baldy through the fog. As we hiked higher, the sun would come out occasionally and you could begin to see the rocky slope of Baldy. By the time we reached the intersection at the top, the sun had decided to come out for the day. We were all feeling a lot better.
We would learn days later that this freakish twelve hour rain (which does not fit Philmont's weather patterns at all) had knocked out power for the entire ranch and an enormous boulder had blocked buses from Ponil Turnaround. We had not known or cared. Many of the staff camps had no electricity and didn't really care either. It made us realize just how cut off from the rest of the world we were.
Upper Greenwood Canyon is a Leave No Trace camping area. The bear bags took three hours. Everyone had to set up their tents to get them to dry out from the wet morning. Dinner was getting cold, and finally the advisors told us to eat dinner and finish the bear bags after dinner. We went back to work on the bear bags after dinner and cleanup. They were only a little over 5 feet high. We were all feeling very disheartened, but we managed to reposition the bags to get them much higher off the ground. We were thankful not to have to find new trees and restart with hanging the ropes.
How many times did you have to try that throw?
ReplyDeleteI got lucky on the second try.
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