A Wet Walk in the Woods

I had a dream job, one I enjoyed for most of the thirty plus years I worked a 9 to 5.  I was the weird guy who started getting excited about going in to work the next day on Sunday evenings.  But eventually that changed and I pulled the plug on my career earlier than I thought I would, four years ago. My job was unusual in that I was both a corporate officer and a plant manager of a large chemical complex.  Usually those are two different people, but at our company it was just me doing two jobs.  And as the plant manager I was literally on call seven days a week and twenty-four hours a day, all year long.

 Seriously, my Fortune 500 CEO expected me to be able to respond in person to anything that happened, and in facility with a billion dollars worth of high tech equipment something was always happening.  That meant I would get a call on Christmas morning and have to leave my family and go to the plant, or we’d ready to leave for a family vacation and the phone would ring and I would have to work through some crisis while my family vacationed without me.  That probably sounds awful to you but it did not happen every day and the adrenaline junky in me kind of enjoyed managing emergencies, I did mention I was a weird guy didn’t I? 

After I retired to nothing more than part time consulting and volunteer work I instantly had a lot of free time.  That might be a scary thing to many former business people who were constantly on call, because they never had time to build much of a life apart from their careers.  Fortunately that was not me, I had developed many hobbies while I was working and my wife was my best friend and companion for most of my favorite outdoor adventures.  And with more time on my hands I found that we could take some of them to another level.  My wife and I were able to travel overseas with friends, knowing I wouldn’t be called to respond to some dire situation at the plant.  We went to  tennis camp together where we immersed ourselves in lessons and matches.  I was able to go off on baseball and football weekends with my guy friends and not worry about being back for work on Monday.  And we could take multi-week road trips with no real planned itinerary and no firm return date.  And this year we decided to take our hiking to another level.

 If you’ve followed my blog for very long you know my wife and I are avid hikers.  Some might even call us extreme for doing things like going rim to rim on the Grand Canyon in one day and bushwhacking to every listed waterfall in Arkansas, a ten year saga that included some truly dangerous terrain.  But for all the hundreds, maybe thousands of miles of hikes we’ve done from Italy to New Mexico to Colorado to Virginia, and of course Arkansas, we had never once backpacked.  And by back packing I’m talking about carrying a tent, sleeping bags, water filter, food, etc. on our backs and spending the night in the middle of nowhere with no conveniences except what we carried in. We had strictly been day hikers and that left us feeling a little inferior to the rugged backpacking tribe. 

There is a lot more that goes into an overnight backpacking trip than I realized.  You have to pick a route, you have to take a second car or arrange a shuttle since you will end up many miles from where you started.  You have to have a lot of gear that most people do not own, and it has to be very light weight or you are going to have a bad day on the trail. In our case we had no light gear at all so we were starting from scratch.  For our day hikes we had small day packs just big enough to carry essentials for a few hours on the trail. But to do a muti-day hike the logistics and the gear get pretty complex.

In our case this is what we decided we needed to carry: a ground cloth, two person tent, a rain fly for the tent, two sleeping bags, two sleeping pads, headlights, flashlights, waterproof matches, dehydrated food, energy bars, breakfast bars, cheese and crackers, beef jerky, salmon in foil pouches, candy for energy, a propane stove, stand and cooking pot, four bottled waters, a water filter with a squeeze bag, a foldable water cup, a multi tool, a lighter, four hiking poles, hiking clothes, two rain suits, hiking boots and socks, inflatable pillow and a couple of large backpacks to haul all of that.  Because we did not own many of those items we bought a few of the less expensive things, borrowed one pack from a friend and rented everything else.  I don’t do affiliate links or ads on my blog but we had great success renting from an outfit called trailtogo.com so I’ll give them that free plug. They shipped everything for free, both ways, and their equipment was state of the art, meaning it was all extremely light weight, yet durable.  

Because the trail we chose is over a hundred miles from where we live we rented the downstairs rooms of someone’s house on VRBO for one night so we could have a short drive to start out the hike. Being a rural state there are vast areas of Arkansas where there are no hotels of any kind, and this was one of those places.  We also dropped one of our cars at the far end of the trail the night before we started.  One downside to renting equipment was we had to do that several days before the trip so that we could be sure it got to our house before we needed it. That was complicated in that we were planning to hike the day after Thanksgiving because we’d be in the general area seeing family.  So that pushed the day we had to commit on the rental to about eight days prior to the hike.  And that meant we had no reliable estimate of what kind of weather we were signing up for.  And since we had spent the money in advance on renting the gear we pretty much had to do it no matter how cold or wet or stormy it might be on the actual days of the hike.  

And wouldn’t you know, the weather did indeed turn out to be challenging.  As we watched the long range forecast the chances of rain just kept on increasing until it hit and held at 90% rain and thunderstorms, awesome!  The first day of the hike it was cool and threatened to rain, but for the most part it just misted until late afternoon. We never even donned our full rain gear, just the jackets a couple of times.  I was amazed at how light the packs felt on our backs.  If you picked one up it felt very heavy but when you got it on your shoulders and attached the straps across your hips and chest it did not feel like it weighed much at all.   At least that is how it felt when we started the hike.  We pushed pretty hard and had seven miles behind us by lunch time.  We dropped our packs and ate our smoked salmon and some cheese and crackers sitting on some convenient big rocks.  After lunch we reached the  halfway point where there was a log shelter.  We debated stopping there since we felt it was going to rain all night but decided that we had time to do a few more miles and kept going.  

At that point I really started to feel the weight of the pack.  The next few miles were straight up the mountain and I started looking for a place to pitch the tent.  Of course the trail did not cooperate, that section was steeply sloped above and below the trail.  The only flat spots were on the trail and while we considered camping there, we knew that animals use the trail, as well as people, and if we blocked the trail with our tent a bear or deer might run over us in the middle of the night.   About the time my legs were calling a strike we found a flat spot just off the trail, hallelujah!  We had made it 13 miles up and down some steep elevations and I could feel every one of them in my legs.  So now we were ready for the true outdoors experience of setting up our little home in the woods with nothing except what we had in our packs. 

We stopped at about 3:15 in the afternoon which sounds early but it gets dark around 5PM in the mountains and it was already feeling like the predicted rain was upon us.  We set up the tent without issue, we had practiced that in our living room.  Talk about a miracle of modern technology, this little tent weighed less than two pounds yet you could fit two people into it and stay dry in a driving rainstorm, or at least we hoped we could.  Next I fired up the propane stove to boil water to add to the dehydrated Beef Stroganoff.  It wasn’t exactly like mom used to make but considering all you did was boil water and then stir it into a bag of dried noodles, it turned out pretty good.  We shared that for a meal and then tried to build a campfire.

Building a fire sounds easy enough, right?  Well try building a fire when it has rained two out of the last three days and every single branch and limb in the woods is just soaking wet.  My wife is a good fire builder and she found some large dead pine limbs that she broke open and found semi-dry wood inside.  We worked and worked to get the fire going because by this time it was pretty cold and we were pretty wet.   And wouldn’t you know it, just as she got the fire blazing the rain decided we did not need a fire at all and the skies opened up on us.  We beat a hasty retreat into the tent, it was pitch dark by then, and it was only 5PM.

 We did tent yoga, or at least that’s how it felt, getting two people into two mummy style skin tight sleeping bags inside a tent that just barely allowed two bodies to wedge into.  The fact that we could not move once we were in our little cocoons wasn’t really a problem because we couldn’t have moved anyway in that casket of a tent.   That’s when it occurred to me that if you go to bed at 5PM and it doesn’t get light enough to hike until 6:30AM the next morning that you are going to be laying flat on your back on the ground for thirteen and a half hours.  I’m not sure I’ve ever been in bed that long in my life.  The next great thought I had was that I was surely going to have to take a bio break at some point in that long night and how much fun that was going to be in the woods, in the pouring rain, in the pitch dark.  

Bears, I almost forgot about the bears.  Up until now we had seen almost no wildlife on the hike.  One deer, a few squirrels and only a very few birds.  I was mildly surprised because were walking on a trail covered with wet leaves so we were very quiet.  But we were deep in black bear country and even though we had not seen them, we knew they were there.  And unlike northern bears, southern black bears break their hibernation and come out to find something to eat whenever there was warm weather.  As it happened, the day before our hike had hit seventy degrees.  So we had taken the precaution to set our packs with the food in them fifty yards away from our tent so that the bears could enjoy a nice meal before they killed us and ate us for dessert.  

Every little sound we heard during that extremely long night sounded very beary to us.  Fortunately the rain, wind and thunder drowned out most of the forest noises.  The thunderstorm, I almost forgot about that too.  Oddly, we did have a cell signal in our tent, presumably because we were camped near the highest elevation of the entire hike.  That let me check the weather radar which showed lots and lots of rain, and not only rain,  we were also in a severe thunderstorm warning zone.  But that was OK because we had almost thirty ounces of gossamer nylon between us and the tennis ball sized hail they were predicting.  Yikes!  

In a stroke of good fortune the storm just barely missed us and the tent stood up to the wind and rain fairly well, though my wife said she got wet on her side of the tent, which she said was much smaller than my side.  Apparently in my sleep I became very territorial and exiled her to a narrow strip that included the wet sidewall, hence her getting wet.  I maintain that I am not responsible for what my body does when I am sleeping, something we’ve agreed to disagree about for the first 41 years we’ve been married. An ancillary benefit of the foul weather was it apparently dissuaded the bears from going out for a midnight snack because our packs were untouched when we finally got up and struck camp.  

We learned two very important things about backpacking that next morning.  One is that even if you lay flat on your back for thirteen hours your legs will have not forgotten the abuse you exposed them to the day before.  The first steps I took when I hoisted my pack on my back that morning felt just as unpleasant as the last ones I had taken the day before.  The second useful factoid is that wet tents, sleeping bags and assorted gear weigh twice as much as when dry.  And everything we had on our persons and on our backs was soaked.  Fortunately we were over halfway and only had nine miles left to go.  Admittedly, nine miles on weary legs is still a long way to walk and today we were hiking in constant rain.  It did not help much that I had misfigured the remaining distance to only be seven miles instead of nine.   After what seemed like hours we finally finished the first two miles of the day.  That is when I realized we still had seven more miles to hike.   It is pretty depressing to miscalculate your progress like that, especially when you’ve got all the geolocation and trail apps I have on my phone.  Eventually we did finally reach our car at the end of the hike.  Our first stop was the Jessieville dairy diner where we had a cheeseburger and milkshakes.  And it was so good!

In spite of the weather it was an enjoyable experience together.  And it did give us an idea of what backpacking is like at its worst, which was at least tolerable.   Our consensus is that we’ll probably stick to day hiking unless we find somewhere to go that requires overnight camping on the trail.  But we know how to do it now so it is at least an option for the future and it is something we can check off our list.  It is something I would have had trouble doing in my 9 to 5 days but our new retired life is all about experimenting. We aren’t surprised that some of the experiments may not turn out perfectly.  That’s actually part of the fun.  I think we get a lot more stories to tell out of a wet and exhausting hike than we might from a sunny walk in the woods where everything was perfect.  Now what next?  

What about you, do you have some future plans that your job or finances make difficult right now?  

Do you love backpacking or are you more of a day hiker, like us? 

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