Sorry! We made it out alive.

Sorry, we made it out alive.  That means the blog must go on.

 

In my last post I told you about our next great adventure – Backcountry hiking with the bears.

We just got back this afternoon (Weds. the 9th) from our first backcountry, 3 day, 2 night hike.  We’re sore, exhausted and were nearly killed by wildlife, AGAIN!  I know!  How can one couple face death so many times on such a short trip and live to tell the tale(s)?

Here’s how it went:

Day 0:  Pick up rental gear from store in Estes Park.  Go back to RV and pack it with food, clothes, water filter, stove, etc.

 

Day 1:  Get up early Monday morning, drop the RV off at the Beaver Meadows visitor center in Rocky Mountain National Park with special sticker on window to allow us to overnight park for a few nights.  Drive the Jeep over the Rocky Mountains to the west side of the park and park at the North Inlet trailhead.  Begin hiking by 8:30.

 

As it turned out it rained most of the morning, the rain broke for a while, then rained again in the afternoon.  We had rain gear, but were still soaked by the time we got to July camp.  It was roughly a 10 mile hike and almost 2500 foot elevation increase.  We knew that would be tough, but the rain made it that much worse.

 

 

About 5 miles in we were walking uphill and as I pushed off with my left foot I felt a significant “pop” in my left calf muscle then pain like a serious charlie horse!  The pain didn’t go away and a little further up the trail I did it again, another “pop” in that left calf muscle.  It’s raining, I’m cold, I’m sore from the backpack and now my left calf muscle is exploding!  Should we turn back and give up the whole expedition?   Then a thought came to me…  Jim Bridger.  Remember the frontiersman who was mauled by a grizzly, abandoned by his buddies for dead and then crawled 200 miles to safety? He just wouldn’t give up.  That was me!  Nothing was going to stop me so I pushed on, exploded calf muscle and all.  I just kept thinking, “Jim Bridger! Jim Bridger!”  (actually, turns out it was Hugh Glass who was mauled by the grizzly and crawled 200 miles.  Oh well, Jim Bridger was cool and tough too).

It was a grueling 10 miles.  The closer we got to camp the steeper the hike became. When we arrived at camp it had stopped raining, I was walking like Egor, dragging my left foot up the trail, we were wet and cold.  No fires allowed at this campsite so we setup camp, changed into dry clothes and heated up some food with our cook stove.

 

We had planned the 10 mile hike to take 5-6 hours.  It took 8.  We arrived at the site at 4:30 and were in bed asleep by 7:30!

 

 

It was fairly cold that first night, but our 20 degree bags did the trick and we stayed very warm inside the tent.

Day 2:  At about 3:00 am I was awoken ( awakened? wakened up? whatever) by the sound of a bugling Elk.  I wasn’t sure what it was at first and each time it bugled the sound got a little closer.  I eventually figured out it must be crazy elk, they are everywhere in the Rockies it seems.  Just what I need, a herd of bugling elk trampling through camp at 3 in the morning.  He bugled throughout the morning off and on until about 6:30 am, but never came through the camp.  I have no idea what to do if elk start trampling your camp in the middle of the night/morning!

 

Fortunately we knew day one would be rough so we had planned a short, easy day 2.  So glad we did.  We needed the rest!  When we went into the backcountry office to get our permits and plan the trip we were hoping to find a nice loop trail and do about 5-7 miles a day and a total of about 20 miles.  However, the right campgrounds were not available to make the loop and mileages we hoped for.  The ranger suggested this route,  10 miles in day one to July camp, 3 miles back to Porcupine camp on day 2, then 7 miles out on day 3.  We wanted to take a side trip to some nearby lakes as you saw on my map in the last post, but they ended up being at least an additional 6 mile round trip so we said, “Nah”.

We stayed at July camp late in the morning.  This camp actually had a privy (which apparently is NOT short for “privacy”).  You really get quite a nice view from this privy.  After packing up we headed back down the trail.  The sky was blue and the weather perfect.  We arrived at Porcupine camp about 2:00 pm.  No privy, but fires were allowed in the fire pit!  Awesome.  However, after all the rain over the last couple of days the wood around the camp was soaked.  It was going to take all of my skill and knowledge gained from cool TV shows like Bear Grylls and Survivor Man to get a fire going with wet wood.  Long story short:  I couldn’t get a fire going with wet wood.  The several little fires I started never lasted more than about 10 minutes tops.  I used all my emergency matches,  all my tinder and fire starter thingys.  I even used my stove as a flamethrower to blast the wood dry.  No luck.  A fire would have been so nice  (OK, you woodsmen and former Eagle Scouts out there may be chuckling – so what if I was kicked out of cub scouts at age 13 – next time I’m bringing my own dry wood and an acetylene torch)!

 

            

 

So we heated up some Black Bart Three Bean Chili (dehydrated meal) for dinner on the cook stove.  There were still some smoldering embers on my fire so it kind of smelled like we had a fire while we ate.

The skies remained beautiful and clear which brought even cooler temps.  This time we were cold most of the night.  Not freezing, but not toasty either.  When nature called in the middle of the night I was able to force myself out of my warm sleeping bag and once outside saw an amazing cosmic display above.  If it hadn’t been so cold I might have stayed and watched the sky for a while.  But I can get cool sky pictures on the internet.

Later that night, Black Bart came back to haunt me.  I had a terrible stomach ache for several hours.  We had tried dehydrated chili, 3 cheese chicken pasta and bacon and eggs.  They looked really good on the package, but none were very tasty at all.  I thought I’d like them better but not really, especially Black Bart!

Day 3:

Wednesday morning we woke up with thin layers of ice on the ground and on the tent.  It was very cold.  We camped near nice little river and used it to fill our water bottles.  Still unable to start a fire and fearing my man-card may be revoked  I made some hot chocolate with the butane stove (That counts, right?).

The 7 mile hike out was great, but exhausting.

 

This is where we had our next, near-death encounter with wildlife.  Just a couple of miles down the trail we were talking about the fresh  horse signs on the trail and all the pack horses and mules we had seen the day before when all of the sudden, just around the corner, in an overgrown portion of the trail I see what looked like more horses coming up the trail.  But, BAM,  I quickly realized it was a huge, BULL MOOSE heading directly for us.  Tina was ahead of me and looking down at the ground.  “Tina!  Stop! Wait!”, I said.  The video doesn’t do it justice.  He was ginormous.  The funny thing was, as soon as he saw us (really he saw Tina first) he turned around (two days without a  bath maybe?).  By the time I figured out which pocket my phone was in and found the video button he had moved back down the trail a bit and started moving into the thick brush.  We were a little hesitant to walk passed him, but he moved on up the hill and left us alone.  Not like the male elk who dropped his antlers and charged us back in Yellowstone (I’ll get to that story in a later post).  This encounter gave us a little, needed energy to keep hiking.

 

 

We eventually made it back to the Jeep.  Drove up to the Alpine visitor center and had a chili cheese dog for lunch, then back to Estes Park for our RV.  Tina commented on how roomy the RV seemed.  It’s nice to be home.

Accomplishments:

• Planned our first backcountry trip.
• Bought some good warm clothes from REI.
• Pushed ourselves hard, but didn’t quit (especially me with my severe medical calf muscle condition/injury)
• Rented our packs, sleeping bags, pads, tent and bear canister (saved a ton of money).
•  Slept in the dark alone, in the wilderness and didn’t cry (at least not so that you could hear me).

Failures:

• Brought waaaay too much food.  We packed out more than we ate.
• Couldn’t fit all our food in the bear canister – That’s bad.
• Accidentally slept with a packet of chocolate milk powder in my pocket (here bears).
• Had too much total weight in our packs (rookie mistake – probably food)
• Didn’t think to bring hammocks – How could I not think about that.

 

All in all it was a great trip, learned a lot and as soon as enough time has passed so that we’ve forgotten the pain we’ll do it again ( gonna take some fire-starting-in-the-rain classes).

Happy Hiking Everyone!