I was half asleep in my bag at six in the morning when the first rays of light should have been bursting through the trees. Instead I awoke to an odd sound, like sand being sprinkled on my tent.
I snapped awake.
It was snowing.
I immediately checked to make sure nothing was wet. Thank god it hadn't rained any in the night. We were above 7000, but when I'd gone to bed there were no clouds!
I practically jumped out of my sleeping bag and scrambled to pull the rainfly over my tent. The snow changed to little balls of ice that stung your skin in the wind. I ran over and shook Joe's tent to see what he wanted to do.
We agreed to go back to sleep and wait it out another hour or so. I was ok with that. It's one thing if you're hiking in a storm, you keep going til you find safe camp or water. We had both.
And it was COLD.
So cold in fact that when I woke up in another hour and a half my water bladder was frozen solid inside my tent. The wind was howling outside. I opened the tent and saw clouds moving through with no signs of slowing. We hadn't had signal in days and we had no idea if it would last a couple hrs, or a couple days. With no way to check the weather, we decided to keep an eye on it and see how it played out.
It went on all day.
I tried to sleep as much as I could, listened to music for a while, anything to distract myself from going nuts. Which I was, a little bit. I had no desire to take a zero day, and it killed me to be sitting in the tent during daylight when I wanted to be moving. However the ten miles ahead of us would bring us only higher than we were, up to 9000+. The snow wasn't bad, but with the wind and it being below freezing, we felt it would be a stupid decision to march off into the storm. I really wished I had signal, just to hear a familiar voice.
Halfway through the day I was almost out of water and going stir crazy so I got out of my tent and woke Joe up to get water from the dripping spring behind camp.
It ended up being almost completely frozen with just a little flow left. I filled up with ice cold mountain spring water and we got back in the tents ASAP. It was almost too cold to drink so I made soup to hydrate and went back to sleep.
Riding out that storm really wasn't fun. I kept having bad dreams about missing out on things at home and I kept wondering what everyone was up to while I laid there isolated in my tent.
Eventually it died down, right about six p.m. Too late to start hiking for the day, but just enough light left to get out and stretch and take some pictures. A hiker named Dave came into our camp, cold and exhausted from the climb up Mission Creek. He was happy to see other people, and so were we after a day in the tent with no stimulation.
We took advantage of the break in the weather and dried our rainflys. Joe looked like a monster under his trying to untangle so I snapped a photo before he found his way out. We made fire in a fire ring there and stayed out long after dark just to talk and be out of the tents. That was a real morale boost, to have that heat.
I wondered about how for thousands of years my ancestors before me sat in front of a fire for warmth, comfort and food. Staring into the fire, telling our stories and letting it warm our bones...there was almost a primal feeling about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment