Life on the Trail

Greetings all!

Please forgive the lack of new posts as the first three weeks have been filled with lots of physical and mental adjustments, more than I ever expected. Finally, I am starting to have more energy in the evenings and am happy to report that my creative juices are once again flowing.

The daily routine on the trail is quite simplistic and simply revolves around addressing one's most basic needs: Shelter, Water and Food.

The morning usually starts just around daybreak when birds begin their morning calls and other creatures start stirring outside of your camp area. Woodpeckers like to get started really early banging their heads on trees way before the sun appears. Why any creature would bang its head against a tree for an hour and a half is beyond me, but that is usually the clue that daylight is about to come.

First, the day begins with an unzipping of a tent fly or a sleeping bag, and then a drunken stagger out to the woods for a morning pee. If you haven't gone to a water source to filter and collect water, that's usually next following by the retrieving of your bag of food which has been hanging up in a tree or on a cable designed to keep the bears away.

You then drag your food bag and stove to a community table and start boiling some water or going through your food bag looking for a suitable meal to start the day. The topic of conversation if you are with others, is how cold it was, or how well each of you slept and then quickly it moves on the climbs and stopping points for the day. Someone usually breaks out his map showing the terrain and each person decides how far he or she will be hiking that day.

The sky is evaluated for chance of rain to decide if we need to have our rainproof pack cover on or our rain clothes handy.

After our breakfast, we clean our pots and pans and stow them in their respective sacks. We then wash off a little and then pack our sleeping bags, sacks and other things in our pack along with our water. If we didn't get our water by using a filter, we then use chemical treatments to help clear out the bacteria that may be in the water. Even though the water may come from high in a mountain spring, there are still many potential opportunities for contamination.

Once our pack is all put together, we start off, taking into account where the water sources are ahead (as listed on our detailed maps) and any other places where we might stop. From this point we walk, noting the physical attributes of the path and comparing them with our maps to make sure we are on schedule.

At some point, we stop for lunch, drag out our foodbag and prepare a lunch of some kind, whether we are hungry or not. We may get more water if we are low and we'll make any other adjustments to our pack necessary. We may take short sit breaks every half hour or so or if we find a nice vista, we may just take off our packs and sit for a while. I personally am taking lots of pictures along the way.

When we finally reach the place where we will stay for the night, we decide if we will sleep in a shelter or if we will pitch our tent. We unpack our packs and setup camp and then dig out our cooking supplies and begin the nighttime food ritual. After dinner, we clean our cookware and secure our food either up high in a tree or on some kind of bear cable system if they have been provide.

When the sun goes down, that is usually when we will hit the sack.

Adjusting to the rise and fall of the sun becomes the norm after a while, going to bed when it gets dark and awaking when the sun rises. It is a simple life, but then again you gain a new appreciation for the most simple things in life...like water, which if one is not careful and he runs out, can be a very serious problem.

But that's the day in a nutshell...simple, but wonderful.

Ron