Monday, October 18, 2010

Wet Sleeping bags and the Yogis By: Evan Anderson

In this blog I will describe the undeniably silly mistake of not using a bivy or tent you think for sure that it is not going to rain. Well we learned that it’s always good to be safe than sorry.
   So after we got back of the back country trail of the continental divide, the group was excited for sunny weather and glad to be back in civilization. We ended up getting in to our camp site after dark and just decided to pick the first big campsite.
  That night the group was deciding if we should use our bivys, eventually I convinced everybody but Connor and Jon that bivys were not necessary because there were still stars in the sky (ignoring the clouds out in the distance).
  That’s when the night got interesting… after we all got in our sleeping bags I started to hear pitter patter of rain on my sleeping bag. Another thing I told people in my group is that since most of us have the snow shoe sleeping bags, our bags will defeat the rains if it does come. Haha, wrong! I totally didn’t think about the water all seeping through the zipper where it wasn’t water resistant. So all night, a few of us were using our socks to soak up the rain coming through the zipper. When the dawn started to break it looked like freedom and that it was all over, but no one realized how wet we actually were until we got out of our bags…
   At this point we are all standing on our sleeping bags ( except for Jon ) freezing and shivering some of us laughing at others and surprisingly having fun and hating me at the same time because I apparently made them do this. Even Connor got wet in his bivy. Then it happened… after 4 days of constant snow up on the pass, the snow finally caught up to us again. None of us wanted to move from our frozen, standing up position, luckily being the trooper he is, Connor wanted out of there so bad that he just grabbed our bags, stuffed them and got us out of there! (Good job Connor).
   So the lesson we learned is that you should always be prepared even when it seems as if it’s not necessary. Thank you for your time of reading this valuable lesson!

2 comments:

  1. Evan, Evan, Evan. After all your sailing experience you weren't prepared??? LOL


    Mom

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  2. Evan...your entry cracked me up! Very descriptive!
    Anders Mom

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