Camping!!

I am incredibly sore. I just got back from an overnight camping trip with two of my friends, and have a sudden respect for "improved" sites. I mean, they kind of suck because there are more people and it's less "back to nature"y, but still. . . they have spigots and stuff. And you generally don't have to hike to them. Like we did. Loaded up with a ton of stuff. Yeah, trying to go up steep hills with a five person tent + poles + other random junk is really really painful, especially since the best way to carry said tent junk was on my back/shoulders. So my right shoulder is killing me, and I'm just generally sore all over. Although I got to take a shower finally. That was pretty awesome.


Okay, so here's the low-down. We left around four on Saturday, driving up to Big Cottonwood canyon and parking and getting all our junk our of the car. Then came the fun part: getting all our stuff packed on the three of us. We really didn't have too much, but it added up, especially since two of the bags were just shoulder bags rather than backpacks. Yeah. Dumb.

So once we were all loaded up, we got to climb with all of it in the heat of the day. And I basically die in the thin mountain air, so we had to stop and rest a billion times. But we finally finally got to our campsite, which was really pretty and in a very nice spot. Set up the tent, rested, then changed into our swim stuff and hiked back down to the beginning of the trail, which actually isn't too bad when you're not lugging twice your weight. And there was a really nice stream all the way down the path, which led to a gorgeous waterfall at the end of the trail. That was our next stop.

We walked along the stream to the waterfall, stripping into our swim clothes when we got there. The water was freakin cold! But very very refreshing. My friend Emily and I were "baptized by the mountain", basically meaning we gathered our courage (or cajones or whatever) and dunked completely under. That was a fun experience. Freezing, but once you've gone under you go numb, so you're not as cold anymore, although that's probably not a good thing. :) Sam merely watched and splashed us occasionally.

We eventually hiked back up, stopping to sun on some rocks on the way, then got a fire started. I went and bothered some ants on a log, which we decided would come and attack us in the two weeks time it would take them to get to our tent. Actually, every bug that came for us after that we decided was sent by the ants. Evil ants and their minions.

We roasted veggie dogs and Emily made a cool rock oven in the coals so we could cook our potatoes, which weren't tin foiled as well as they could have been, because we'd run out of tin foil. After eating our veggie dogs, we went in the tent for a while and forgot about the potatoes until I remembered I was still hungry. We went and got them, and they were perfect with some cheese and butter. Yum. Everything tastes better when you're camping and starving.

We eventually went to bed, where we all had to snuggle under one spread out sleeping bag. We were in the middle of a tickle fight, mostly wearing only underwear, when some guy came up the little trail to our campsite with a flashlight. He was like "Hey, have you seen my friends?" and we were basically like, "Um, no, go away, creepy guy". After that, we loudly discussed the shotgun we had supposedly brought, as well as the supposed pistol in Emily's bra. Then later, once we'd calmed down a bit, they guy came back! Seriously, quit wandering around campsites scaring young women. He was basically saying the same thing, "Hey, did a group of guys pass you?" or something. "NO! Go away!! We would have told you the first time if we'd seen anything!". So that was fun.

I barely slept all night because we were on a slant and there wasn't enough blanket to go around and the ground was really hard. So we all woke up at 6 am just because we couldn't sleep anymore. Emily went for a run to get more water bottles, I tried to make a fire and failed, and Sam tried to make a fire and succeeded. We had more roasted veggie dogs for breakfast, and put some potatoes in a new little rock oven and ate those eventually. Then we hiked a lot more, napped for a bit, and packed up just as it started thundering and raining, which we decided was Mother Nature's payback for bugging the ants. We got it all back to the car, collapsed in the car, then came home and collapsed. So that's where I am now: collapsed. It's a nice place to be.