My Walk in the Woods, Part I

As you read, do so with the following image in mind, which is the view from our first campsite: (click on the picture for a larger version – same goes with all subsequent pictures)

I’ve done a little bit of camping in my life, so I know about the tent and the stove and building a fire and how excellent it is to wake up to a cool, quiet outdoor morning with trees overhead and dew on the ground. Until June, however, all of my camping had been car camping, wherein you pull your vehicle up next to the campsite and enjoy the peaceful semi-isolation of nature while still being able to run to the grocery store if the Golden Grahams get pilfered by raccoons (who are, by the way, the devil’s mignons). Car camping, it turns out, is not universally accepted as “camping.” The population of non-car-campers – backpackers, back-country canoers, serious rock climbers, etc. – look sharply down their noses at you if you are one of the slave-to-comfort weenies who can’t leave their Volkswagons behind. It is a look that says you might as well have stayed at the Sheraton Palm Court and dined on Miso Glazed Chilean Sea Bass.

So when my friend Louis called me in April and said “Hey, you and Nate and I are going backpacking on the North Country Trail in Michigan this summer, okay?” I quickly agreed. I was tired of him, a card-carrying non-car-camping geek, looking down his nose at me. More importantly, it was time for a good adventure. I feel that it is tremendously important to go rambling off on an adventure at least once every other year, or else life gets a little rutted out. Louis and I have been on a few adventures before (the most epic being our road trip from Indianapolis to California, which we kicked off by driving thirty-two hours straight through to the Grand Canyon – in the days before Red Bull, no less) so it seemed right and proper that my first true foray into the wild should be with him. He also owns more gear than freaking Grizzly Adams, which would save me a bunch of money because, as I found out, backpacking equipment is pricey.

It was a pretty spectacular trip. In the interests of you, the reader, actually accomplishing something at work today, I have divided this epic into two posts, the second of which will be polished and edited and ready to go some time next week (unlike a certain as yet undelivered sequel).

In preparation, we bought maps from the North Country Trail Association (darn fine people, by the way, who manage a continuous hiking trail that extends from eastern New York to central North Dakota) and planned out how far we would go in our six days of hiking. I will destroy any suspense right here by saying that we planned to go X miles but in fact only went X minus Y miles, with X and Y being numbers somewhere between 3 and 98. In the end, we ended up going exactly the right number of miles. Our hiking locale was Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, a national park on Lake Superior in the upper peninsula of Michigan. A photo of said rocks:

See? Very pictured. If you live in the Midwest and are a fan of nature, I highly recommend Pictured Rocks. Don’t worry, they have car camping, and I will not sight you down my nose if you make use of it.

You need to go buy some stuff before you go backpacking, even if your friend has all of the major gear. You need wicking shirts and wicking socks and wicking underwear so that when you wash your clothes in sub-zero Lake Erie they will dry on a line in a reasonable amount of time:

Do not bring cotton, as it will never dry. I brought one pair of cotton socks, washed them in the lake, and three months later they are still wet.

You also need many hilariously small items, including a small bath towel (wicking, of course), a small pillow, a small knife, and a small air mattress. Your friend the gear geek will bring the absurdly small stove, small tent, small water filter, small hatchet and on and on. Now you will need to get all of this stuff together in one place and cram it in the appropriate number of backpacks (I recommend one per hiker), which will get full so quickly you can hardly believe it. Hours before leaving to drive to the park, Nate, Louis and I tried to shove all of our gear, including food (small food, naturally) into three backpacks. After much compression, and many sacrifices we strapped the beasts on our backs (requiring the fastening, adjusting, and refastening of approximately ninety six straps) and tried not to fall over backwards. We estimated that mine, the heaviest, weighed in the neighborhood of seventy pounds. X miles quickly started edging towards X minus Y.

After a lot of driving about and obtaining of permits and other final preparations (buying the industrial strength, non-diluted, “do not use on children,” 100% Deet insect repellent was key – I may develop fatal elbow tumors at age 36, but it was worth it to keep the mosquitoes off), we arrived at the trail head, strapped on our packs (now the density of depleted uranium) and headed off down the trail. Just before leaving we had another hiker take the following picture, which, now that I think about it, had an only slightly less than even chance of becoming a “Last Known Photo” tacked onto sheriff’s bulletin boards all over northern Michigan:

But that is exactly the sort of spirit necessary for an adventure: “We kind of know what we’re doing, we mostly know where we’re going, we’re pretty smart, and it is likely that we won’t actually die. Let’s do it.” And so we plunged into the woods, which were so beautiful that words are a waste of time:

And it was good. The birds chirped, the sun shone, the trail was slightly downhill, and we managed not to topple over from the weight of our packs. The walking sticks helped. After a little more than an hour of peaceful walking, nature introduced itself. We stopped for a minute to rest. Nate and I got out some summer sausage (insert drooling sound here) and Louis wandered off the trail a few yards to relieve himself. Approximately seven seconds later Louis returned from the woods at a high rate of speed and said without stopping, “You guys let’s go I just saw a bear.”

Now, a word about bears: there are all sorts of signs and warnings and pamphlets at every entrance to the park warning about the presence of bears and making helpful suggestions on how to avoid them. This does not mean that we actually expected to encounter a bear, and certainly not seventy minutes into our adventure. There was a brief frenzy of strapping and grabbing and jogging, and ten seconds later we were 100 yards down the trail, moving at speed, Louis gripping our three walking sticks, me clinging to the summer sausage, and Nate holding the bear mace at the ready. Yes, bear mace. This is a ketchup-bottle sized item which sprays something unpleasant a distance of twenty five feet (the “close range” bear mace being sort of useless) and which, I suspect, has much greater value in providing hikers a false sense of security than it does in actually repelling charging bears. But, lucky us, we didn’t get to find out. The bear apparently had no taste for either adventurers or summer sausage, and we didn’t see him or any of his bear companions for the rest of the trip. Technically, Nate and I never actually saw the bear, opting instead just to take Louis’s word for it, as pausing to question him in detail seemed ill-advised. Louis, if one day, years from now, you decide to reveal that you just invented the bear to see how fast Nate and I could run with our packs on and wasn’t that a hilarious joke and hey, there was no harm done, I will put a fork in your eye. In any event, it was a good solid start to our adventure: A reminder that we were out in Nature, plus a good, dramatic story to tell without having had to go through the trouble of being eaten by a bear

So that’s it for now. Coming soon, in the next exciting installment: Vomiting Backpacks! Nude Bathing! And Whether Backpacking Actually Changed My Life Or If It Was Just Quite Amazing.