It’s almost eighty degrees here today. That’s still a bit nippy if you ask me, but since it’s only March, I’ll take it. It is now warm enough for me to tell a story about the cold.
When I was in high school, I went camping with my friends a lot. We had a small camp in the hills behind my house, with a fire ring and a couple of lean-to’s. It didn’t matter what season it was, when we got a little bit restless, we’d grab some gear and head up into the woods.
During the winter of my sophomore year of high school, we decided that we needed to do some snow camping. We picked a Saturday night after a snowstorm and agreed to meet at my house. My parents told us to be careful because the temperatures were going to be close to zero that night. We weren’t worried. You really shouldn’t take that into account, though. Teenage boys don’t worry about much of anything. I took two sleeping bags and figured I’d be fine.
The four of us took off into the woods with our backpacks and a borrowed toboggan. We set up our sleeping bags, cooked dinner and talked about the stuff boys like to talk about. Girls, music, school, movies, and girls. You really don’t ever have better friends than you did in high school. The rest of your life you have to deal with people who have gotten very good at hiding their ulterior motives. When you’re young, everyones motives are fairly clear, even if they’re ulterior.
The night was beautiful. It was clear and bright. The moonlight was magnified by the snow, so visibility was very good. When it was almost time to bunk down I threw a rock into the fire and let it sit for twenty minutes or so. Then I wrapped it in an old dish towel and threw it into the bottom of my two sleeping bags. I could feel the temperature dropping. We all hunkered down. I had to repeat the rock trick a few more times, but all in all, it wasn’t too bad of a night. In the morning I crawled out of my bedding to a wicked cold. I looked at the thermometer on my pack. -12 degrees. I love breakfast. But when it’s that cold, no one feels like cooking breakfast. All of us but one were awake and moving around now. I started to get worried, so I did the teenage boy thing and asked one of my friends to kick the one guy still in his sleeping bag to see if he had frozen to death or not. Before anyone kicked, I heard a muffled, “I’m awake.”
I couldn’t feel my face. I couldn’t feel my fingers. I couldn’t feel my toes. It was time to go home. We started walking with our packs and the toboggan. When we reached a significant downhill section of the woods, three of us decided to put the toboggan to good use. We hopped on, built up some speed,,,,,,, and ran straight into a tree. It was totaled. The front end was completely smashed. Luckily, no one was hurt. As far as I know, that thing is still there in the woods exactly where we left it.
We stumbled out of the woods twenty minutes later. Turns out my parents were worried about us, but that didn’t stop them from locking me out of the house.
This will be my only story about camping in below zero temperatures. If it ever happens again, it will be because my plane has crashed in the Andes.
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