Date: 2006-01-16
To: Butterfly-Bats and Bears
Miles today: 0.0

When I was a kid, I would get pretty excited about 2 events each year ¢ Christmas and our family vacation which was 2 weeks of camping each summer in the Adirondack Mountains at Fish Creek Ponds campground. I was excited to the point of not sleeping a wink the night before each of these times, and having butterflies in my stomach at the thought of half the living room floor covered up with presents, or of those beautiful white birches, swimming in the lake right at our own campsite, canoeing, evening campfires, the sound of rain on the tents¢¦. Well, I am having some of those same feelings in the stomach these days, but they are much more powerful than those childhood butterflies ¢ feels more like bats flying around in there! All good, positive anticipation, with just a little bit of nervousness about trying to get everything done that needs to be done before I take off. I don¢t feel afraid of being out on the trail, but I do think there are some situations that need to be treated with respect, such as lightning storms, strong winds causing falling trees/branches, rattlesnakes & copperheads, skunks, and bears, and of course road-crossings. Statistically speaking, I understand there is a greater chance of being hit by lightning or by a falling branch than being attacked by a bear or bit by a poisonous snake. Protecting your food from bears is a somewhat more likely problem (though not near as common as mouse thievery). So I do plan to hang my food from bear cables where they are available, or from a likely tree branch. The way my kids and I used to hang a bear bag was to tie rope to a stick or a rock and toss it over a branch 12-15 feet up, out away from the main trunk of the tree, grab the end, tie the food bag to it, and haul it back up to dangle from the branch. My son has a good throwing arm and we always made this work eventually. Well, I was mulling this method over in my mind about a year ago thinking there has to be some better system than using a rock or a stick ¢ sticks just don¢t throw that well, and have you ever tried tying a rope around a fist sized rock? Besides I have a very wimpy throwing arm and bad aim as well, and need this process to be made as simple as possible. So I thought and thought, and came up with a brainstorm of making a small mesh or silnylon bag with a drawstring, tied to rope with a carabiner on the end that you could hitch the food bag to. Just find a rock to put in the little bag and throw it. With any luck it would go over the aimed-for tree branch and you are all set. I told my son about my great idea for a bear-bag hanging kit and he said ¢Mom, they already make those.¢ Oh. Well, I still thought of it all by myself¢¦. While I am on the subject of bears, after I bought a nice sturdy red food bag (thinking it would be easy for me to spot dangling from a tree on a foggy morning) I read somewhere that bears are attracted to red. Oh no! Since then some other hikers have assured me that bears rely much more on their sense of smell than vision, they are color blind, etc. Well, that is good to hear because I also have a red rain jacket, red windshirt, red summer T-shirt, red trim on my tent¢¦.hmmm. Anyway, based on my experience so far the black bears in the east seem to be very shy. The two times I have seen black bears on the southern Appalachian trail, I have only had a brief glimpse of a furry black bear butt going as fast possible away from me down the side of the mountain! Duct tape is really great stuff! It has solved the relationship problem between my boot and left ankle. They were really having issues and I was agonizing over what to do - cut out a chunk of inner boot or get a different pair of boots or what? Hated to buy new ones because these boots (Vasque Calderas) are only 9 months old, feel really good on my feet, are reasonably light, good support, and I hated the thought of trying something else that may not be as good a fit. The only problem was where the fold on the inside edge of the tongue landed it was right on my inner ankle bone, left side only, and was creating quite a bruised area with every use. I tried positioning the tongue differently, tying differently, padding my ankle, etc. Some of these things would help for a while then would work back to the same situation. Last weekend, I kept thinking if I could just train that piece of fabric to lay out straight instead of folding backwards there, I would be all set. DUCT TAPE! Sure enough, it worked beautifully on my 8+ mile hike ¢ not a twinge of pain, duct tape still very much in place. Excellent!I wonder ¢ will I ever be able to put my pack on semi-gracefully?