- Joined
- Jan 28, 2007
- Messages
- 1,236
It wasn't until this weekend that I realized exactly how bad an idea it is to be organized and prepared. Really!
Let me explain...
Having four days off for Easter Weekend, I decided to head up into the high desert of BC. BC's Thompson River Valley and what we call the Gold Country are some of my favourite places in the world. It is mostly forested, although also there is a lot of sagebrush on the sandy soil. It's very mountainous and rugged, and there is snow on the mountains for most of the year (or all year on the larger mountains) but in general it's very dry - a nice change from down here on the coast.
Anyway, I would ordinarily take my truck (an old F150) on a trip like this for the clearance and 4x4 ability, as most of the roads up there are pretty sketchy. But annoyingly the fuel tank selector valve died on Thursday night, and I couldn't get it fixed in time. So I took the car instead - probably the second best off-road vehicle ever built: a 1964 Malibu station wagon.
Anyway, we got ourselves set up in a clearing above a creek about eight klicks up a logging road. This wasn't any sort of serious wilderness survival trip or anythgin, I just wanted to do a bit of woods loafing with my girlfriend.
Well, up there the ground is still frozen in lots of places, so for comfort's sake we took a couple of chunks of rigid styrofoam insulation leftover from some renovations to insulate us from the ground. I have one of those prolite 4 mats which I also took.
Now of course we needed a fire. There was an old fire pit there, so to help guard against root fires I dug it down about a foot and filled it back up with rocks. I built a small fire and we had dinner - some fresh Italian sausages!
We relaxed for a while, and I gathered a good bunch of deadfall so I could keep the fire going all night. The deadfall there is bone dry, of course, and there is lots in the 2-4 inch range, so I didn't even use my axe - unusual for me indeed!
Right, so I gathered plenty of wood and broke it up into two foot lengths, and stacked it a ways from the fire, close enough so I could reach it to tend the fire at night without getting up, but on the other side of a large rock. I put the largest wood at one side of the pile, and the smallest at the other, in case I slept long enough that the fire had died way down and I needed a bit of kindling to get a larger log going.
I watched the stars or a while with my girlfriend, whose father is a professional photographer and amateur astronomer and who is consequently pretty knowledgeable herself about the constellations, and nodded off around ten thirty.
I woke up a few hours later and immediately knew something was wrong. Have you ever fallen asleep in the sun, and woken up because one side of your face was getting sunburned? That's exactly how I felt. I looked towards the heat and realized that my careful preparation and organization of wood for the fire had made a perfect target for a single coal which must have popped out of the fire and made a leap straight to the kindling end. My wood pile was now a blazing inferno! I grabbed the brass zipper of my old army sleeping bag and it was hot enough to hurt. I ripped open the bag and pulled it away from the fire. The styrofoam pad had just started to catch fire. I knocked the fire apart with a stick, and put on a pair of leather gloves and started chucking the burning logs into the fire pit. I took a break every ten minutes or so to let the fire in the pit burn down a little, and to give my face and hands an chance to cool off.
It took an hour or so but I got everything under control. I climbed back into my sleeping bag, and lay there for a while. It was just getting a tiny bit light out when I started to nod off. At this point the dog got cold and started trying to force her way into my sleeping bag. I let her climb down to the foot of the bag and went to sleep.
In the morning I surveyed the damage. My expensive prolite 4 sleeping pad came unglued at the hottest spot and wouldn't hod any air, and my nylon sleeping bag had big holes in it and was hemorrhaging feathers. My girlfriend woke up (she slept through the fire incident peacefully) and asked if the dog had killed a chicken. (?) Fortunately, I had spent a fair bit of cash getting a high-tech repair kit for my bag despite much mockery by my friends, and I was able to fix it pretty near perfectly. If you look in these pics you can just make out the spots where I had to apply the adhesive-backed film.
Here are a couple of the styrofoam sheet:
Well, there you have it. Don't be organized or prepared, or you will probably be burned half to death.
Let me explain...
Having four days off for Easter Weekend, I decided to head up into the high desert of BC. BC's Thompson River Valley and what we call the Gold Country are some of my favourite places in the world. It is mostly forested, although also there is a lot of sagebrush on the sandy soil. It's very mountainous and rugged, and there is snow on the mountains for most of the year (or all year on the larger mountains) but in general it's very dry - a nice change from down here on the coast.
Anyway, I would ordinarily take my truck (an old F150) on a trip like this for the clearance and 4x4 ability, as most of the roads up there are pretty sketchy. But annoyingly the fuel tank selector valve died on Thursday night, and I couldn't get it fixed in time. So I took the car instead - probably the second best off-road vehicle ever built: a 1964 Malibu station wagon.
Anyway, we got ourselves set up in a clearing above a creek about eight klicks up a logging road. This wasn't any sort of serious wilderness survival trip or anythgin, I just wanted to do a bit of woods loafing with my girlfriend.
Well, up there the ground is still frozen in lots of places, so for comfort's sake we took a couple of chunks of rigid styrofoam insulation leftover from some renovations to insulate us from the ground. I have one of those prolite 4 mats which I also took.
Now of course we needed a fire. There was an old fire pit there, so to help guard against root fires I dug it down about a foot and filled it back up with rocks. I built a small fire and we had dinner - some fresh Italian sausages!
We relaxed for a while, and I gathered a good bunch of deadfall so I could keep the fire going all night. The deadfall there is bone dry, of course, and there is lots in the 2-4 inch range, so I didn't even use my axe - unusual for me indeed!
Right, so I gathered plenty of wood and broke it up into two foot lengths, and stacked it a ways from the fire, close enough so I could reach it to tend the fire at night without getting up, but on the other side of a large rock. I put the largest wood at one side of the pile, and the smallest at the other, in case I slept long enough that the fire had died way down and I needed a bit of kindling to get a larger log going.
I watched the stars or a while with my girlfriend, whose father is a professional photographer and amateur astronomer and who is consequently pretty knowledgeable herself about the constellations, and nodded off around ten thirty.
I woke up a few hours later and immediately knew something was wrong. Have you ever fallen asleep in the sun, and woken up because one side of your face was getting sunburned? That's exactly how I felt. I looked towards the heat and realized that my careful preparation and organization of wood for the fire had made a perfect target for a single coal which must have popped out of the fire and made a leap straight to the kindling end. My wood pile was now a blazing inferno! I grabbed the brass zipper of my old army sleeping bag and it was hot enough to hurt. I ripped open the bag and pulled it away from the fire. The styrofoam pad had just started to catch fire. I knocked the fire apart with a stick, and put on a pair of leather gloves and started chucking the burning logs into the fire pit. I took a break every ten minutes or so to let the fire in the pit burn down a little, and to give my face and hands an chance to cool off.
It took an hour or so but I got everything under control. I climbed back into my sleeping bag, and lay there for a while. It was just getting a tiny bit light out when I started to nod off. At this point the dog got cold and started trying to force her way into my sleeping bag. I let her climb down to the foot of the bag and went to sleep.
In the morning I surveyed the damage. My expensive prolite 4 sleeping pad came unglued at the hottest spot and wouldn't hod any air, and my nylon sleeping bag had big holes in it and was hemorrhaging feathers. My girlfriend woke up (she slept through the fire incident peacefully) and asked if the dog had killed a chicken. (?) Fortunately, I had spent a fair bit of cash getting a high-tech repair kit for my bag despite much mockery by my friends, and I was able to fix it pretty near perfectly. If you look in these pics you can just make out the spots where I had to apply the adhesive-backed film.
Here are a couple of the styrofoam sheet:
Well, there you have it. Don't be organized or prepared, or you will probably be burned half to death.
