I finally went camping last week, and now I'm finally writing about it! Last week was reading week at uni, so I finally had some time to go camping, and since I'm part of the outdoors society here, I lead a trip. I had a fantastic co-leader, Thalia, and the participants were amazing! We went up to Gully Lake Wilderness Area for what was supposed to be 3 nights, but more on that later. The start was a bit of a roller coaster, we stopped in at Sugar Moon Farms. I'd never been there before, but I will definitely be going back! Holly is on exchange from New Zealand, so she'd never had a 'tire d'érable' before, so we made sure to do that! Starting a snowshoe with very full bellies may not have been the best idea, but it ended up being a non-issue, since one of the other cars ended up getting stuck half way into the ditch at the trailhead. The snowplow had plowed considerably more than the road, and while the snow on the edge looked very solid, it was, in fact, not. At the end of the trip, when lots of snow had melted, we saw there was a vertical drop-off from the pavement of about a foot and a half! Fortunately, CAA was on site surprisingly quickly, and we were all good to go less than an hour later! One adventure over with, we hit the trail. We opted for the snow machine route instead of the snowshoe trail. It was shorter, and well traveled, and we were loosing daylight. We ended up getting to camp with about an hour of sunlight left, which was the perfect amount to get tents set up and some food cooking! Tuesday morning, we all slept in. Holly and I were the first to get out of our tent at 10, after having gone to bed before 9 the night before. It was a wonderful amount of sleep. We got breakfast going for the rest of the group, and once we were all up, we headed out for the day! The forecast did call for rain, so we weren't sure how it would go. Fortunately, we had a mostly sunny day; it was really warm! I was down to my base layers (under rain gear, it was rather windy). We ended up not being able to do the loop we had planned, because of the late start, but we had lots of fun exploring anyways! The rain held off throughout supper, it didn't actually start until 2 am! However, we woke up to a whole new, swampy, world. There had been about a meter of snow on the ground, but with all the rain, about two thirds of it melted. Combine the rain and the melted snow, and there was a lot of water everywhere! There was a pretty decent creek running through the campsite, where there had been none before. Some of our sleeping bags got rather wet, the snow melting around, but not under, the tents lead to a plateau effect. In some of the tents, this lead to the sides of the tent being pulled down, and sleeping bags getting caught and dragged into puddles. The forecast called for a colder night, and rain during the day so with no way to dry things out, and a cold night ahead, we decided to hike out a day early. It was a warm day, again, so warm that even Holly took off most of her layers! It was very interesting navigating the same terrain as the day before because so much had changed. The small creeks we had crossed with ease were suddenly much wider, with less solid snow banks on either side. Our trail, instead of being a channel of packed snow, was instead a series of ghostly raised snowshoe prints. It was really neat! The drive home was also very different, most fields and yards were lakes!
It felt so great to go camping again; it had been way too long! My next trip is planned for next week, which is unfortunately far away, but between having all my midterms and my honours thesis draft due, it's hard to get out! But, I'm still very confident I can accomplish this, and very much looking forward to having a bit more time! A huge thanks to Holly and Lindsay for the photos. I forgot my camera battery in the charger (it was bound to happen eventually) so I wasn't able to take any of my own.
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AuthorCarmen has successfully camped for 100 nights out of 365. This blog is a record of those nights outside! Archives
July 2016
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