Camping Trip: Part 6: Land Navigation

[I return now to the story (and life) so rudely interrupted (for better or worse) by the elections. I hope y’all have been celebrating not just political wins but re-emergence of a society that can manage proper transition of power. Meanwhile, back at camp, I’d just finished a small motorcycle maintenance issue and an exhausting tire change.]

After all that work, I wasn’t in the mood to run my freshly gassed and packed dirt bike. I grabbed my shotgun and my hunting jacket (which is also bristling with survival gear) and headed out on foot. As always, I was alone. This time I was in a genuine “trackless” area.

If you don’t go off trail you might not know this but there’s happy nature and there’s grumpy nature. Two sides of the same coin. The same glorious natural environment that lightens your heart can be a stone cold bitch that’s out to kill you. It all depends on the circumstances.

The place I’d camped was at was the dead end of a spur road that forked into a big chunk of nothing. Five minutes out of camp I was in a roadless area that was last “civilized” a century ago. It has no “hiking paths”. It doesn’t even have UTV trails.

There’s occasional logging action out there but most of that is winter based. Heavy equipment comes in through the swamps when they’re frozen. If you follow their tracks in summer they’ll lead you astray. Overall, this place was a navigational mess.

Navigation tends to settle on three things; points, edges, and areas. There were no edges to the nothing. No “if you get to the ravine you’ve gone too far”. No “the area terminates at a big obvious lake”. No points either. Occasionally a tree that’s a little bigger than the other trees, but nothing that would show up from a distance as a legitimate point of reference. No good views of a mountain peak; I couldn’t even see the sun in the western sky. Nor could you navigate by “areas”. A solid block of pines or a solid block of aspens would give two things upon which to fix your place in the world. This place didn’t have discrete chunks of different conditions so much as a messy dispersed stewpot with a little of this and a little of that. Everything blended into a giant uniform matrix of “this messy stuff here” and it went from forever to forever in all 4 directions.

I wandered around out there hoping I’d see a bird that didn’t hear me coming from a mile away. I was aware of the risk I was taking. I’m perfectly skilled at such things. This particular terrain was extremely maze-like but I’ve been in mazes before. The sky was cloudy and the air was chilly. It felt like it wanted to rain again; it would be a cold icy rain for sure. The sun would set in due time and I couldn’t even identify the sun itself. (The whole sky was a uniform gray.)

I went about a mile; checking behind me often to make sure I’d get back out. Finally I decided the risk reward equation was too far gone. Reward was 4 ounces of bird. Risk was some hunter finding my skull in a decade. A lot of it was that I was tired. If you’re going to do solo things you need a mind firmly under your command. You need to rationally assess your own condition. If you want to pretend you’re something you’re not… stay in town.

It was late afternoon, I was bushed, the place was a maze, it might turn to cold drizzle at any minute, and I’d never been there before. Red flags all. So I turned around and hunted back toward camp.

Call me a wimp if you wish. In my defense, I’ve lived a lot longer than some people who’ve ignored nature’s hints.

Plus, I was just starting a re-read of a good book!

More to come…