Time to wrap this story up I think… :)
To pick up where I left off. After a nice hot dinner (foil packs full of steak or chicken and veggies), some cuddling by the fire, and, of course, s’mores (mmm…), we decided to quickly hoist a bear bag and turn in for the night…
To say the night was cold would perhaps be the biggest understatement I’ve uttered… Well, maybe not, but it would be pretty close… It was COLD! Damn cold… But somehow we managed to get a little sleep…
Since we didn’t have a watch between us, I have no idea what time we got up the next morning… Since a hot breakfast was definitely in order we decided to drop the bear bag and make some oatmeal… When we brought be bag down from the tree we discovered that, in our haste we hadn’t gotten the bag far enough away from the tree and our three bags of gorp had little clawed openings in the bottom, and several of our breakfast bars were gnawed on…
After a quick debate, we decided the gorp was salvagable, and transfered the top layers to a new bag and went back to our breakfast…
After breakfast, we decided to do a day hike up the spur trail to the waterfalls. The plan was to hike out, check out the falls, have a little picnic lunch, hopefully find nice sunny spot to hang out for a while… and, for once, things went according to plan… :)
The hike out was pretty nice, altho there were some areas where hurricane damage had eroded away or blocked the trail… there were also a couple more rather interesting river crossings (but I managed to make it throught those with dry feet), but it was well worth it.
The falls were beautiful (check out the pictures) and on the hike back we found an great sunny rock to just bask on for a while…
:)
The rest of the evening was pretty uneventful… We had another great dinner (dehydrated pasta primavera), some more s’mores, and spent the evening cuddling by the campfire…
Before going to bed we decided to bundle up a bit more, hoping that 3-4 more layers would keep out the cold a bit better… and it did, to some degree… :)
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About halfway throught the night, I awork to a rustling sound outside the tent. As I woke up a bit more, I could hear the sound of claws against nylon and realized something was trying to get into my pack… after a few more seconds, I heard the clank of my mess kit hitting the gound.
After yelling at the critter (and scaring the crap out of Kristina), I ventured out to explore. I didn’t see the animal, but the contents of the top pocket of my pack (my raincoat, mess kit, and first aid kit) were laying on the ground. I picked everything back up and put it away and headed back to bed.
About 15 minutes later, I heard the same rustling sounds again. I grabbed my flashlight and poked my head out of the tent and there, hanging off the side of the tree I had hung my pack on, was the biggest, fattest racoon I have EVER seen… EVER! I mean, this thing was HUGE! It was like, if you took 5 regular racoon and put them together into one gigantic Voltron like racoon (only like a really FAT Voltron, not a cool fighting machine Voltron)… I mean, damn, that was a fat racoon….
I shined my light on it and yelled again. This time he kinda just stared at me for a bit… then slowly climed down the tree… then slowly plodded off, looking back every few feet to see if I was still looking… Until he was finally out of sight…
Luckilly, our chubby little friend stayed away the rest of the evening, and we were able to get a fairly good night’s sleep…
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The next morning we decided to forego a hot breakfast, and just snacked on some breakfast bars before breaking camp and heading out.
The hike out was pretty nice. We were old pros at the river crossings by then… but our orienteering could still use some work… We managed, at one point, to end up about 30 feet farther up the side of a hill than we really should have been… :) but that was ok…
After getting back to the real trail, we continued on, and managed to make it back to the car without incident… :)
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And that ends my rather lengthy tale of the first (hopefully of many) camping adventure of me and my amazing girlfriend Kristina… :)