Okay. Settled down? Ready for more? Well, read this anyway . . . :-)

This happened on my first day out. I had just ended a tuff steep uphill climb - only 2.5 miles, but it had taken me 3-1/2 hours. I had stopped at Pico Camp (Vermont) to eat lunch.

I was preparing one of the dehydrated meals by pouring boiling water into the foil bag. I had boiled the water on my tiny two-ounce stove. (But the fuel cell weighed nearly a pound.) Anyway, the bag collapsed and my dinner dumped out into and onto my opened back pack, which was leaning against the shelter right underneath where I was fixing my lunch. Huge globs of lasagna dropped onto the wooden floor of the shelter and splattered up on to my legs. I sank to the shelter floor in dismay. (Later I learned from another hiker the proper way to fix those meals, which is to dump the stuff into the water in the pan.)

I had to unpack every single thing from my pack and take the pack to the spring, 50 yards away, and wash it repeatedly. Then I had to come back and clean off the equipment, clothing and such which had been inside the pack. Then I had to repack everything back into the wet pack.

About then, a couple of hikers came by the shelter. The only thing I hadn't yet cleaned was the shelter floor. The young men looked down at this disgusting looking blob of half-cooked lasagna laying on the floor and then looked quickly away. Oh no! They thought it was vomit! I quickly explained, of course. They wandered out and after a few minutes began hiking on. Maybe they didn't believe me? Oh well . . .

Muttering to myself, I poured water onto the floor and scrubbed the rough wood (with my only washcloth) as best I could. That necessitated many round-trips to the spring. I buried the garbage as deep as I could dig a hole, using the small trowel I carried to bury fecal matter. (It was a trail rule that such material be buried. If a hiker was accompanied by a dog, it was also required that the dog's fecal droppings be buried.)

That was Disaster #1.

I've just one more happening to tell you about - just one. You can handle one more, can't you? Stay tuned for Part III.

Martha R. Thomas
1997
Belen, New Mexico