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The Formative Wilderness Experience                                             Part 3 - Survival Education

9/26/2022

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     For those of you who haven’t been following along, my two college buddies, Al Hendricks and Dennis Alf, and I left the University of Wyoming to hike the thirty-mile Moffit Road over the Continental Divide to Winter Park, Colorado March 15, 1968.

     We spent one night in a tiny pup tent in a tunnel at 11,300 feet, followed by a day of trudging seven-miles through armpit-deep snow, where we spent the next two nights in an outhouse. After that, it was clear neither the Canadian Royal Mounted Police – nor anyone else – was going to rescue us, so we had to rescue ourselves.

     Tuesday morning Dennis and I left Al behind with extra clothing and what little food we had left (Slim Jims), while the two of us headed towards civilization. 

     It was cold and clear when we left our outhouse domicile and started plodding through the forested terrain and deep snow. After about a mile of strenuous travel, the snow was firm enough to walk on, having been packed down by a snowcat. No more trudging through armpit deep snow. We quickly scrambled down the road, once taking a steep waist-deep short cut between switchbacks. (It turned out that we saved over a mile of walking this way.) 

     We took a short break when Dennis said, “My big toe has worn a hole through my sock. It’s driving me crazy. I’ve got to stop and take care of it.” 

     If we'd had extra socks, (which I doubt) we’d left them with Al. He took off his boot. 
“What the heck?” He said, “There’s no hole in my sock?” Then, confused but eager to keep moving he put his sock and boot back on and we took off.

     We made good time and arrived in the sleepy village of Winter Park by 10:00 a.m. Tuesday morning. Uncertain as to where we should go, we went to the first public building we saw, the post office. We walked in and I asked the lady at the counter, “Have you heard of any boys being lost in the mountains?” 

     She said, “No but I can call the forest ranger and check with him.” A few minutes later she returned and said, “Yup, the ranger said they were just starting to look for you fellas. He’ll be here momentarily to pick you up.” 

     While waiting for the ranger, we asked, “Do you have any water?” 

     She said, “Sorry no, but I have a couple of candy bars.” We politely accepted.

     Have you ever tried to eat a Butterfinger candy bar without having had much water for 48 hours? We hadn’t thought how dehydrated we were though our cottonmouths should have made it clear. The Butterfinger came close to giving me a lifelong case of arachibutyrophobia, the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. 

     Overall, though, we felt fine except for Dennis’s sock that didn’t have a hole in it.

     The ranger pulled up in his U.S. Forest Service truck and got out to greet us. In typical Rocky Mountain understatement, he said, “Spring must be coming ‘cause the fools are gettin out into the mountains.” 

     Well, that perked up our self-esteem, and we hopped into the truck to travel the short distance to the Forest Service headquarters. Thanks to our friends in our dorm finally calling the Dean of Students and reporting us missing search parties were just getting organized. The little building was humming with folks preparing to head out and look for us. The rescue team leaders told us they were planning a variety of search strategies. They had folks approaching the pass from the north and the south, and folks with ice axes, crampons and ropes were ready to scale cliffs. Like so many bureaucratic efforts, they seemed to have every route covered except the most obvious one. The one we were hiking.

     One of the rescue coordinators asked, “How are you?”

     I said, “Fine except for Dennis’s sock that doesn’t have a hole in it.” 

     Dennis said, “I thought my big toe was sticking through a hole in my sock but when I took my boot off there was no hole.” 
   
     The chief first-aid person said, “Let me take a look.” 

     Dennis removed his boot and sock, and his big toe was whitish gray and cold and stiff to the touch. The rescuers had just recently completed a seminar on frostbite, and they thought that might be Dennis’ problem, and sure enough, it was. It was comical to watch four adults surrounding Dennis’ toe, pointing, poking, and prodding with one exclaiming, “Yup, just like the pictures in the seminar. This here is frostbite” 

     They whisked Dennis off to the hospital, where he spent the night and was released, no worse for wear, after being treated for superficial frostbite of his big toe. Meanwhile, a small team of rescuers took a snowcat up the road to rescue Al, who was tired and a bit dehydrated but otherwise in good shape. Our college buddies from Laramie came down and picked up Al and me, and we headed back to campus. 
 Much to our chagrin, our misadventure made big headlines across the country, “Three Missing UW Students Found – One Hospitalized,” “2 Walk In, 1 Rescued of 3 UW Students in Colorado”. My favorite appeared in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, the nearest paper to my hometown of Phelps, “Phelps Youth, Friends Safe After Hike Jaunt.” 
Picture
     We weren’t surprised when a week later we received a bill from the Forest Service for $68.23 ($580 in today’s dollars) to repair the damage done to the outhouse.

     In a letter to us after the incident, the Ranger hit the nail on the head when he said, 
"It is rather foolish to attempt crossing Rollins Pass during the winter, being poorly prepared…This high country is very hostile during the winter and should not be treated lightly… All too many times weekend mountain trips have turned into disasters for college students. Most of these past cases…can be related back to poor preparation, lack of equipment, inexperience, and poor judgment in leadership of the party.”
     It described us to a capital T.

     In hindsight, we were extremely lucky. We did a bunch of things wrong but survived because we did a few things right. We didn’t panic, we strategized, and we problem solved. Zipping our sleeping bags together, and finally deciding to hike out on our own were smart. And of course, letting people know where we were going and when we expected to return was critical.

     After my experience on Rollins Pass, I got the outdoor bug and decided I wanted to do it right, which I did. I gained a lot of outdoor leadership experience between 1968 and 1974. I took a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) wilderness course in 1970, climbed Denali with NOLS in 1971 and became a NOLS instructor in 1974. NOLS provided me with a tremendous foundation for being an outdoor leader. 

     My career path had been mapped. I had taken the lemon of the Moffit Road experience and turned it into lemonade.
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The Formative Wilderness Experience                                             Part 2 - Winter Camping - 1968

9/12/2022

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PictureA typical U.S. Forest Service "toilet" similar to the one we spent two nights in
     It had been less than forty-eight hours since Al Hendricks, Dennis Alf, and I’d left the comfort of our dormitory at the University of Wyoming to hike the thirty-mile Moffit Road over the Continental Divide to Winter Park, Colorado. Once there, we’d take the train through the seven-mile long Moffit Tunnel back to our car.

     At least that’s what we’d planned.

     But a lot had happened in that short span. A thirteen-mile hike brought us to the Needle’s Eye tunnel where we spent a restless night in Al’s tiny two-man pup tent. The next day we trekked seven-miles through armpit-deep snow leaving us dog-tired, and still ten miles from civilization. Plus, because of the 11,000-foot altitude and dehydration due to our extreme exertion and minimal fluids headaches were constant.

     Suddenly, we saw a green-shingled roof sticking up through the deep snow. We thought it was a wilderness cabin stocked with food. Instead, it was an outhouse. It was like waking up Christmas morning with no presents under the tree.

     While it was only an outhouse, it was the biggest and best outhouse I’d ever seen. It was one of the Forest Service’s finest crappers, complete with a cement floor and stainless-steel throne. It didn’t take long for us to realize that even an outhouse was better than the three of us crammed into Al’s tiny tent.

     The outhouse had a men’s and women’s section and, being the polite young men of the sixties that we were, using our hands, cook pot, and whatever else we could muster, we dug out the nearly five feet of snow to the men’s side and tumbled in. I’ve never been as grateful to be in a five-by-six-foot confined area as I was that late afternoon. I know it’s hard to imagine three young men crammed into an outhouse and loving it, but we thought it was heaven.

     We laid out our sleeping bags around the “throne” and I suggested to Dennis, we zip our bags together, so we’d be a lot warmer.  We did, and it was. It was one of the three smart things we did. Although we were jealous of Al’s goose-down-filled sleeping bag, we kept warm in our Kapok-filled bags (with the pheasant hunting scenes on the liners) by sharing our body heat.

     Sunday night was a restless one. Although the temperatures were relatively mild in the teens, Dennis and I tossed around trying to keep warm. Al suffered more from headaches than Dennis and I, and none of us had much of an appetite. We were out of water, so occasionally we dipped our cups into the snow for frozen refreshment.

     Monday was spent anticipating rescue. We were hopeful that we’d hear the roar of a snowmobile, our rescuers would pull up to the outhouse, we’d climb aboard, and would zoom merrily out of the wilderness. The reason for this hope was that the second smart thing we did was tell our friends where we were going and when we should return. We told them if we weren’t back by Sunday night, something was wrong. It was Sunday and something was definitely wrong. We were exhausted and stalled in armpit-deep snow with ten miles to go.
     
     In the afternoon, partly out of boredom, partly to generate more space, and partly to cook some food, Dennis took it upon himself to expand our living quarters. It was easy for the muscle-bound guy since he was a wrestling conference champion. He punched his fist through the plywood partition separating the women’s section from the men’s. Then he tore down half the wall, allowing us to peek around the corner into the women’s section. Determined to build a fire in the women’s half of our domain he waded through the deep snow to break branches off the coniferous trees. Then with much coaxing of the toilet paper, small twigs, and lumber from the walls, he finally got the green wood burning enough to perhaps heat a can of baked beans. Unfortunately, in the process it filled our lungs with smoke. Years later I’d be reminded of the experience whenever I visited my chain-smoking in-laws.

     Al and I were confident we wouldn’t end our lives in an outhouse, but Dennis wasn’t so sure. At one point while tending the fire, he took a burnt stick and wrote his fiancée Mary’s name on the wall, as if he might never see her again. He maintained his sense of humor, however, when later that night, as we lay huddled in our sleeping bags braced against the cold, he said, “You know, Mary will probably never forgive me. I told her I’d never be in anyone else’s arms.”

     Dennis had apparently worked up an appetite from his construction, (or should I say DEstruction) efforts. He tossed a can of baked beans on the fire before returning to the warmth of our sleeping bags. We lay in our bags feeling sorry for ourselves, with Al serenading us with his vision to become president of the Young Democrats of Wyoming, and Dennis telling us of his undying love for Mary. Me, I was thinking, “I could go for a pepperoni pizza about now.”

     Suddenly we heard a loud bang as if someone had shot a gun outside the door. But it wasn’t outside the door. It was closer, much closer. It was in the women’s toilet. I peered around the corner and saw a Jackson Pollock-like painting of baked beans decorating the wall.
Not being a connoisseur of outdoor cooking, Dennis didn’t know that when cooking baked beans in the can you must first put a hole in the lid.

     That provided one of a few good chuckles, but no, we didn’t scrape the beans off the wall to eat. In hindsight I wonder why, cause it was our only real food and I had gotten sick of chewing on Slim Jims.
Early Tuesday morning Al said, “Isn’t that a plane I hear?

     Sure enough, it was. Maybe it was the rescue we were waiting for!

     I grabbed Al’s binoculars and scrambled out to see if it was a search plane. Peering up into the sky, I couldn’t tell for sure, but unless rescue planes were Boeing 707s searching from 35,000 feet, it wasn’t a rescue plane. It didn’t take long to figure out it was a commercial airliner heading to Denver’s Stapleton International airport.

     At that point I realized, there weren’t no bugles blowing and the cavalry weren’t coming. So, we had to get out of there on our own.

     We decided to leave what little food we had with Al (a handful of Slim Jims), who was still suffering from altitude sickness, and Dennis and I would try to hike out.  By leaving Al alone, we’d be breaking a cardinal rule of wilderness survival ‒ never split your group. But we felt the time had come to rescue ourselves.

     Little did we know that back in Laramie our friends were saying, “Oh, their car probably broke down. They’ll be back tomorrow.” They had found every reason to rationalize our absence and hadn’t reported us missing till Tuesday morning.

     So, ultimately leaving Al and heading out was the third smart thing we did

Stay tuned in two weeks for the conclusion to this epic adventure
Picture
The pheasant hunting scene lining so typical of sleeping bags in the sixties
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    I contribute a biweekly column for our local newspaper, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. It is called Bushwhack Jack's Tracts. I post them here for your reading pleasure.
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