**STRESS CAMP DAY #3**

I woke the campers with what became my standard wake-up call: “STRESS CAMPERS!! RISE AND SHINE FOR ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY!!” It was not a beautiful day at all; day 3 dawned much the same as day 2 had ended- gloomy and rainy. All the kids were wet, although some (boys, mostly) were more vocal about it than others. Various kids had not taken my advice to heart, and had left their boots or packs or clothes poorly guarded against the rain, much to their chagrin. It's all about delayed gratification, man.

Thanks to the fact that we ate the cursed pancakes the day before, our breakfast for the morning required no fire, just some water to make the powdered milk into liquid milk (gas milk??). In addition to being wet, everyone was cold, so once everything got packed up, we just started hiking. The trail seemed strangely familiar from the night before, and it wasn't long until we reached the point where, the night before, we had chosen to turn back. It was really only a slight uphill, and from the other side, if you looked down maybe 20 yards, we could see the white stripe of the guardrail. The road really had been right there.

If we had made it, it was my plan to sleep there, using the guardrail to tie up one side of the ground sheets, and putting rocks on the far side or something. It seemed like a good enough idea at the time, but it may not have been in reality. It all depends on whether or not I was dreaming. See, I would have bet a thousand dollars on the fact that during the night, some girl got up, wandered down the hill with a light for a ways, turned the light off for a bit, then turned it back on and came back up. Pretty much your typical “nature call”, as we called them. The reason I remembered it was cuz it freaked me out- the girl was making a lot of noise in the bushes, and it woke me up pretty well. Come morning, I ask around to see who it was, mostly to comment on their dedication to going to the bathroom in the middle of the night- there is no WAY I would get out of my warm downy sleeping bag in the middle of the night to pee. I don't care if I have to go the dreaded “number 3” (diarrhea), it can wait. But nobody would fess up. Apparently, there had either been an animal rummaging around in the vicinity of our camp, masquerading as a girl with a flashlight, which is unlikely, or I had hallucinated the whole thing, which is much more likely.

This all comes back to the finding of the road. During that very same night, I thought I had heard the sound of a car or 2 going by- further fueling the idea that we had been within spitting distance of the road. The problem with that is, people drive like Jehu up there, which is normally ok, since they are on tiny, windy, semi-paved roads, but could have been a bad thing if we were sleeping where they would normally be driving. All this to say, if we had been sleeping on the road, we might have ended up being 10 speed bumps for some drunken bluecollar, driving home in the wee hours of the morning. But, that is all contingent on my being lucid, which is doubtful.

Once we hit the road, we hiked at light speed. The map and reality did not exactly agree, which became more and more common as the day wore on. On the map, the trail crossed the road, and continued on the other side. In reality, the trail hit the road and stopped in a disconcerting fashion. I made my best guess, using my horrible sense of direction and my dubious cartography skills (see “the disaster of the summer death hike”) that we could walk on the road for a while, and if our trail didn't appear, we could at least bushwhack up to the ridge that it should be on. A trail did, in fact, appear, but in a strange place. It was marked with these little brightly-colored plastic stakes that are used as a method of demarcation between prefectures, which was the only part that made any sense to me. We stopped for breakfast under a high-tension power tower, in a fog so thick we could barely see 30 feet in any direction, which is frustrating when you don't know exactly where you are and are trying to get your bearings from the landscape. The weird thing was, the only place on the map where the trail crossed the power lines was way further than I thought we were. But, unless there had been new power lines built recently (unlikely), there was no other place we could be.

The main frustration on this part of the hike was going up. Well, going down too. Pretty much, everyone was sick of hiking, but especially sick of going up. The slow gals had become the really slow gals, then they became the ridiculously slow gals. We didn't really have the luxury of waiting for 20 minutes at the top of every semi-challenging hill; we did have a deadline to make, and we would not make it if we kept up the pace we were at. The guys were really good about volunteering to take the girls stuff every time we took a break, and the girls very humbly allowed them to bear their burdens.

Crisis! One of the girls, the slow girls, no less, had a weak ankle that she had been protecting for the whole trip. In a moment of confusion, however, she twisted the other one really bad, and so was basically only capable of shuffling, barely even able to take her feet off the ground. So, one of the guys took her pack. It was really hard for her (she cried a little, sad that she was the “weakest”) but it turned out to be good for everyone.

The ever-elusive hut was again set as our goal. As we hiked further and further, I realized that I had really displayed my lack of wisdom and experience by thinking we could make the hut by the night before. Not only were we going up and down every hillside in the world, but there were a few parts that were ridiculously steep, and one part that was steeper and more slick than the rock climbing we had done the first day- only this time there were no chains. I was in the back, and I got to these cliffs and was like “wait- the kids went down HERE?! Is that even possible?!” There was no way we could have made it down in the dark. We would have had to stop somewhere. I was still leading at this point, and there were a few times when I really had no idea where I was going. The group would stop, and I would mosey up to the front to see what the holdup was. Invariably, there would be a fork in the trail. Examining the map, I would see that our trail should have been going due south. A quick compass check would reveal that one path was going south-east, and one was going south-west. WHAT?! So, I made educated guesses based on the condition of the trails. Scary stuff. But, as I’ve often discovered, Jesus often spare me and, more importantly, the kids, from making decisions that really have really bad consequences. We never got lost.

Well, not really lost. There was this one time....

According to the map, we were going to take our trail until it connected to another trail, and upon meeting it, we would head back in the general direction we had just come from, but on a different trail. The kids really “wanted” a bushwhacking experience, so we decided that instead of doubling back, we would just cut across. We were supposed to bushwhack for about half a kilometer before we found a trail, but in reality, we went about 50 meters and found a trail. A nice one, too. Where the crap were we? Could this be our trail? I decided that I would scout it out, and give the team a chance to have a breather. If we continued in the same direction we had been going before we started bushwhacking (south, for those that are interested), our trail just ended up connecting to our original trail. Going the other direction, however, it wandered in and out of valleys and ridges, never really varying elevation much. After a bit, I thought I saw some corrugated metal through the trees, and as I drew close, my heart sank, and I looked despair full in the face. There was a shelter, all right. It was about 6 feet wide, 4 feet deep, and 4 feet tall, basically a sheet of metal stuck in the ground on one side and held up by 2 thick sticks on the other. If this was the “shelter”, there would be a mass mutiny. The kids would probably have melted into the ground and refused to take another step. The world would end. I just stood there in utter disbelief for probably a full 60 seconds. I looked around a little, and realized that if this were the hut, there should have been a peak just past it. I hiked beyond it, using every last ounce of willpower I had to believe that we were headed for a different shelter, but still secretly dreading the worst. To my relief, the peak never made its appearance, giving credence to the hope that I was in the wrong spot. As I jetted back to the group, I decided that we should go back to our original, pre-bushwhack trail, and just get to the hut the conventional way. I didn’t say a word about the faux hut; 98% of me believed that there was something better coming, but 2% kept wondering if that’s where the actual trail would take us too. So, I went back to the slowly freezing team, never said a word about the hovel I found, and led them on to the actual hut, which was less than 30 minutes from where we were.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take any pictures of the hut itself. Years before, it may have been structurally sound, but through the years, had fallen into disrepair. Different parts of it leaned at different crazy angles, and there were a few places in the roof where the corrugated metal had rusted through, which let the rain in. More importantly, in my eyes, at least, it was only a short distance from a stream, which meant that we could refill our water supply for the first time since the morning of the second day. We were at the point that I knew exactly how many liters we had and was rationing it out to the kids. While 2 guys were hiking down to the stream with all the water bottles, some of the kids were building a fire, some other kids were making lunch, and some guys were putting up rain fly’s so the rain would run off, I got out the maps to see if we could stay in the hut that night. By my best guess, we had only gone about 4.5 kilometers that day, a far cry from the 12 we did the day before. There were about 7km left, and we were supposed to get “home” between 9 and 11, which means we’d have to start hiking at 3-ish, which means we’d have to get up at about 2. I shared this with the kids, and asked them what the wanted to do. If they chose to spend the night, we would be getting up REAL early, and hiking for a lot of hours before the sun even came up. If we chose to press on, we’d have less hiking to do, and we could get more sleep. And, of course, we spent the night in the hut. I’ll admit, even I didn’t care how far we had to hike the next day- all I wanted was to sleep inside.

The cooks did an excellent job, the fire people did an excellent job, everything was really done great. We had tons of food, including this ham stroganoff stuff that was seriously the best thing I have ever tasted. I would make it at home for a regular meal like every week, it was so good. Because it was the last night, we could pretty much eat everything except one snack and the breakfast. Anything we didn’t eat we would just be carrying, so, even though it was really hard, we all ate as much as we possible could. So delicious….Then, as it was getting dark, we got set up for the night. I had the kids repack their bags as much as possible, so we could get a quick start the next day. There was exactly enough room in the hut for all 10 of us to lay out- there were a few roof-drips that had to be fixed before everyone was happy. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as we all got into sopping sleeping bags, then we all slowly drifted off. Everyone was wet, cold, and exhausted, but also full, content, and sleepy. It felt like midnight by the time everyone was asleep, but I snuck a peek at my watch just before I faded off myself:

6:45pm.

And so, the last night of stress camp found the team sheltered from the incessant rain, but still quite far from their goal. Will their leader accurately gauge how long it will take to hike home the next morning, or will they find themselves lost, and hours late home? Does the blasted rain ever stop? Find out….