Yo you wonderful bastards, I'm back. Two days in the
Shenandoah Mountains backpacking, bushwhacking and camping on top of a mountain. Our only breaks were for lunch and setting up the camp on top of the mountain. But let me begin from the beginning.
So we drove about two hours to the base of the mountain and reached it at around 10:00 in the morning. We checked our bags, packed everything and packed some tarps, because the weather forecast called for rain all weekend. It was at this time our leader brought the 16 of us together to say something.
"Alright, all of us are between the ages of 17 and 25. So I thought it fitting that we have a theme for this trip. The theme is 'becoming a true man.' Now can anybody tell me what is the one thing that every man has? Except from the obvious, of course."
So we gave our little guesses, like sweet beards and such, when he revealed his first surprise.
"No, the one thing that every man has is a
Do note that this particular site is an advertisement for a cheap and crappy knife. Our knives are apparently made with a high-grade steel that did not get dull from the constant use we gave it over the next two days. But 11.5 inches is nothing to sneeze at. He gave all 16 of us sweetass knives. Once we had all secured our sweetass knives we began up the mountain. The clouds looked like it would rain at any moment, and many of our people had hot ponchos on. Jokes were cracked at their expense, and they would reply about how when it rains they will be the ones laughing. A lunch break by a stream and two hours of hiking later the clouds cleared out and it was just sunny blue skies.
The path we would take was straightforward. There was a trail around the base of a mountain. We would travel to one side of the mountain, bushwhack up one side to the peak, camp on the top, and bushwhack back down to the trail on the other side. After two hours of hiking we decided to begin our off-trail adventures. It was only about 45 minutes of moving uphill past excessively large piles of logs and bramble thickets with about five guys with shorts before we reached the peak. It was here our second surprise was revealed. There were three leaders on this trip, so they all put down their packs and addressed us."
"Alright, we are all basically bros here. And we love you guys so much we prepared something grand. Have you ever climbed a mountain and just wanted," All three of them reached into their bags and pulled out the surprise, "A watermelon?"
And behold, three huge seedless watermelons they lugged all the way up the mountain. Have you ever climbed a mountain and just wanted a watermelon? We had that. Oh lordy did we have that. After 30 minutes of enjoying that we found a good campsite on top of the mountain and made camp around 7:00. We had dinner of sausages and broccoli with a desert of hot chocolate and marshmallows before the light was gone. At that point, with the fire raging, we did Bro stuff I cannot say in public simply because of how Bro and slightly lame it was. Let me just say it involved being shirtless and was in every way not gay(Literal use of the word here, not the derogatory).
After a night under rainproof tarps listening to the rain and having about a foot of seeing distance because a cloud had gone around us we woke to a clear blue sunny morning. We broke camp and began our trek down the mountain. We climbed down 3000 feet of incredibly steep hills filled with loose rocks, downed logs that were slippery after last nights rain and even more brambles than before. We had traveled 8 miles of this stuff in the time we could have gone 20 on a trail. And apparently we got lost, as the planned path down was supposed to be downhill all the way to a brook which had the path next to it. We ended up climbing up two 500 foot hills before finding the stream and the path, simply because our map was complete crap for not noticing those hills.
The rest of the trip was uneventful except for swimming in a stream about as cold as the Nist Akath winters in liquid form. It was here our final surprise was revealed. Somehow without any of us seeing it the leaders had brought along several-dozen bottles of root beer and hid them behind a rock in the stream. After hiking through all that crap and with the sun beating down on us those cold ones were like heaven on earth.
The rest of the trip home was rather uneventful, except for one guy who slipped on a rock and dropped his knife in a deep pool of cold as death water. You could see chest hairs grow on him as he swam for it. And my god that mountain was covered in sassafras. By the end of the hike we had replaced the weight of food eaten with their roots.
So yeah, first ever time backpacking. My feet and shoulders are sore as hell, but ultimately it was a good trip. I really do feel like a better person because of it. No more of this shy fuckery.
Duke is back.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 16226965 times)