The Trip

Hey everyone!!!
I know its been a long time since my last post, that that just means I have MORE to tell you. So to start off, training is FINALLY over. To let you know how much I am pleased that it is over, training was 3 bloody weeks. 3 weeks of telling me how to do my job in many different ways by many different people. It started out pretty shaky because my boss didn't trust me at first because this is her first time being a Challenge Course Manager. So she was really hesitant about letting me chime in my two cents of my experience working a Challenge Course. But after talking to my Director and the Manager, things worked out and I was able to prove to her that I COULD do my job just fine.

This last weekend, my girlfriend Adrianne came up to visit me and hang out for a few days. It was really great to see her after about 2 weeks. This is where the title of this post comes from. We decided to go for a night backpacking trip into Hetch Hetchy for the night to get out of camp and hang out in Yosemite. So we had a couple of options that we wanted to check out, but when we got to the entrance station, all the quota's were met on those destinations. The ranger suggested a place called Miguel Meadows. She described it as a beautiful place with a lot of flowers and a clear view of the sky with a stream close by for water. It sounded really good, even though it was 8 miles out with 3 of them up a switch back trail. But we started our trek. We made it half way up the switch backs to come to a BEAUTIFUL view of the reservoir and it seemed as things were going great. When we got to the top of the switchbacks, we began down the trail towards the Meadows. The trail was full of wild flowers in bloom, trees covered in moss, and wonderful beautiful ferns everywhere. As we got closer to the destination, the mosquitoes started to come around, and not gradually. If I could compare it to something, I think I can sympathize with the Egyptians when they had a swarm of locusts back in the day. They were EVERYWHERE. But we trekked on. Finally we got to our destination. And everything the ranger said it would be was false, wrong, incorrect, a fallacy, and any other synonym of 'not true' there is. There was 2 old ranger stations there, not beautiful meadow, very few flowers, and a TON of mosquitoes. The stream was no stream either. It was a stagnant length of water infested with algae and other nonsense. This was especially bad because we only had about 3 quarters of a nalgene left of water. We set up camp anyways to get away from the mosquitoes. We ate some food and made a decision, we had to hike out ASAP due to lack of water and terrible conditions.

We started hiking out at 8 pm, so we knew we were going to hike out in the dark. It took us about 4 hours to get to the Meadows, so we estimated around 3 hours to get out because we were traveling downhill. About 20 min into our hike out, we heard a rustling about 30 yards away. There was a black bear chilling out on the trail right in front of us. We started to back up and I began to scream at the bear to scare it away. Luckily, it ran off almost immediately. Now we were running on pure adrenaline. We started to book it for the top of the switchbacks, yelling occasionally to scare any bears ahead on the trail away so we wouldn't surprise one accidentally. We finally made it to the switchbacks as the sun fell completely out of the sky and we had to rely on our headlamps. Luckily we made the 3.5 mile trek in about an hour and a half. We were hauling. We started going down the switchbacks, rolling our ankles a plethora of times on the way down and tripping and falling on the way. At this point, we had no more water and were on a desperate need to get back to the car so we could get the hell out of the park. We finally made it back to the dam. We looked at the time, and were amazed. It took us two and a half hours to get down from the Meadows. That was a 7 mile hike. We were beat. At last we could get out of there and go back to camp and have a nice night. But know, Murphy's Law was on our sides. The gate at the entrance station, was locked. Now what??? Luckily, my cell had a sliver of service and I was able to call the dispatch and have them let us out. I told them Adrianne's ankle was rolled badly, but that I was a Wilderness First Responder and was going to take care of it back at camp. They came right away and let us out. Lucky for us, the ranger was super nice and didn't ask many questions and wanted to get us out right away. So Adrianne's visit was quite a thrill and now we have a wonderful story to tell everyone and a great suggestion of where NOT to go camp at Hetch Hetchy.

But there is some good to end this post. I started back on Monday working with bunks (finally) and it is just soo much fun!! I will admit that it is very exhausting having days starting at 6:45 with set up and working on my feet in the sun until 5. Then starting the process all over again the next day. But I love working with the kids and teaching them valuable skills for them and the bunk. Speaking of planning a day, I need plan my day for tomorrow and make sure I have all my supplies for that. With that I will end this post saying please do not camp at Miguel Meadows, but that I have an incredible story from it, and that I am having a great time finally working with the kids.

Hope this post finds you all well!!

Until next time,

Sean