Bad camps

I’ve camped in a lot of different places over the years. The first camping trips were in the backyard of my grandmother’s farmhouse under 200-year-old maple trees.

I slept in an old canvas tent and one night a heifer jumped the electric fence and almost landed on the tent. Heifer breath has a unique aroma, which isn’t pleasant, but not entirely unpleasant, either, as she stood breathing inside the tent.

From the backyard we graduated to the backwoods and we never left home without a jug of gasoline cut with diesel fuel to start a fire. If you didn’t cut the gas with diesel you’d get a huge flame, but not much fire in the end. The gas would burn off and if the wood was wet, which it usually was, it wouldn’t catch on fire.

Diesel burned longer and was much safer. It only takes setting one jug of gas on fire to figure that out.

One of the worst camping trips I ever took was a ski from Polebridge to Apgar. I had a flimsy three-season tent, a sleeping bag that wasn’t anywhere close to warm enough and I had on leather ski boots.

It rained just enough to make life miserable and then it got cold enough to freeze everything. I distinctly recall one morning putting frozen cotton socks (not smart enough to wear wool) onto frozen blistered raw feet into frozen leather boots and then slinging a frozen pack on my bag. I screamed out loud as I stuck those frozen feet into the boots, because when I did, it tore open all the blisters on my feet.

I’ve learned a lot since then. But not close to enough.

Take Friday night, for example. We were headed over to the east side of the park with the truck and truck camper and it was getting dark and I was tired so we pulled over at the Forest Service Trailhead at Summit and decided to call it a night.

The rain had changed to snow and I wasn’t in the mood to drive over to St. Mary on questionable roads in the dark.

Big mistake.

Things were pleasant enough for the first 20 minutes or so, then a train rolled by, and then another and another and another.

This went on for hours. You’d just get to falling asleep and a train would roll either up or down the tracks. I suppose one doesn’t notice train traffic until one is trying to sleep. It wasn’t just loud, it sounded like the train was literally going to run the camper over.

It wasn’t until 2 or 3 in the morning that the train traffic subsided. By then I would have gladly opted for a heifer, sniffing at the window.

The next day we hiked about 15 miles and the next night we slept 12 hours at the St. Mary campground, a nice quiet place that we should have stayed at to begin with.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.