Archive for ‘Lies Around The Campfire’

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Oct04

Old Friend, New Summit

by Jeff Cravens on October 4, 2012 at 6:44 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

My buddy Roger is 50 or 60 or something around there.  He and I have climbed a lot of mountains in Washington State over the years.  We were talking about his accomplishments recently, when he reminded me that he had not made it up Mount Baker.  I had been skunked on Baker both times I tried to climb it too, so the mission became clear.  We simply HAD to do it.

If you are not familiar with Mount Baker, here is some beta.  Mount Baker is the third highest volcanic peak in the Cascade Mountain Range.  It goes from near sea level to over 10,000 feet in a very short distance.  It is an active volcano and will erupt again someday.  Currently, it is home to millions of tons of ice and snow in the form of enormous glaciers, along with a crater that spews out sulfur gas and steam 24/7.  Due to its size and proximity to the ocean, it tends to create its own weather, which is why it held the record for the highest amount of annual snowfall in the USA for a while.  One of the times I tried to climb Baker, we were buried in our tent by snow and had to dig out to keep from suffocating– not from snowfall, but from snow being blown onto us.  It can be a nasty place.

So, Roger and I signed up his daughter and son-in-law (who always join us on our adventures) to climb Mount Baker this August 3rd.

We arrived at the trailhead, packed up, pontificated, prepared ourselves and plodded up to basecamp.  There we met a group who intended to climb the next morning, just as we had planned.

 

Typical of Baker, at 3am, we found ourselves in heavy overcast, but decided to go for it anyway.  Despite the decreasing visibility, we found a safe route, which merged with a fresh set of crampon tracks.  After dodging crevasses and slugging up in the fog for hours, we found ourselves taking a food break in a drizzling rain.

During our break, disembodied voices drifted in from higher on the glacier, and within a few minutes, the group we met the day before was retracing their path back to basecamp.  Sodden and defeated, they passed us and wished us luck.  At the time, I wanted to quit.  I wanted to get out of my wet clothes. I wanted to take a nap in my warm down sleeping bag and forget that I ever talked myself into doing this stupid thing, but when I opened my mouth, it was to rally the troops and push for the summit.

 

Everyone stuffed their Cliff Bar wrappers, shouldered their packs, and waited their turn to start grinding up the glacier with a rope that was not too tight and not too loose.

By 10am, the summit rose into view through the fog.  We had made the right decisions.  We were on the safest path.  We were less than 1,000 feet from the summit of the mountain that had plagued Roger and me for years.

At noon, we stood on the vast expanse of snow, which was essentially the summit of Baker.  Gradually, the clouds cleared and we had a 360 degree view of the world.  No one was there.  No one else had made it that day.  The summit, the experience, the reward was ours alone.

On the way back down, the expanse of the Pacific Northwest lay before us.  We walked in awe down to the crater.  At the crater, we experienced the living Earth.  Sulfur and steam vents dotted the crater, melting ancient ice and recent snow.  The sight, smells, and sounds were eerie and powerful, creating a sense of insignificance and connection at the same time.

Back on rope, we trudged, slid and sloughed through the warming snow, over snow bridges and down immense glaciers back into the fog. At base camp, the sleeping bags awaited our arrival, but the experience of the day proved to override our weariness.  We turned in early after watching the gibbous moon rise over the Cascade Mountains.

Before the trip started I had hoped to hike out after conquering the mountain, with a feeling of accomplishment and success.  But the next morning after our summit, as we strolled down the trail with heavy packs, I sensed that we had not conquered anything.  I felt like I was walking away from an old friend, whom I’d just spent some quality time with.  A friend that pushed me out of my comfort zone, and still had much to offer.

As we approached the car, Roger turned to me and casually offered that when we were sitting on the glacier in the rain and the group passed us going back to base camp, he wanted to quit.  He wanted me to say that we were turning around too.  He didn’t want to continue, but he got up simply because I didn’t offer an option.  I smiled and told him that I had felt the same way.  I didn’t want to keep going up either, but an old friend put the words in my mouth.  And I’m very glad.

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Sep25

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

by Jeff Cravens on September 25, 2012 at 9:46 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

from Jeff Outdoors-


The Department of Transportation cam showed that the mountain pass was smoke free, so that’s where we went.

I had been waffling for days between depression and trying to hide from my children without breathing outside air.  The smoke from the forest fires was so bad that the Health Department shut down the schools and told everyone to leave the area, or at the very least not to go outside.

Firefighters flying water where it'll be more use than it had been

The Health Department doesn’t have children.

I was trapped in my home with a 13 and an 11 year old who have a penchant for fighting in the most irritating ways.  My only respite was an occasional foray into the smoke choked town for groceries.  Meanwhile, my wife was on a Mediterranean cruise with her mother and cousin.  My compassionate side was thoroughly relieved that she was missing all of this, while my selfish side was wanting to film our children for 14 straight hours and then force my wife to watch the video when she returned.  I needed someone to share my pain.

My children were just as stir crazy as I was by the time I got the car loaded with snacks, fishing poles and waterbottles.  As we drove for an hour up to the mountain pass, the smoke thinned like my hair, and at the top, it was clearer than my shower door after a vigerous Windexing.  I felt better just getting out of the car in the parking lot.  The fresh air gave me new vitality while yelling at the children to stop hitting each other with the fishing poles.  “If one of those hooks gets stuck in your skin, I’ll have to cut the barb off, and those hooks cost money!”

We started up the Jeep track toward the lake in the fresh, clean air, when my daughter started crying.  I thought for a moment she was shedding a tear of joy for being in a land where the only smell was of fir trees.  No.  She was crying because she wanted the trail to be downhill both ways.  I took a physics and topography approach with her, which, if you’re a woman, you’ll know didn’t work.  Apparently, I was supposed to say, “Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry you have to walk up hill, but we’ll be there before you know it and I’ll have treats waiting for you at the top!”

Whatever.

When the physics lesson failed, I went with, “Suck it up and stop harshing my buzz.”

We made it to the lake after quite a lot of tears and attitude.  At the lake, all memories of discomfort flew out the window.  We fed gray-jays out of our hands, fished, waded in the pristine water, listened to the silence of the wilderness, and breathed clean, smoke-free air.  While I was reveling in my new low blood pressure and heart rate, I overheard my daughter demanding that my son untangle the snarl in her fishing line.  Her reasoning was simple, “I only know how to catch.  You know how to fish, so fix it.”

As the sun dipped lower, I decided it was time to go.  On the way back down the trail, the children raced, cheated, then experimented with new ways of “accidentally” hitting each other with their fishing poles (without the hooks).

We loaded back up in the car, took one last breath of air, and drove back into the smoke.

The children are now asleep and I’m checking the windows to see where the smoke is leaking into the house.  Perhaps tomorrow I’ll take the kids to coalmine or China… you know, somewhere we can breathe better.

 

Jeff, Intrepid Dad and inspired writer

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May08

Adventure Porn

by Greg Cravens on May 8, 2012 at 8:51 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

Some of the people that find their way to Hubris do so by typing some pretty strange stuff into Google.  Google analytics is the sort of thing that newspapers WISH they had twenty and more years ago.

Anyhow- I can look over the sorts of things people have searched in Google to find their way here.

“Adventure Porn” is one such.  A surprising number of people (to me, anyhow.  One day, I hope to be jaded and have so many loyal readers that numbers roll past me like the Gauley river- thunderous and explosive.) have found Hubris by searching for ‘Adventure Porn’.  Is this some new euphemism for outdoor entertainment so thrilling as to get a cute nickname?  Or is this actually a bunch of people googling and oogling photos of people doin’ it on the tops of mountains or in desert caves, where only the bats and the film crew are there to see the secret goings-on?  Eeew.

Some other alarming things that I found people had searched for to make their way to Hubris:

•Scat Comics. and Comic Scat.

•Archaeology cartoons.

•Bawdy cartoons.

•Mom galore comix.

•Triathlon comics.

•‘bicycles with no handlebars, just paddles seen on tv’.

•atc belay funny.

•are there bmx comics.

•brwn trousers cartoon

•caving comics

•“cartoon razor pro scooter side view”

•clif comics

•coleman mini display tent

•‘dirty picture in Memphis tn”

•monkey butt scout camp.

•Porn adventure comics

•“Open mouth (some Cyrillic letters)”

•“porn hubis”

•Tibia comics

•“What wild animals eat berries and leave larger scat?”

Okay, so being the person I am, I hope that these searches are like the crazy ones I occasionally do for reference material.  I do a weekly illustration for a local paper that’s based on the more insane comments they receive online, so my Google history makes me look like the fringiest of fringey freaks- I hope our government overlords, or at least the dark-adapted minions that are sifting through everyone’s emails and google results, don’t think too badly of me.  I should probably go out in the yard and make friendly gestures to the satellites passing overhead, or at least go to the window and try to look harmless to any official looking cars going by.  On the other hand, no.  No, I shouldn’t do those things.  No.

Don’t worry so much about your own Google history, though.  And for heaven’s sake, don’t google ‘adventure porn’, at least not in Google Images, ’cause I did, and it’s not pretty. Or at least it’s not pretty in the same way that it’s not ‘adventure’ the way I think of it.  Let’s just say that the word ‘porn’ takes some sort of digital preference over the word ‘adventure’ even though they went into the search engine in the other order. But mingled in with the alarming stuff is just enough of the kind of thing that might bring someone to Hubris- there IS the cute euphemism form of the word that means ‘stuff that gets hardcore paddlers all hot and sweaty’.  See how the language betrays us there?  Lots of words that go with ‘adventure’ and at the same time can be used in the ‘porn’ arena.

So, I don’t know what the heck anyone was hunting for when they typed in Adventure Porn, but here are some of the photos of the type that work for me:

 

And because of that search, I found a neat blog that’s got some adventure porn (and no porn porn that I saw):     http://esheffey.tumblr.com/

So here’s to us!  Co-opting the word ‘porn’ for a greater purpose.  Would it be funny if,  in a generation, people were openly talking about Adventure Porn, and if you wanted to talk about dirty movies, you had to be so specific as to call it PornPorn?  Weird.  Let’s try that.

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Mar18

Spep Oop

by Greg Cravens on March 18, 2012 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

Okay, here’s the scene:  College. Guys. Camping.

We’d have brought girlfriends if we’d had them, but it wouldn’t have gone well.  You have to take things like clean and useful tents and stuff with you, when you have girlfriends along.  You have to avoid doing things or apologize profusely for things that otherwise would be perfectly acceptable behavior on a camping trip. Such as, say, only bringing along by way of food, several boxes of Spep Oop.  Lovely stuff, Spep Oop.  It was on sale, and since we were college students and the camp that we’d chosen was hundreds of miles away, Spep Oop was our choice.  Oh, and cheap beer.

So, why, you ask, would impoverished college guys drive so far to camp, spending money on gas instead of food?  Surely there were closer places to camp?  Surely there were, but we were colleging in Memphis.  Memphis is pretty much in a river delta.  That means flat and muddy, which might be okay if you were visiting from the mountains.  ”Oh, look dear, it’s all flat and muddy.  Take a picture of me with the flat mud.  Now let’s go to Beale street and Graceland.”

So we drove to a place that had hills.  Hills and, therefore, valleys.  Sometimes, as in the case of our chosen camping place, there were waterfalls that fell off the hill into the little valley.  Nice for camping.  We loved it.

You know who else loved it?  Well, we’ll get to that.

So we sat up and talked and laughed and made a campfire and passed around the Spap Oop and drank a little beer.  And then we were all tired from the drive and the setting up and the sound of the waterfall was lulling us to sleep.

When I say we were tired from the setting up, well, you need to know what sort of setting up there was.  I had a nasty, tiny little pup tent.  It was orange.  It had aluminum poles and nylon cord holding it up.  the whole thing had to be staked down and tied up.  Fine.

My brother, an altogether more adept person, had tied a rope high across two trees and thrown a tarp over it. A few rocks held the tarp in a roughly tentoid shape.  Then he tied his hammock under the rope and tarp.  Nice, you see?  (I tried this stunt another time without taking the low-ish temperature and a broken sleeping bag zipper into account.  Whole ‘nother story)

Now, Ken is adept at other things.  Being very entertaining is one.  Planning ahead and carrying a lot of gear he has to haul around is NOT another.  On this occasion, though, it all seemed to work out in his favor.  Just underneath Jeff’s gently swinging backside (think ‘Hammock’, not whatever filth you just conjured up) Ken realized there was plenty of room for  a whole other person to crawl in.  He would have not only a nice tarp that someone else had put up for a roof, but the person who’d done the putting up would now also be a roof.  Genius.

If you can see any flaw in this plan, then 1) you are not a college student who’s been drinking beer, and 2) you’re wrong about what’s about to go wrong anyhow.

The wind did not pick up and smack a tarp and attendant weighty rock into Ken’s face.  It did not rain and allow him to discover that he was sleeping in a disused water channel.  Jeff’s hammock did not come loose and precipitate Jeff onto Ken, doing them both hilarious injury.

No, you haven’t guessed what makes this a funny story yet because I haven’t given you a critical detail.

I haven’t given you the detail because I, in my ugly mildewy orange tent, didn’t have it.

What I did have was someone outside my tent saying “git” very persistently.  And progressively louder.

“git” …  ”git” …  ”git” …  ”git” … “Git” … “Git” … ”Git” … “Git” … ”Git” … “Git” … “GIT” … “GIT” … “GIT” … “GIT” … “GIT” … “GIT” … “GIT” … “GIT”

Interspersed with all this “git”ing was the occasional “Ken” and “Ken, shut up.”  and “Ken I will kill you.” but those were from me and didn’t really advance the conversation because all we could get out of Ken was “Git”.

‘Git’ is a rude name to call someone.  Someone English that is, because we don’t use the term in the U.S.  I don’t even know what it means, to be honest, but I’ve read it in books.  You may have already figured out that Ken was not calling anyone a rude King’s English name.  Don’t tell anyone else.  We’re not to that part of the story yet.

There was a burst of noise- a swift rattle of pebbles or something, and all went quiet.  For college guys, that’s problem solved.

Now, you and I know the problem wasn’t solved, it simply wasn’t revealed.

So in the morning, there was Spep Oop aaaaaaaaaaaaall over the ground past Ken’s feet.  He had taken our last  box of Spep Oop and flung it across the camping area sorta downhillish toward a cave that was not too far away.

Flung our food!  All over the ground!  Why?!  These things were said to Ken in raised voices.  As in “You flung our food!  All over the ground!  Why?!”

And here’s the big reveal.  Remember that Ken was sleeping directly on the ground, sheltered only on two sides by tarp and by tree trunks near his head and feet.  He was also, apparently, hugging the last box of Spep Oop.  we had opened and nibbled at it, but it was breakfast, as far as our plans went.

The skunk that Ken woke to find staring him in the eye had different plans for it.  Our plans changed when Ken found that skunks don’t speak “GIT” and finally just jettisoned the Spep Oop. The skunk’s plans didn’t change one bit.

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Mar08

Grand Canyon Diary- part 7

by Greg Cravens on March 8, 2012 at 9:21 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

Packing, as it turned out, meant getting together two sets of stuff at first. The first set going with Fred and the second set going with us.

Most of our gear was going with Fred.  God love him, the man was driving his truck all the way to Arizona carrying his boat and camping gear, and, naturally, Kathy and her gear.  Not so naturally, he was carrying all my gear, Mike’s gear and Jason’s gear. He may have even had some of David’s gear in there.  I should point out here that ‘gear’ is a tiny and inadequate word for a big honking pile of crap.  First, boats.  Say it.  “Boats”- another short word.  But when you try to strap five of them to the top of a pickup truck, even one like Fred’s- one of those extended cab things with the big fiberglass topper on it- you start to wonder if their combined weight and complicated, conflicting aerodynamics will prevent the truck from going much of anyplace. More likely, you think, it’ll swing side to side in the breeze or even try to leave the ground.  The whole arrangement would have put an aeronautic engineer into fits.

As a side note here, I’d like to point out that the number of straps used to hold five assorted sized and shaped boats to a truck rigged for a long trip becomes, if you’re not in charge of the strapping, entertaining to see.  First and foremost, the straps have to hold the boats on the truck.  Simple.  An alarming thing to note is that when I say ‘truck’, I actually mean ‘the racks attached to the aftermarket fiberglass topper’.  And when I say ‘the racks attached to the aftermarket fiberglass topper’ I mean a set of top-of-the-line Yakima racks.  The racks themselves have seen a lot of service over Fred’s long and storied paddling career.  They look good and sturdy.  It’s the points at which the racks are attached to the topper that might worry you.  Rather, it’s the sunburnt duct tape that’s wrapped around them that’s worrying.  You can’t help but wonder what problem the tape is meant to overcome or obscure. Fred, after having been asked what the hell’s with the duct tape, tells us not to worry.  He doesn’t say “It’s just to make sure the something-or-other doesn’t do this-or-that.” He just says not to worry.  Fine.  We’ll use extra straps, we silently agree.  If one boat comes off this setup, they’re all coming off in a big lump- if they come sailing off the roof of the truck, there won’t be any missing it- or maybe not any missing the car just behind.

After making sure that the straps will hold the boats to the truck (and to each other) you must make sure that none of the straps will squash or abrade any critical part of the boats on this long and possibly (probably very) windy ride.  Pull too tight, and somebody’s deck will finish the trip looking sort of wonky.  Mike found that one strap was putting some odd tension on the cockpit of the Mamba.  Not wanting to arrive at the end of the drive to find out that the cockpit would no longer make a watertight fit with it’s skirt, we start fine-tuning straps.  Eventually, after tinkering with tension and location of straps, we just stuck an extra piece of closed-cell foam between the strap and the cockpit.  It was Art.

The next thing is totally absurd and counter-intutive. You check the straps for ‘twist’.  Normal brains, examining the arrangement, might assume that you’d want all the straps to lie flat and sleek on the boats and racks, and stretch neatly across the open spaces.  Anal-retentive people might spend a great deal of time making sure that everything looks just that tidy.  Those people would then get in the truck, drive away, and lose their minds.  You see- neat, flat straps hum.  They hum the same way that, say, a Cessna hums as it follows just above your truck for hundreds of miles desperately trying to land on it.  If you let it get to you, the humming will actually make you to stop your truck on a busy interstate while shouting uncouth oaths, order everyone out of the back seat –traffic be damned- to put untidy, ugly, mercifully quiet twists into the straps.  The final effect is that you allowed chimpanzees to tie boats to your vehicle, but in fact they were clever chimpanzees who, apparently, wanted  a quiet nap in the back seat during the trip.

Then there are the paddles, which are at least lightweight and not prone to add to the wind resistance of the vehicle the way that five kayaks on the roof will do.  No, the paddles are just a problem because of their length and uncanny ability to fit in the back of the truck until the very last second when they leap into the closing gap of the topper door and make a sickly crunching noise.  Broken paddles are not much use on rivers.  Broken topper doors are not much use on long trips when your truck is filled with giant, waterproof, expensive duffle bags. If you have ever tried to maneuver an armload of various kinds of rakes through a freshly painted room, then you understand how irritating handling lots of kayak paddles can be.

The dufflebags of choice were NRS Bill’s Bags.  They are marvelous things if you want to make an extended journey in wet or disgusting places but you don’t want your stuff to get wet and disgusting.  A Bill’s Bag (Named for Bill Parks of NRS) is a large waterproof duffle with a flat bottom and a top that rolls down then straps tight.  It has backpack straps and handles on it, too.  I think everyone on the trip had at least one.  NRS made plenty of money off our expedition.  By the time we were on the water, we looked like an advertisement for NRS, sporting the numbers of their logos we had.  We’ll return to that point later, because… well, you’ll see.  Just remember- NRS, Bill’s Bag, and the number of logos.

Now we’re all packed up.  Fred and Kathy and our stuff are going on ahead.  Jason, Mike and I are following along in Mike’s wife’s car.  It’s one of those stylish HHR things, with low profile windows and sort of retro design features to its exterior.  We’re going to do the whole drive to Flagstaff in one go.  Haul ass, as it were.  Straight through, boys!  We had the drive figured at something like twenty hours, so we were going to start early one day and arrive even earlier the next.  Good plan, right?

And the directions were easy.  1) Get on interstate 40, going west.  2) Stop 1378 miles later when you get to Flagstaff.

Let’s roll.

That is, let’s roll the next time I update this story.  See you then.

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Jan31

Grand Canyon diary- Part 6

by Greg Cravens on January 31, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

I never made it to the Ocoee with the ancient boat. The Ocoee was a river I was perfectly happy in.  Even on a bad day, I knew what to watch out for and where I could fudge the run.  I’ve been nearly drowned there, and I’ve done some of my most controlled paddling there, and everything…EVERYTHING… in between.

So, I wasn’t going to learn anything there about paddling unfamiliar water in my long, obsolete creekboat.  I’ll say now that it was a Savage Gravity.  Savage was the brand name- and it wasn’t the only Savage boat I ever owned, just my least favorite.  The model was called ‘Gravity’.  It was a pumped-up version of their whitewater playboat, the Scorpion.

I don’t recall how I got it, to tell you the truth.  I did a couple of deals here and there over the years for boats- some Dagger work in trade for one of their canoes, for instance; and I recall having worked on some Tshirt designs for Savage, though I don’t remember how the deals came about, and I don’t remember any of the shirts ever being produced.  Also, there may have been some logo work done with Mike that went haywire.  Anyhow, back then I was young, the economy was booming for advertising illustrators like me, and I didn’t yet have kids… so I had the time AND money to collect boats and weird stories about how they’d been got.

To get on unfamiliar water, I went to a river called the Cheoah with Mike, taking only the old creekboat so that I’d have no choice but to paddle it.  I should have taken my reluctance to paddle the thing as a subconscious prompting that I just wasn’t happy with it.  It nagged at the back of my mind all the way to the river.  The Cheoah is one of Mike’s favorite rivers now.  It was opened to recreational kayakers only a couple of years ago after its bed had been dry for decades. Mike was very complimentary about the run, and got me excited at the idea too, finally.

So.  The Cheoah. It’s not the smooth, wide run of the Ocoee. The rocks in it are sharp and formidable.  There’s a waterfall. It’s not Western Whitewater, like the Grand Canyon would be, but it wasn’t what I was used to, so it would serve a good purpose.  Before we go farther, I should point out that the purpose it would serve would be to unman me, make me worry that I’d die either on the Cheoah, or in the Grand Canyon, and lead me to do something that would make Mike really, really mad at me.  Looking back, I can’t decide how bad an idea it was; whether it was a truly horrible idea, or just a crappy idea that was just what I needed anyhow.

Fred and Kathy joined us for the run, and so did Drew Armstrong, one of the most amazingly competent men I ever hope to meet.  He once pronounced that he knew of a dozen or so ways to start a fire without matches or a lighter, then went on to demonstrate six or seven, even allowing the rest of us to give it an unsuccessful shot. You’d think that the fun and camaraderie would calm my nerves about my old creekboat. Nah.

This old boat was long and straight, tippy side to side, and made to keep your knees low for a sleek profile.  It was awful.  It was so old, and the intervening years had seen boats with higher knee placement, much more volume, and shorter length come into style.  The new boats were much more stable and yet easy to turn.

For a forty two year old like me, the low knees placements were murderous.  In fact, I suppose they turned out slightly less than murderous, because I lived.

The run was a cramped, uncomfortable, unstable mess from the beginning.  This thing was fast in a straight run, but there’s very little room for that on the Cheoah.  What there is room for is ducking and dodging between things and sprints to nearby eddies where the length of the boat worked against me badly.  I brought the boat to see if it was the sort of thing I could sit in for sixteen straight days out West.  I discovered that I couldn’t sit comfortably in it for a single run down a new river.

The discomfort of the boat and my estrangement from kayaking resulted in panic upstream of the waterfall. The waterfall has a tricky lead-up to it, too.  That didn’t help.  Nor did the fact that I had to be lead down some sneak routes coming into the waterfall area.  When I finally worked and sweated my way to the set up point, I guess I felt I had a handle on things.  You were supposed to run toward the fall, aiming at a jutting rock.  The water rushed across the rock and would sweep you to the right as you dropped over.  That’s not as tricky as it sounds, and I could visualize it.  Of course, I can visualize flapping my arms and flying around, too.  I ran at the rock and instead of shooting nearly straight over it, pushed only slightly to the right by the force of water, I shot sideways to the right and plunged down where I didn’t want to be.  I landed badly, fought for control, and lost it. I’d flipped the boat, panicked, bailed out, and swam for shore before good sense kicked in.

A lot of other people worked very hard to retrieve my boat for me.  I lost a new water bottle, lost my pride and lost every bit of self-confidence I had.  That was probably a good thing.  I had become pretty complacent about the Grand Canyon run.  Old memories of competence on unfamiliar water led me to think I could weather whatever I needed to.  Not so.  I vowed not to take my old creek boat, even though the cost of a new boat was out of my reach and I was so out of touch with kayaking that I had no idea what boat might suit me anyway.

Mike, as usual, came to the rescue.  He loaned me a wonderful Dagger brand boat called a Mamba.  I wanted to get back on the Cheoah and shake the fear I had of it now.  So the next day I ran it in the Mamba, not entirely upright, but always in the boat.  Rolling the Mamba the next day above a narrow run, I felt some control return.  I was thinking while I was upside down, not just panicking.  I rolled the boat and went on.  That was what I needed:  to learn that I could panic, and to learn that I could keep from panicking.  My choice.  I wasn’t ready to run off to the Grand Canyon, but it was as close as I was going to get.

Mike wanted to borrow the Savage Scorpion for a race during Memphis In May.  I was glad to agree.  In a fit of pique at the miserable, awful boat, though, I went ahead and listed it on Craigslist.  I figured it would take a month or two to sell and by that time Mike would have raced it and that’d be that.  It sold within hours.  And another boat I had.  Mike was rightly ticked off.  I’d agreed to loan him the boat and then sold it.  In my defense,  I can’t think that Mike would have done very well with it.  It was a wretched thing altogether.  After letting me know I’d been a thoughtless (insert favorite rude name here) Mike forgave me, and I gave him the money from my two boat sales for the Dagger Mamba he’d loaned me on the Cheoah.  I should have charged more for the boats… obviously they sold too quickly to be priced well, and if I’d gotten more money for them I could have afforded a camera to take on the trip with me.  But I was now out of discretionary funds and it was time to pack.

 

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Jan12

Grand Canyon Diary- part 5

by Greg Cravens on January 12, 2012 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

I mentioned before that I might be invited along on this Grand Canyon trip because, it being a desert, there’s no TV there.  I’m good for a laugh now and again.  I mean, I’m a cartoonist.  I write humor for a living.  I tell stories.  I’d like to think that kind of thing has value.  I can be counted on to bring out a totally unexpected quip from time to time, and thus add some humor into what might otherwise be a simple drowning.

My father makes regular motorcycle trips with a rotating roster of best buddies. He earned the title ‘A Veritable Outhouse of Information’ early in one of his first long trips. On such long trips, I imagine the other old guys are, at first, happy to have someone along that can offer up anecdotes, aphorisms and at least one interesting fact about whatever’s at hand. I fulfill a similar role when in crowds of people my own age.

Lacking the sort of filters that the normal person has, and having filled my days reading or listening to the sort of stuff that normal people skip over, I can now play a wicked game of Trivial Pursuit, or, returning to the point at last, take the place of a television set. True, I’m a TV tuned to that station that most Nielson Families lie about preferring when recording their preferences, and my on/off knob was torn off and rolled under a sofa years ago. After a week in the canyon, though, I figure I’ll be as welcome as any three random TV commercials.

So now you know why I’m being packed along, we can return to what I’m gonna pack myownself.

I have three kayaks. One of them is for paddling down creeks, one is a tricky little boat for playing in holes and waves, and the other is a more extreme version of the play boat. And they’re all old. Really old. If they were cars, they’d be old enough to kiss goodbye and hand over to your sixteen year old who just earned her driver’s license.

Now, I had to figure out which one of these old boats to take. The idea is that you need a boat that is swift enough that you don’t struggle when trying to paddle flatter water, and big enough that the rapids won’t treat it like a tub toy. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re paddling a kayak with a low, flat stern. That’ll be fine for rivers in the Southeast, where you want to slew around and let that stern slice into a wave. The wave will force the boat to stand on its stern, and you get an entertainingly daring ride out of it. That same stern, if it suddenly has some Western water poured onto it, might leave you staring at the sky at just the time when you’d rather be getting a good look at the crashing, surging, pounding rapid in front of you. Clearly, which boat I was going to carry to the Canyon would take some thought.

Firstly, I went to CreekWeek. CreekWeek is a function of the non-club we paddled with.  Once a year, the non-club (there are no officers, no dues, and no weird power structures, just the normal organic societal power structures you get when a BUNCH of alpha personalities hang out together.) meets at a particular state park that’s reasonably close to several rivers and creeks. Recall, also, that we’re mostly from Memphis, where ‘reasonably close’ is measured in hours of drive time.

We set up in ‘the group camp’- a large central building with an industrial kitchen and dining hall en suite surrounded by eight bunkhouses that’ll sleep three dozen people each in a pinch.  Groups of people sort of form and disperse, coagulate and shift- like the goop in a lava lamp, or ants in a panic.  Finally, these groups decide who they are in a sort of last minute mob rule and head out to paddle rivers and creeks.  This year, I spent my Saturday with a group on Clear Creek in a kayak called an RPM (‘Revolutions Per Minute’… the boat is built to spin around on waves.) made by Dagger Boats.  In its day, it was a radical design and much praised.  Its day has gone by, and I was worried that mine has too.

I was very nervous.  After a rapid or two, I realized that I was being too uptight and so I tried to relax.  It helped.  Old skills reappeared, and I paddled the entire river without injury or unintended exit from the boat.  Still, it was a familiar old creek without the hazards that the Colorado River and its unknown perils would throw at me.  So I figured that I should, if possible, try to get in another run on Sunday before I headed home.  Maybe something totally unexpected.

Feeling like I knew enough to survive, I joined David, Fred, Kathy, and Elmore Holmes (A very extensively paddled boater.  This is not, as far as I know, a commentary on his personal life.) on the Little Clear Creek (Not to be mistaken for the Clear Creek, as this one has the word ‘Little’ in its name.) on Sunday.

Supposedly, it was on the way home and supposedly would take us maybe an hour and a half.  The guy who recommended the run was the same guy from whom we’d all taken swiftwater rescue classes.  We should have known.  He was probably looking for anecdotes to use in the next class.  He threw us some useful information about the Little Clear rapids.  We read the guidebook, and we set off.

Fred… can’t be trusted with GPS equipment, just so you know. We didn’t know, because we were less familiar with GPS use than he is.  But it turns out that if you bookmark the wrong place as the ‘Put-in for the Little Clear Creek’ on Saturday, it’s still wrong on Sunday.  Who knew?

The guidebook said that we should be able to do this run in 45 minutes with an expert guide along.  We didn’t have an expert guide and (don’t try this at home, say the lawyers) we didn’t actually have anyone along who’d been on the creek before.  Honestly, I can hardly stand to admit it.  It sounds like we must have been brain damaged.  We all knew Elmore to be a hugely accomplished paddler, and I suppose our own performances the day before, taken with the beauty of the day, the fresh air, and the large amounts of meat we’d had at dinner the night before combined like some kind of John Denver-grade natural high to make us think that we could make this run without consequence.  And therein lies the problem.  We did make the run without consequence.

It was wonderful.  There were a couple of short falls at that level of water, and some sections that were dangerously overgrown with grasses and overhung with trees. We had some minor trouble in a couple of places. One place in particular stand out in memory.  It was a hairpin bend in the creek, with a dropoff in the middle of it.  Boats, once abandoned by their paddlers, tended to imitate swizzle sticks against the bank opposite the dropoff. That was a plus, as one alternate thing for the boats to do was to shoot off down the creek without their paddlers.  Elmore and Fred negotiated those particular troubles, while David, Kathy and I risked twisted ankles by portaging our boats along the bank instead. There was much cussin’.

There was a LOT more to the run than the useful information our swiftwater rescue teacher had given us. In fact, I’d like to point out here that his quick recon of the run left off about halfway, at the bottom of the largest drop.  Having spent an hour and a half getting to that drop, we naturally assumed that we were nearly done.  When, an hour and a half after that, we finally rejoined the Clear Creek and, consequently, the take-out, it occurred to me that Swiftwater Teacher Jim had, in the broader scheme of things, lost the last seat on the Grand Canyon trip to… me.

Ah.  He was, after all, trying merely to get me injured or killed so that the space would open up.  I can’t blame him, but I can resent it like hell.

CreekWeek’s success allowed me to get very complacent about the big upcoming trip.  I slacked on research and I slacked on getting a decent boat to paddle.  I didn’t think I could spend all sixteen days in my RPM- it was a little uncomfortable for the two days of Creekweek.  I had taken my ancient creekboat along to CreekWeek but hadn’t paddled it. I thought, since we’d all promised ourselves that we’d get to the Ocoee and put ourselves through some more paces, that I’d take my ancient creekboat THERE and try it out.  I remembered, dimly, thinking it had, years earlier, gotten me down the Ocoee, not to mention the Gauley and the New River.

I supposed it’d be just the thing.  It WOULDN’T be just the thing.  And therein lies the next chapter.

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Dec03

Grand Canyon Diary- Part 4

by Greg Cravens on December 3, 2011 at 6:40 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

“It’s difficult to know what to bung in when beginning a story”

P.G. Wodehouse

When packing, you naturally come up with some questions, especially when packing for something people keep wanting to call “Once In A Lifetime”.  For one thing, how much personal grooming equipment should you bring?  For men, the answer might be “Not much.”  If, however, there is even one woman on the trip, though, the dynamics take on an altogether more hygienic tone.  You might not be in such a hurry to start a ‘whose nose hairs can become the most unruly in two weeks’ competition.  Things like that just aren’t as amusing if one person “just doesn’t get it.”  or “Throws up in her mouth when looking at you”.   You might think that women could be included in the competition by letting them substitute her armpit hair or leg hair or whatever in place of nose hair.

If you are the sort of person who thinks this might work, you are likely also the sort of person who is baffled by his own serial divorces.

Packing for an extended river trip is tricky.  Packing for an extended river trip in the Grand Canyon is made trickier by several details:  You’re paddling on heart-stoppingly cold water. You’re paddling in the middle of one burning hot sonofabitch of a desert.  That doesn’t even make sense, and yet you have to give it a shot.

In fact, you have no idea what you’re packing for.  I, for one, had never done anything like this before, and what was necessary and what was frivolous was anyone’s guess.  I try to personalize the generic list by guessing where my own failings will rise up to bite me… I should pack my vitamins, my glucosamine, lots and lots of antacids, more sunscreen than others might want. Heart medicine.  That might grow in importance the three weeks I’m out of town.

Then I have to decide WHERE these things get packed.  Where do they have to be for the drive there?  Where will they have to be in camps?  Where on the river?  I have no idea, and therefore, must make guesses and pack with a broad latitude for moving things around, or as is a regular thing on my short trips- doing without at the most awkward times.

Fred's truck, Mike, Jason, Me, and a lot of stuff.

I can’t say that I was completely in the dark about what to pack.  Along with the timetable for payments, we made lists based on Fred and Kathy’s advice.  The list was the sorts of things that we needed- big floppy edged hats, sunblock, waterproof liquid bandage (superglue), aspirin, waterproof duffle bags… you get the idea.  We’d gotten all that info at the meeting wherein we discussed the trip and handed off the first of three checks each to David LeMay- the totally lucky guy to whom we all now owe serious Karmic debt.  The trip wasn’t going to be horrifically expensive, as far as the fees and food were concerned, but the total was broken down into three payments.  We all quietly feared that someone would miss a payment somewhere, a deadline wouldn’t be met and the whole thing would fall apart.

There would be a second meeting, we were told, where we would have to carefully watch a 36 minute Park Service video about how to behave on the river, and we’d need to deliver another check.  And we’d need to start packing.

Speaking of packing, this might be a good time to reinforce an important idea:  The reason that I was brought along.  Entertainment.  I’m not kidding.  You pack what you need.  It will be pointed out, rather indelicately, that if some of us were smarter we would have packed along a member of the opposite sex.  In fact, the way it was put was:  “You want a woman, you gotta bring ‘er with ya.”

I’m not saying I was brought along to be someone’s party partner. I wasn’t brought for any vulgar reason.

I think I was brought along because there was no television in the canyon.  

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Nov29

And Just Like That… It’s Winter

by Jeff Cravens on November 29, 2011 at 5:50 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

Jeff Outdoors says:

 

Yesterday we had the first snow fall of the year.

I got the Bronco plow-truck out and none of the electrics worked on the plow.  The standard “kick it really hard” method didn’t work, so with the sun setting, I loaded the kids up and drove them to Charlie-The-Snow-Plow-Guy’s Shop.

Charlie’s shop is a large garage full of trucks, snow plow bits, tools, trash, and racks upon racks of metal, rubber, and plastic junk.  All of it is covered in a layer of welding residue and dust (including the very old dog, Jake).

Charlie’s son, who is a pair of legs sticking out from under a Chevy 2500, also works in the shop.

While Charlie ran a full diagnostic, the legs twisted or slid around occasionally, and I heard a muffled exclamation float up from the engine compartment of the Chevy.  Charlie and his son work around the clock when the first snow hits, because that’s when people like me get in their plow trucks and find out they don’t work.

So, by 6PM, Charlie found the blown-out relay switch on my Bronco.  Ford stopped using these relays back in the mid 80′s, but Charlie had a box of them (under an unusually thick layer of welding residue and dust) and had me out and plowing in no time.

For all his time and skill, Charlie hit me with the bill…. $30.  I now understand why Charlie can’t afford to have someone clean his shop.

 

See More Of Jeff Outdoors’ blog HERE.

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Nov12

Grand Canyon Diary- Part 3

by Greg Cravens on November 12, 2011 at 7:52 am
Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

At some point early in your preparation for going to the Grand Canyon, you find yourself on YouTube.com. Turns out that everything that has happened for years is either on YouTube or is about to be.  It’s insane.  My father uses it to watch videos from heaven-knows-where of his favorite music.  As his favorite music was written, performed, and saw its creators die long before there were music videos, much less computers, you have to wonder where the hell they’re getting these videos. I imagine that some were performances on obscure old TV shows being hosted by a Red Skeleton or somesuch.  I admit to being baffled.  At any rate, his own work now appears on YouTube.  So the circle is now complete, we’ve all joined the Dark Side, and YouTube owns us and our kitty-cats that chase laser pointers.

So. Everything else being covered, YouTube, of course, has lots of video of whitewater rafts flipping over in a ‘hole’.  A hole, as you probably know, is a spot in a river where you have:

1. A rock,

2. A steep decline in your feet above sea level, and

3. Water that momentarily and repeatedly smashes itself back upstream against the aforementioned rock.

If this sounds like the dumbest place in the world to put a boat filled with your food, dry clothes and the things that prevent you from being stung by scorpions in your sleep, then you’ll get no argument from me.

You know, it’s one thing to read about rafts flipping in holes. It’s another thing entirely to see video of someone’s boat flipping over in a hole.  When you see it, you’re not seeing ‘it’.  You’re seeing YOU.  In your mind’s wide eye, it will not be that little video person, but yourself.  You will, you know, be IN that boat when it does its drunken lurch to the upstream side.  You will no longer be in that boat when the little video person is chucked out of that upended mess into the chocolate-milk-colored river.  And as you watch the tiny little video person claw its way through the water,  you remember the part about only having a few minutes to get out of the river before your body heat departs, leaving no forwarding address.

It’s best to take YouTube.com in small bites.

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