Here’s the computer file of the whole mural. There are no electrical boxes and exit signs to interfere, although the I-beams on the roof are marked in for space. And the access hatch that Lance’s torso fell across is marked in. Still, this is pretty much what the whole thing looks like. The impression you get while in the shop is different, because you can’t back up enough to get the mural to this scale in your line of vision (you’d find yourself in the back parking lot of the shop) In other words, you can’t actually see it at this size. You have to turn your head and scan across to get the whole thing. For scale, look at Lance’s bike. That’s a 1=1 scale bike that the shop owns, won at a charity raffle. Lance is full size. That makes it a pretty neat thing for the store to have. Because it’s behind and above you as you enter, there’s no “Whoa!” moment, at least not until you’ve been in the store and glance up at the colors. The only big difference between this file and the wall itself is that I was asked to scale back the shop logos in the sky and the parking area on the right. They’re not so obtrusive in the real version. Other differences are minor, decided on after seeing the thing on the wall.
For any of you who don’t believe there’s such a thing as a bathroom tent, click on the one below.
If you are a stereotypical male who tells his ladyfriend to ‘Pick a Tree’ when she asks the whereabouts of the nearest bathroom, you may not want to reveal the existence of this thing:
I’ve said in the past that I would try not to degenerate into crotch-area humor. But this is a product review, not a cartoon.
The subject of The Camp Shuffle comes up on long outdoors trips. Going down the Grand Canyon for a couple of weeks, say. Or taking your kids to Scout Camp. They warn the kids and warn them good, but you know somebody in the group will neglect to take proper showers or change his underwear or not take the proper precautions in the sweaty days of Summer camp.
I feel bad for them. Because I’ve gotten the Camp Shuffle. I’ve staggered along like the crippled sidekick in an old Western, wishing I could quit the hike, go back to camp and let my tenders heal. It happened this past June. I was miserable. I could have been MORE miserable, but another scout leader told a funny story about a buddy of his that got the Camp Shuffle. The guy had gotten some powder, figuring that would fix it all up. But, the story went, he bought MENTHOLATED powder. Everyone laughed, and I felt better. My drawers were uncomfortable in the extreme, but at least I hadn’t dropped menthol down in ’em. Ha. Hilarious.
This gave me a good idea, though. While the scouts were being taught or tested or whatever the heck during their Camp class, I’d step over to the trading post and see if they had anything for Camp Shuffle. I figured that if it was standard practice to lecture the kids about it during our first few moments at camp, surely the trading post would keep powder or something on hand. And they DID. They had two different kinds of Gold Bond powder. Regular, of which they had a dozen containers, and Extra Strength, of which they had two containers.
It hadn’t been that long since I’d heard the story about the idiot who dropped Menthol down his pants, so I looked over both bottles carefully. ‘Extra Strength’, the one bottle said. ‘Healing’, it said. ‘Triple Action Relief’ it said. ‘Cooling, Absorbing, Itch Relieving’ so far so good, and I’d exhausted the front of the bottle. No mention of ‘Mentholated’. The directions on the back say, ‘Apply freely up to 3 or 4 times a day’. It also says, under ‘Uses’: temporarily relieves the pain and itch associated with: minor cuts, sunburn, insect bites, scrapes, prickly heat (!) minor burns, rashes (also “!”) and minor skin irritations. The ‘Warnings’ say it’s for external use only (good. I had no plans to eat it.) and to keep it out of my eyes. (also, no problems. I’ve never powdered my eyes and couldn’t see a reason to start.) There was some ‘ingredients’ list at the bottom. It didn’t mention ‘menthol’, though it did say ‘methyl salicylate’, which worried me since I had no earthly idea what the heck it might be or if I wanted it on my tenders. But I figured that there were only a few ‘Extra Strength’ bottles left because that was the kind everyone bought. And I bought the Extra Strength.
Then I went to the car. It was very close and mostly, no one goes to the parking lot during the day, so the lot was empty. I opened both doors on one side, stepped between them, and discreetly medicated my nether regions.
Which is to say I set my own crotch on fire.
Fire. fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire!
While I am trying to hold still and wondering if I should, maybe, run around or call for help or die or something, my son comes up from the trading post. He said… something that didn’t have to do with testicle fires, so I don’t recall what it might have been.
Nerve endings, says my wife who was a burn nurse for many years, die. They burn up and the victims of fires no longer feel the pain- not until they begin to heal, that is. I decided, while standing there sweating, panting, gasping and trying to answer my son (I thought, I’ll tell him I’m okay. Everything’s okay and I love him very much. Those would be good last words.) that I would just wait until there was enough nerve damage that I could get on with the day.
Finally, things changed. The fire didn’t go out, you understand, it just started oscillations between nuclear fire and nuclear winter.
fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice
I had never thought that I’d be happy to have my gonads light up and freeze over and over again, but I assumed that any change in blinding furious pain was a good thing. Maybe someday I could live like normal people again, and this was the beginning of it.
•••••
Okay, that was about as funny as this story gets. Eventually, the pain turned into a confused discomfort that I was able to see through and deal with. It was probably only a couple of minutes that I had flop sweat, agonizing fire and ice and a sincere concern that I had crippled myself to the point of needing hospitalization. It seemed like longer, but you know how that is.
I finished the day and got back to our campsite. Another Den Leader with us had Johnson and Johnson’s Baby Powder. I used it that night and the next day, and didn’t have another minute’s discomfort.
So here’s the conclusion: If you have Camp Shuffle DO NOT put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in your shorts. Even if you DO NOT have Camp Shuffle, do not put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in your shorts. If you have a bitter, bitter enemy for whom you have nothing but a seething hell-born hate, and you find that you have an opportunity to put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in his shorts, DO NOT do it. It’s and evil thing to do, and you’re not that evil. No one is that evil.
You have some poison ivy rash on your arm or leg? It’s itching like crazy? Use Gold Bond Extra Strength powder. Use it. It’s fine. It feels good. It even smells kinda nice. Need something on your pits before you go out on a long hike? Go for the powder. Back of your neck a little sunburnt? Use it according to instructions. It’s good stuff.
But DO NOT put it on your genitals. Ever. Under any circumstances.
Last thing- I must have been in a desperate hurry to get relief. The label on the back of the bottle? Yeah, at the bottom there’s those ingredients listed? They’re ‘Inactive’ ingredients. Up at the top, Right under ‘Drug Facts’? THERE’s the ‘Active Ingredients’ and the first thing listed is ‘Menthol’ 0.8%. You might want reading glasses to see it, but it’s there. Oh, it’s there, my friends. On the label and in the bottle. It’s THERE.
On an only semi-related note… in this video they are using the non-mentholated Gold Bond:
By the way, THIS is the stuff I’m using next trip. Mostly cause ‘MonkeyButt’ is just too funny not to have on some kind of packaging around here. Click on the bottle if you’d like to buy some too:
The tough part is pretty much over. I’ve done all the confusing, frightening, stupid, dead-ended things that can be done, and now, I’m ready for the part that, while maybe not EASY, is at least straightforward. Climb a ladder. Out. No more questioning the options. This was it. Just one long climb and I would be out.
So I climbed.
The Royal Gorge Incline Train’s incline is, I see at http://royalgorgebridge.com/about/facts.php, 1,550 feet long. I had to have been a little better than halfway up after all this nonsense, so let’s say I had maybe 700 feet to go. 230 yards or so. Rounding up, maybe a quarter of a football field. It seems like longer in my memory, but you know how I exaggerate.
I would now like to point out that the tallest ladder you’re likely to run across in your life, or more specifically in MY life, is one of those 24 foot jobs that reach to the top of your two-story house to let you reach, say, the wasp nest that has been built in some inaccessible and frankly vertiginous corner where you wouldn’t normally go on a bet, especially since it’s full of wasps. But I digress again and the commas are getting plain silly. You ever climbed on one of those 24 foot things at full extension? No, because at full extension, they bounce like trampolines. But that’s not the point. The point is 24 foot ladders. What about 29 of them, end to end? Right. You haven’t climbed 29 fully extended 24 foot ladders because you’re not an idiot. Hardly anyone is, or could even imagine getting oneself into the position to climb that far. But let me tell you that such a climb uses muscles that boot camp workouts don’t reach. You use neglected, dehydrated, twanging muscles that are wobbly from bathing in old adrenaline that went sour in your bloodstream four or five chapters back.
But there is very little incentive to stop, because numbers of feet and dehydration aside, you’re nearly OUT.
My wish for you and your life is that one day, you can have a task that has such single-minded purpose and such dawn’s-awakening results. I won’t say it’s like seeing a child born because saying so can get you killed by some woman who remembers her own purpose and results and knows damn well if you try to equate climbing a ladder to it, she’ll kill ya. And because it’s not really the same anyhow. Frankly, though, it’s affirming to just climb along as best you can,counting missing bolts on the ladder (98 in case you’re wondering) and knowing that you’re on a straight road out of Dodge.
By the time I got to 98 missing bolts that should have been holding my ladder in place, it was no longer my ladder.
It now belonged to the guy whose face suddenly popped over the end of the ladder as I approached the top. I was now the interloper and I was on HIS ladder. He had a genial face, a work-smudged face, a suspicious and a baffled face. He said, “What was you doing down THERE?”
“Kayaking.” I said, “I lost my boat.” After a brief thought I added, “Please don’t tell me that I’m the first dumb son-of-a-bitch to have to climb outta here.”
Without missing a beat, he said, “Well, son, I got bad news.” And he grinned. Ass.
That wasn’t adding insult to injury. That came a few minutes later, and we’ll get to it in the Conclusion Of Boy Gorge, next time.
Yep, we took us a trip up onto a mountain in Arkansas, where we hunted crystals. And them ain’t good eatin’.
Wegner Quartz Crystal Mines is a fine place to go if you want to come home with a double handful of really pretty quartz crystals. If you have ever seen them in necklaces and such available in shops and you assume that they have to be cut to those pencil-type shapes, you’re wrong. They form like that- six sided and pointed at the end. Amazing. Wegner is a working mine- they harvest all the big ones by breaking a… what do you call it, a vein?… of quartz with a backhoe or a bulldozer or something similarly awesome. They can’t get the millions of tiny crystals that are left in the dirt, though- and so for a few bucks a head you and your kids, cub scouts, indian guides, girl scouts, cousins, or herd of rugrats of whatever description can go and pick up as many as you like. It takes a while to ‘dial in’ your eye. Sometimes the best ones look black, sometimes they reflect brilliant white. There are tons of them that are a dirty mess, and many that shine clear and clean- amazingly clear.
Here’s a couple of truckloads of us, about to head up the mountain to the site where the vein’s been opened for us to vampirically suck up all the beautiful quartz flecking the ground.
Jeff Outdoors – The man abuses outdoor gear, so you don’t have to
MSR Pocket Rocket
“What the #$@% happened to GAZ?????? I LOVE MY TRISTAR!!! I WANT GAZ!!!!”
After the salesperson at my local outdoor store recovered from my screaming, he pointed to the only two stoves they carry. The MSR Pocket Rocket is similar to my old Gaz Tristar with two significant differences. First, it is tiny, little, itsy bitsy, small, petite, and not big at all. Second, because of it’s three contact points, the pot platform is not as stable.
I admit I’ve only used this stove for about four meals and some drinking water boiling, but I love it. Did I mention that it’s tiny? And light? And really well made? And cute in a cool backpacker sort of way?
The little guy comes in a small prism shaped container (see photo) which is big enough for the little stove and a mini Bic lighter. If you are a purist and would rather stick a flint stick in there, you can kiss my Bic and put your flint stick in there for all I care. Lighters are awesome, cheap, and reliable – enough said.
The simmer function on this stove works well and the little three legs work fine if you have the base very level. The instructions say not to use a windscreen. That said, I think a windscreen is necessary with even a moderate breeze, but keep it well away from the assembly to avoid heating the canister and adjustment wire. Also, the boil ratings on this little dude are not the best but they are easily adequate for normal use.
Pros
• Tiny
• Light
• Well made
• Reasonably priced (around $50)
• Comes with a “hard” case for cramming in your pack
Cons
• Does not hold a big pot well
• You must have the fuel canister level
Bottom Line
If you’ve run out of Gaz fuel, or you need a little, light, reliable, three-season stove, put this little rocket in your pocket.
