This Thanksgiving we decided to do something a little different. No family, no big meal, no traditional feast and food hangover-sleep day.... we decided to pack our backpacks full of warm clothes, canned food and gallons of water to spend the week in Big Bend National Park. Four girl-friends venturing out for the start of a new tradition. We met in Marfa, Texas thinking we were going to stay a few days but realized we were all pretty anxious to get into the woods. It had been a long time coming and life at home was getting pretty busy. An exit from civilization was what we all were seeking on this trip. The weather was surprisingly sunny and perfect for late November! We heard rain and even snow was coming but it was hard to believe with such great weather. We had 4 days to soak up the mountains before the bad weather was supposed to show up. So we hiked on. We left the park headquarters about 4 pm and entered the trail, thinking we were only a two-mile stroll from our camp site. In our mind, we were just barely hiking in to set up camp and to have a place to leave our bags for the rest of the week while we took on more strenuous hikes. Little did we know, Day one’s "stroll" WAS the most strenuous hike. One hour passed and surely we thought the campsite was just around the corner nearly every turn we came to. Two hours passed and we wandered how much strength our body had left, each of us carrying nearly three gallons of water. Three hours in, the sun was headed down and every step became one more miraculous movement forward. How much further could we possibly be? The distance on the map was suddenly looking much bigger than before. We kept stopping to relieve the weight off our shoulders, but the more we lingered, the darker it got, the colder it got, and the further we still were from our campsite. A woman breezed right by us, having a much smaller pack and seemingly no water to carry, she asked us where we were camping and made an "Ooohh" sound when we told her where, as if she were saying "Ouch, you've still got a long way to go!" But unlike the other passer-byers who would say something along these lines, she kindly offered her campsite in case we didn't make it all the way to ours.
Nice lady with the small backpack’s gesture became our “Plan B”. But as we kept hiking and kept hiking, we faced more and more incline and less mobility in our legs. “Plan B” seemed further and further away as well. So we gathered on the side of the trail and plotted “Plan C”- camp on the side of the trail. (We had contemplated stealing an empty campsite but the last thing we wanted was to have to wake up in the middle of the night and move on when the campers arrived.) So we took one last attempt towards the nice lady’s campsite and our legs just screamed "NO!" So we decided to stop. There was a little section off of the trail, so we used our remaining strength to remove all the big rocks to set up a somewhat soft place to camp for the night. By this point it was very cold, and we hardly wanted to eat, we couldn't wait to crawl into our sleeping bags and pass out. The only problem was all of our food in our bags. Since we didn't have a campsite, we did not have access to bear box. So we gathered all of our food out of our bags, stuffed them in one day-pack and tied it to a branch of a tree. At last, Rest. We hardly cared who would pass by and scoffed at us as we camped barely off the path of the trail, it just felt so good to rest our legs for a while. A few of the girls couldn’t get their minds off of possible bear presence, but the tiredness took over, and finally a long, hard day’s hike into camp was ending. They say the adventure begins when everything goes wrong, from the looks of Day 1, we must be off to a good start!
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AuthorKatie Elizabeth: Archives
February 2021
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