Just the tip

One of the biggest perks of the guide job was that you left camp for the week, caused a bit of mischief on the weekends and then got out of Dodge for another week. Generally, provided that you didn't do anything too bad, no-one remembered what you did the week before. Another perk was that you would often get tips at the end of the week from the group you guided. Nothing huge generally $50 or so, but still always welcomed.

 As mentioned before, on most trips the second adult is typically the father of one of the scouts on the trip. Generally, the adults are pretty mellow. They go with the flow and don't interfere. There are notable exceptions, but this is not the post to discuss those exceptions. This is the post to talk about the German that I had on one trip. First, he had a very distinctive german name like Heinrich. Second, he had the german accent and was built like a stout bulldog. He was affiliated with the troop, but I think his kids had gone through scouting already but he still helped out. Heinrich had an old school external frame pack. There is nothing wrong with an external frame pack, they get the job done. The main drawback is that a lot of them are not very well made. In particular, the hip belt is usually pretty shoddy. The hip belt is one of the most important parts of a good backpack. It allows you to take most of the weight off of your shoulders and put it on your legs.

 Most people would be limited by a poor hip belt, but not the German. A couple of hours into our first day, I noticed that he had not strapped his hip belt on. I asked him about it and he told me it interfered with his stride. I liked that answer, particularly since he demanded to carry as much weight as possible. Before any trek, we would conduct pack shakedown. Everyone would empty their pack and we would see what they had packed. The idea was that we needed to check to see if they had left anything critical behind. 

Interestingly, if they had, there wasn't much we could do. There were no stores close by and we didn't stock anything useful. I guess it was similar to knowing your tires are bald before driving in the rain, at least you were not surprised. Not too much could go really wrong anyway. This was the summer and even though it was cooler than most parts of NY, it was not like hypothermia or frostbite were much of a risk. But, for whatever reason, we would do a pack shakedown and generally let people know that they did not need a change of clothes for every day and so on. At the end of pack shakedown we would distribute the group gear. This consisted of the food, stoves, tents and so on. I would have a big pile and hand it out evenly.

 Most of the time this went pretty smoothly. This time I noticed that everytime I went to hand something out, the pile had shrunk quite quickly. Heinrich wasn't going to wait for me to assign him gear, he simply grabbed as much as he could, shoved it in his pack and then amazingly found room for more gear. This went on through the trip. Each morning we would redistribute the remaining load (as food was eaten and stove fuel burned). Heinrich always wanted more things to carry. I think he would have been happiest if someone had broken an ankle so he could have carried them too! Even though he was carrying the most weight, he was always at the front of the line charging ahead. He was like a damn freight train, it didn't matter what the terrain whether it was hilly, he just kept right on. Typically we would hike for 50 minutes and rest for 10. Most people would drop their packs and either lay down on them or sit on a log somewhere. Heinrich would stop, but that was it. The pack stayed on and he would tell some great off color jokes. He would also chide the slowest in the group for not being able to keep up with him.

 It was a great trip and I was sorry to see it end on Friday morning when we got picked up. That evening, there was a group going to Panther Mountain and we invited Heinrich along. As much fun as he was on the trip, he was even more fun at the bar. He insisted on paying for the drinks and just like on the trail we struggled to keep up with him. After a couple of hours he had to head back but left a pile of 20s on the bar. Now that was a tip!