Voaygeur Part III: Being Preppy (Wherein the long name referencing the Denver Omlette gets explained and dismissed finally)

In previous posts we discussed camp school and the follow up remedial training.  This post focuses on the Sunday afternoon before a group leaves.

Sundays start off with a brunch, a ton of coffee consumed out of 4 fl oz cups and waiting for your trek group to arrive.  Once the group arrives, there are quick introductions, a brief discussion about the planned route and plans to meet later for pack inspection.  As it turns out, at least for me, Sundays were always extremely busy.  I could have done a lot of the work on Saturday, but I viewed that as my Summit Sabbath, and made sure that I did not do any work or anything morally correct on that day.

Load purpling it up here and there on this post.  Sundays always stared out well.  Especially my last year (2000 when I came back full time, not freelance).  There was no breakfast, just brunch and dinner that day.  Brunch commenced around 10:30 or 11:00, yet the Voyageur and I would usually arrive at the dining hall at breakfast time (7:30) and begin to drink that aforementioned coffee.  There really is nothing better than having a few free hours to caffeinate your body while bullshitting with a friend on a beautiful summer Adirondack morning in front of a gorgeous wood structure (the new dining hall).  I looked forward to those times.

In addition to meeting the group and making sure they were ready for the trip, you had to pack your own gear and make sure all the group gear was ready to go.  Packing your own gear was pretty easy, because my pack was typically 85% ready to go at any time.  Most of the gear just stayed in there from week to week, the clothing might get changed out, but really the only thing that certainly got changed out was the socks.  That is one area you don't want to take lightly, you really do need fresh socks each day.

You always hoped for early arriving groups (post-brunch though) so you could go through your paces with them, do pack check, discuss this and that, distribute gear, and still have time to chill in the late afternoon.  

Our groups usually ranged in size from 8-12.  Over the course of 5 days, this is a lot of food to consume.  Fortunately, there is an entire line of backpacking food.  The food is freeze dried, meaning that there is little to no moisture content.  The food is comparatively light and does not require refrigeration.  Something is lost in the freeze drying process however, that something is taste.  But it gets the job done.  Generally, the dinners were the best of the worst, the lunches in the middle of the pack and the breakfasts were really really bad.  For whatever reason, freeze drying eggs doesn't work.  It go to the point that we would typically pack two freeze dried breakfasts for the group (one denver omelette and one eggs and baco bits) and the other breakfasts were instant oatmeal.  I think we universally agreed that the Denver Omlette was the worst.  Perhaps it was the lofty title that made you think of a diner where you would get a lovely fluffy omlette, perhaps some plump juicy sausages and a glass of orange juice.  In the field it was a slightly runny mess with flecks of green pepper floating in the eggy soup.  We started wising up at the end and just packing oatmeal for all 4 breakfasts.  It was cheaper, tastier and required almost no clean-up. The Denver Omlette is the meal I took w/the Voyageur when we hiked up Stevens for the (very) abridged training when it turned out he was going to fill in to take a trek out.  It's also the meal that we threw out after having tasted a bite each.

The lunches typically consisted of some sort of bread that never went bad, but was never really good either, either a cheese spread or peanut butter and jelly and some sort of energy bar.  I imagine it was similar to what they ate during the Korean war, in fact some of the adult leaders who were vets remarked that it was indeed similar.  All in all, the dinners were not too bad.  They were usually hearty enough that people did not go to bed hungry and actually tasted ok.  My favorite was the nicknames for the meals, only one sticks in my mind because of the totally juvenile nature, and that is "Happy Cow" for Beef Stroganoff.

Two comments here.  When I began, in '93, the lunches were pre-packaged deals that contained Mountain Bread.  This was the stalest, driest cracker you could imagine, along with two packs of squeeze jelly and peanut butter.  These were definitely reminiscent of military MRE's.  Lunch was the first to go, we would end up taking a bag of bagels, peanut butter in a jar, GORP, granola bars, apples and oranges, etc.  Quick, yummy, saved money, filling, etc.  Oh, and pepporoni!  After a few days of heavy hiking, nothing beat sticking a large slice of pepperoni into a jar of peanut butter and chowing down.  Later we got rid of breakfasts in favor of fortified oatmeal.  That's oatmeal with anything added you could think of.

I always made the "Happy Cow" joke about Beef Stroganoff until an adult leader I was taking out commented that "Happy Bull" was more accurate in this instance. 

Each one of the freeze dried meals was packaged to serve 4.  It worked best if you had a group of 6 or 10, because a meal for 8 served 6 very well, and a meal for 12 similarly worked well for 10 people.  Typically, I would round up.  People get cranky enough in the woods away from toilets, showers and general creature comforts, you don't want to add in hunger.  We would also give each participant a bag of trail mix (M&Ms, peanuts and raisins) that was to be used as they saw fit.  Interestingly, many scouts chose to break out this bag of treats on the drive to the trek start, about an hour after they had breakfast.

Packing all this food was relatively simple.  As mentioned before, we had an old dining hall at our disposal.  The walk in refrigerators were still there, but inoperable.  That didn't matter though because the food didn't need to stay cold.  My approach was pretty haphazard.  I generally grabbed as many bags of each food as I thought we might need, supplemented with some extra oatmeal and trail mix and called it good.  The load, who is a bit more of a purist, put more thought into it and even carried a spice kit with him.

After packing the food, you needed to get the rest of the group gear, namely the cooking gear, stoves and fuel.  The cooking gear was relatively straight forward.  All the meals could be prepared in a big pot and or a frying pan and the scouts were responsible for bringing their own plate and cup.  You needed a big spoon and a spatula, and then you were all set.

We used stoves like the one below:

These were really efficient machines, when working correctly.  Probably the most useful thing I learned at camp school was how to repair one of these in the field.  You poured liquid fuel in the tank.  There was a pump on the other side of the stove:

You can see the pump on the right side of  fuel tank.

In order to get the stove started you would pressurize the tank with the pump and light her up.  At first, a mixture of liquid and gaseous fuel would come out, creating a nice dangerous flame.  Eventually, the heat from the flame would convert all the liquid fuel to vapor and the stove would run smoothly.  The problem was that the stoves were pretty finicky and over time some would work better than others. Rather than figure out ahead of time which ones were working well, my approach was to grab 3 or 4, with the idea that at least one, and hopefully two would work well.  These stoves didn't use much fuel, but you never wanted to run out. Generally, I would estimate what the worst case scenario would be for fuel usage, double it, and then grab an extra couple of bottles of fuel to be safe.  I never ran out of fuel.  In fact, I often came back with enough to do an entire follow on trip.   (A bit of an aside here, at the end of the year, we had to get rid of all the fuel that remained in the stoves or in the expedition fuel bottles.  I don't know exactly what the approved method was - my method, which I greatly enjoyed - was to build an enormous bonfire and pour the fuel onto it.  I think the hair on my hands and my eyebrows have finally recovered from the constant singing!)

Then you had to get the incidentals, like a shovel for burying your poop, something called polar pure that we used to treat the water.  This was an interesting product.  You can use Iodine to treat water so it is safe to drink.  Polar pure was a product that contained pellets of iodine under a net.

You could put water directly from a stream into the bottle and then it would form a solution that you could use to treat water.  It was really quite ingenious, the bottle weighed a few ounces and you could treat many many gallons.  The other option is to pump water through a filter, which works OK if there is just one person, but would take forever with a group.  Granted, you knew it was working because the water had a lovely brown tinge and iodine bouquet, but it beats getting sick.  You are supposed to fill the bottle up and then there is a scale on the side with a film that changes color.  The color is supposed to indicate how many capfuls of solution you should use to treat a quart of water.  Our bottles were quite old though, they still contained plenty of iodine, but the scale was impossible to read.  Once again, my motto was to over compensate.  It seemed to work.  

I became a polar pure convert.  It was much more efficient than straight pills, and I've always ended up clogging filters, even on my own.  For fun, you could drink a bit of the stuff straight, though from a medical and sanity standpoint I don't recommend this.

All of this took quite a bit of time, particularly when you were new.  It was not at all uncommon to stay up until 2-3 am getting ready.  It made for a long first day, when you started at 5.  But, there is plenty of time to catch up on sleep during the week and get ready to do it all over again.  

The Voyageur and I have very different recalls on this - or perhaps we did things quite differently.  It's a peculiar quirk of my character that as much as I broke rules of camp often concerning fermented hops and amorous adventures with the ladies, I actually was quite rule and regulation bound  otherwise - at least during my first few years.

Part of what we had to do with our trek groups was medical check, swim check, and pack check.  

We usually met in a gazebo for first aid check.  The guide, nowhere near qualified as a doctor, would look over the first aid forms of all participants and ask questions.  Somehow we were supposed to suss out some debilitating issue that would prevent a week of canoeing that the participant themselves were unaware of.   "Oh, it says here you suffer from a severe fresh-water allergy?  Do you think that will be a problem canoeing?"  I can't recall a time when I learned anything useful during medical check except to affirm that everyone had a health form signed by a doctor.  After medical check was swim check.

Now my first year I walked the groups down to the Bucksin waterfront and did a full swim check at a regulation waterfront, Boy Scout style (remember I actually followed regulations?).  I quickly wised up.  100 yards from the gazebo was the Zip-Line pond.  We would wander down there, I would have the group fly down the zip line into that god awful freezing water.  If they struggled swimming out, I would mark them as someone to watch whenever we went swimming on trek or if they fell in canoeing; if they were fine, they were fine; and if they refused to go in, then I wouldn't allow them to swim on a hiking trek and they weren't allowed on a canoe trek.  

Finally was pack check.  Voyageur recalls this as a time to make sure everyone had what they needed.  He skipped this eventually, because there was no way to get something left at home a four hour car ride away and he would end up carrying spare everything anyway.  I used pack check as a way to take the crap out of their packs they didn't need.  Ten t-shirts for a 5-day 4-night trek?  Gone.  A hatchet?  Gone.  I had troops argue that they might need to cut wood crossing their path while canoeing.  Step out and carry it over.  Or they might need it to make a fire.  Nope, any wood that can't be snapped is too big in my book.  Nintendo Game Boy?  Gone.  Deoderant?  Don't need it, gone.  It attracts bears, your girlfriend won't be with you, etc.  

What you have to understand is a lot of 12 year old boys are still packed for by their mothers who only think of comfort and not of the carry part.  They don't realize that in addition to what was packed at home, the following would be added: full water bottles, share of food, share of cook gear, share of fuel, half a tent, etc.  So I whittled down.  

Finally it was time for dinner.  We used to march down to the dining hall and eat the food they were serving.  This was tedious because though the food was ok (on a sliding scale) there were tons of announcements for new troops arriving that week that didn't concern us.  So we started having barbecues at Summit on Sun. nights and these became major affairs and attracted all adult volunteers and any staff member that could sneak away from the dining hall.  Our food kicked ass.  After that it was off to bed.  Originally we had trek groups stay in two sites at Summit (names?  I'm drawing a blank!  They were named after geographical landmarks in the 'Daks; I want to say Saranac and Colden, but I'm not sure).  This was a waste as it took a loooooong time to set up the platforms and canvas tents at the beginning of Summer and they were only used Sun. night and Fri. night.  So instead we sent troops up to the sites with their backpacking tents and they learned on the fly how to set them up.  In stormy times they slept in TAC.  Not sure what they do now that it's burned down.  

And then any reasonable person would go to bed and get some sleep.  I would go party or hang out.  Lots of fun things to do at a scout reservation.  Go for a midnight stroll or swim, hike up Mt. Stevens, pull a prank, drink beer, play darts, hit the bar, hit the climbing wall, play chess, carry a canoe somewhere pointless  - often it was a combination of all of these.  We would get back to our cabins between 12-2 am, wake up at 5, pack (which was quick as there was very little unpacking from the previous week) meet our trek group at 6, quick breakfast and off we go.  That's when the real work and fun began....