I awoke at seven AM. My first thought was “Crap, I didn’t go swimming at 6”. You see, I forgot to mention that last night I boasted to all of my course mates that I would be up with the sun and go for a nice refreshing swim in the liquid nitrogen warm lake. Oh well, they might as well know early on that I say I’ll do a lot of things that I won’t actually do.

The tent didn’t smell this morning. Having split up the guys was a good idea. Girls for some reason don’t excrete the musky odors that we do. Unfortunately my sleeping was still a little ripe.

It’s raining. Four months of sun and it rains the first full day in the mountains. This is just my luck. It’s not even one of those good downpours either. It’s one of those misty-windy days that chills you to the bone and gets everything damp. It is about now that I am starting to see why everyone else brought Gore-Tex. See, the list of approved clothing said “Rain Gear – Gore-Tex best, Helly Hansen style also ok”. I opted for the $50 rain slicks instead of the $300 Gore-Tex. The worst $250 I’ve ever saved. I’ll tell you more about this as the days go on (foreshadow – it’s going to rain a lot).

Breakfast was oatmeal with dried fruit chunks in it. I discover that dried fruit chunks are not high on my list of things I like to eat. It’s key to point out now that we all eat everything out of our one bowl with our one spoon. As my little metal bowl was laughed off the mountain, my new replacement bowl is a Becel tub. I’ve skillfully wrapped it in duct-tape to make it a little stronger. It seems to be holding up well after a few meals.

So here’s the deal, there are no toilets in the woods. To make matters worse, we are not allowed to use toilet paper. Outward Bound emphasizes no impact camping. When we leave a campsite you should not be able to tell we were there. Leaving toilet paper in the ground is not good for the environment or something like that. So if you use toilet paper you have to keep it and carry it out in a zip lock bag. I didn’t bring toilet paper, so I’m left with what’s growing around me.

The bathroom procedure is as follows. There is a shovel. It sits outside of the “kitchen” with a bottle of Hand sanitizer (hand sanny). If nature calls your number and row you grab the shovel and make your way to the latrine, a medium sized hole one of us has dug when we arrived at camp. This is all well and good except for one thing. Butt wipe. Being the first time for me I do not really know what or how much to look for. I grab some bigger leaves off of a tree and make my way to the latrine. I do my business and find out the hard way that I’m short on butt wipe. Now I’m left to scramble for what’s within one arms length. What’s around me……grass….moss…..spruce trees…..rocks……. grass was really wet and hard to manager…….the other two…….well…….I’m not comfortable talking about them. As the trip goes on I’ll let you know the best butt wipes as I discover them.

Doing number two in the woods is really the only thing that is unacceptable about living in the woods. Here are my thoughts from my trip journal moments after I returned from the latrine for the first time:

“Wiping your butt with leaves, moss, branches, and rocks is why human beings began inventing modern amenities. It is the sole reason humans advanced, the initial catalyst of invention.”

Jasmin set up a short rappel for us. It was fun. I’m not really scared of heights so it was not a fear thing for me. It turned out much easier than I had expected. Matt and Jasmin are really turning into a great team. This is the first course they’ve led together……there are sparks too…..the romantic kind. They sleep in the same tent too!

We then packed up the camp and made our way up towards the base of our first peak, Mt. Myra. The hike was only two kilometers, but the terrain was very hard to read and very time consuming. Matt and Jasmin call this terrain “microterrain”. Terrain that gets in your way but is not big enough to show up on the map. The two kilometers took more than two hours. At this point we are not following a trail. We are reading maps and deciding the best routes for ourselves. There are no trails even if we wanted to follow them.

We finally arrived at our camp destination. Sandbag Lake. A beautiful mountain lake surrounded on tree sides by mountains and the other side open to the world. While it was a beautiful place to look at it was a crappy place to tent. Not a single flat area as far as the eye could see. We spent two hours looking for tent spots. We didn’t find any so we camped in crappy spots.

Vero Super and I had to cook dinner. Bean burrito thingies with cheese. It’ll be warm in the tent tonight! Sleep came fast as it had been a long day. The end of day 4.

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