In Which Backpacker Girl Returns to the Wild!

Last week sometime, my husband looked at the weather for the week ahead and identified Sunday night into Monday as a good opportunity for us to get our first night out in the woods in a couple of months. The forecast held. So on Saturday afternoon, we started packing up all of our gear. We got up Sunday morning, made cheese sandwiches, finished packing, and by noonish, we were heading for the woods of Moshannon State Forest.

It was not without some trepidation, at least on my part. The past year has been rife with injuries and concerns regarding my knees. I've also walked a lot, continuing walking even after I was hurt. In the past few weeks, my knees finally seem like they are doing better. In the past few DAYS, I've had very little pain. 

Yes, I was wondering: could I actually DO a backpack trip into the wild woods, walking several miles in the one day, and several miles back out the next? Yes, I was wondering about the answer to that question. In fact, I was wondering and holding my breath.

My husband had promised that we would take some breaks during the hike in if we needed them. Which mollified me some, but not a lot, to be honest. He is a good, strong walker, and a fast one. The Walking Dude is the name he has always gone by on the trail. If I had a trail name, it might be That Little Gal Trying To Keep Up. (He is 6 feet fall; I am 5 feet 2 inches.)

The good news is that Moshannon State Forest isn't that far away, so it wasn't a long trip. There was some erosion along the place where we parked that meant my husband had to drive his Impala over a rather large ditch to get the car in. That was a trick, to be sure, but he did it!

We got out of the car, packed up our packs, and started the hike to our back-country site. We got separated on the way in, and I walked UP the hill - trudge, trudge, trudge - with my big pack on, and then DOWN the hill, and to the point in the trail where an old woods road took off down the side of the ridge.

You used to be able to follow it, but at this point after a long, hot summer, the old logging road was all grown in and practically untraceable. We were a little off on where we usually go in, but with my husband as lead hiker once again, we made it into the back-country without incident, I am happy to report that my knees held up just fine, and in short order, we were setting up camp in the woods.

It was sunny and breezy and beautiful, with a high temperature of about 60 degrees for the day. We got there, took our packs off, and cooled down a little. Then we started setting up our site. My husband always puts up a clothes line first thing. 

While he did that, I took my gear off my pack and put my groundsheet out and began putting up my tent. Once you've done the work of lumbering into the backwoods, there isn't THAT much to do once you get there. And so I like to just "git 'er done."

I put my groundsheet out, laid out my tent, put my poles together, and had the tent up in short order. "Hey, are you putting up your tent?" my husband asked me. "No, no, of course, I'm not!" was my reply. And then I was inside my tent setting up the two floor blankets, and the two flat pads, and setting Big Agnes aside, and putting out my sleeping bag and other gear.

You remember those white sunglasses I broke a while back? And then I glued them, and was so pleased with myself to have them back? Guess what! I knelt on them inside my tent and re-broke them, in the exact same places!

Boy, did I feel stupid. But my advice is this: if you are going to do something truly senseless, go ahead and get it on out of the way early so that you can move on to other things. Do the stupid thing, move along, turn that page.

I didn't have any other sunglasses with me - I don't carry extras - and neither did my husband. But I seemed to remember that I used to have super glue in my camera bag, for gluing the errant crittergator. Alas, there was no glue. But I did find a tiny bit of museum putty. 

So I used that to put my sunglasses back together. It was a field repair, to be sure, a Ms. MacGyver sort of solution, with very little elegance or style to it. It worked as long as I didn't move my head around a lot, and once again, I was quite pleased with myself. 

You may see me enjoying some of the last gorgeous rays of the afternoon light in the selfie above, with my tent and backpack sitting behind me in the wild, wild woods. That green shiny thing on the floor of my tent is Big Agnes, my blow-up sleeping pad.

There is more of this story to tell, but I'll save it for tomorrow's tale. For now, let's call it quits and end up with this sun-kissed scene, and I'll put a song or two to part one of two of our first backpack of the fall season (though technically, it's still summer!).

For the backpacker girl returned to the wild, let's use this one: Iggy Pop, with Real Wild Child. And for the girl who broke her sunglasses - yet AGAIN - and somehow managed to move on, and have fun in the sun anyway, here is Metallica covering Bob Seger's Turn the Page.