2001
Adventures With Uncle Wally
You know, if you’re lookin’ for Adventure, you don’t necessarily hafta travel thousands of miles to find it. Sometimes all you hafta do is travel to a different season.
Now, this was Charlie’s idea to start with. Not that I didn’t go right along with it, mind you. But Charlie thought of it first. We go canoe campin’ spring, summer, and fall, right from ice-out to freeze-up. Why should we stop just ‘cause it’s winter? I mean, why let a little ice come between you and a good time? Why spend three or four months outta every year romancin’ a bunch of maps, seduced by the canoe trip that won’t happen ‘til next summer when you could be out doin’ something right now? Well, there’s probably a darned good reason for it. And it was high time we found out what it was.
We’d have to settle on an alternative mode of transportation for our foray into winter’s wonderland, seein’ as how we’d already figured out that a canoe doesn’t work real well on ice. But that was OK, ‘cause Charlie and I both knew how to ski well enough. This trip, we’d just hafta glide on skis over the snow instead of glidin’ in a canoe over the water. And who knows what other, minor modifications we’d have to make to our usual routines in order to accommodate winter. But we’d make out all right.
Now, we’re still guys drawn just as naturally to water as iron is to a magnet, even if it is through the intermediary of a foot or two of ice. So we decided to ski down to Lake of the Clouds and camp pretty much smack in the middle of Michigan’s Porcupine Mountains. We figured it’d be pretty, relatively remote, and maybe even worth the trouble. And the water’d be down there somewhere.
What we hadn’t quite figured on was how much stuff ya gotta take with you when you go campin’ on the snow. And ya gotta carry it all yourself, too, like on some endless portage. But we weren’t willing to give up any of the little comforts, seein’ as how we expected winter camping to be pretty uncomfortable to begin with. So packin’ up was a daunting task. By the time I’d strapped an extra sleeping pad, two sleeping bags, a down parka, and insulated pac boots on the outside of it, my pack was nearly as tall as I was. And it weighed a ton. Skiing down to the lake with that behemoth on my back was gonna take some finesse from a guy more used to skiing with nothing but a water bottle and a pocketful of M&Ms.
The going wasn’t too bad at first. We had this big, flat, unplowed road-cum-snowmobile trail to practice upon. The snow had been packed pretty hard by passing ‘beelers, makin’ it reasonably easy to ski with a load. But once we turned off onto the hiking trail down to the lake, skiing became an entirely different experience. The trail here was untracked, narrow, and steep. Leastwise, it looked steep to a guy standin’ at the top on skinny skis and totin’ on his back an extra 60-70 pounds just waitin’ to aid and abet gravity.
I took the first shift at breakin’ trail. It was hard work. No sooner’n we’d left the road but I was up to my knees in deep, soft snow. This did an admirable job of impeding my progress. But that turned out to be a darned good thing. ‘Cause just then my skis seemed to be at odds with each other over the preferred line of travel. My right ski took a sudden fancy to a tangential path from which I was at a loss to dissuade it. It went burrowin’ off under the snow like an over-excited gopher until I ended its adventure by sittin’ down hard and deep.
Now, the first rule of cross country skiing (or maybe it’s the second) is that if you fall down, you get back up fast, brush the snow offa your bum, and hope nobody was watching. But staggerin’ back to your feet when they’ve got about 6 1/2 feet of board strapped to ’em is a bit of a trick even under the best of circumstances. Try doin’ it out of a foot-deep impact crater while you’ve got more’n 60 pounds of pack pullin’ you over backwards. Trust me: you won’t be mistaken for the new guy at the Joffrey Ballet.
Graceful or no, I got back up and did my best to destroy the evidence of my little altercation with gravity. I resolved to pay more fastidious attention to keepin’ my skis parallel, underneath me, and on the trail as I floundered on downhill through knee-deep snow with my top-heavy load. Then, just as I was feelin’ like I was beginnin’ to get the hang of it, I found myself confronted by a sapling bent down across the trail under a load of snow.
That was a heckuva place to leave a tree. Duckin’ under it was my only reasonable course. But somehow I didn’t duck quite low enough, having underestimated the altitude of my pack. The sapling clipped the stuff strapped to the top of it and about sent me sprawling flat on my back. A vigorous lunge forward did save me from makin’ an uninspired snow angel. But unfortunately, that lunge was powered by a tad too much adrenaline, ‘cause I ended up pitchin’ forward in a perfect face-plant into a snowdrift. Not that there can ever be much of an air of perfection about a face-plant.
And there I was, pinned face-down in 2-3 feet of snow by an oversized pack sittin’ squarely on my back like a heavyweight wrestler. I couldn’t move. This was a predicament. For a while, it looked like the pack was gonna win the match on points. Then I finally managed to twist outta the packstraps, slide the thing offa me, and struggle back to vertical.
Charlie was highly amused by my Abominable Snowman impersonation. So I decided it was time for him to take a turn breakin’ trail... up front where he couldn’t be a witness. To even things up, he managed to have his own little encounter with lurking timber. And his tree branch across the trail was even more interesting than mine. It was completely buried under the snow. So Charlie’s skis slid right under it without him ever knowin’ it was there until his feet were stopped cold by the hidden road block. The rest of him didn’t catch on right away, continuing blithely downhill in a slow motion free fall. Judging from the commentary comin’ from the far end of this rather profane snow angel, I’d say Charlie was no more pleased to suddenly find himself eatin’ snow than I’d been.
With the score Trees 2, Skiers 0, we humbly made our way on down to the lake, wonderin’ what other sorts of fun and games we might lose at this trip. Makin’ camp was the next step. So we staked out our frozen claim to the edge of the lake.
This was gonna be unlike any other camp we had ever made. Charlie, he wanted to go native and build an igloo. Never mind that the natives in this part of the world didn’t build igloos, they dug quinzees ‘cause it worked better. But Charlie had his heart set on an igloo. He’d even whittled himself a wooden snow knife for cuttin’ the blocks. So igloo it was.
We had to cut our blocks down on the lake where the snow pack had more potential for holdin’ together and then haul them up to the camp site. Back in the woods, cuttin’ the snow woulda been like tryin’ to cut sugar. As it was, we still had our share of disappointments as some of the snow blocks just couldn’t bear up under the weight of commitment we were imposing on them. It took most of the rest of the afternoon for our domicile to take shape. But as the light began to decline, the remaining hole in our roof was quickly filling in.
At this point, Charlie was standin’ inside the igloo and I was on the outside, slidin’ the snow blocks one by one up the curve of the dome for Charlie to fit into position. But either we were poor substitutes for Buckminster Fuller or you really do need Arctic pack ice to make stable building blocks, ‘cause as I slid the very last block up to Charlie, the whole roof of the igloo collapsed in a dramatic cloud of snow. It looked like they’d dropped the bomb. For a second, I thought Charlie’d been buried alive. But once the snow-dust had settled, I could see he was still there, holdin’ that last block, lookin’ kinda like a parka-clad statue of an ancient Greek demi-god standin’ amid the ruins of a fallen civilization.
Well, there wasn’t an Innuit alive who woulda claimed even the vaguest of ancestral responsibility for the structure we slept in that night. But any nine-year-old bred north of the Mason-Dixon line woulda immediately recognized it as a snow fort with a tarp stretched over the top for a roof. For all its lack of architectural aesthetics, it was still pretty cozy; much warmer than a tent. Which was a darned good thing, ‘cause we hadn’t even brought a tent!
So you see, Adventure, as a famous, arctic explorer once sniffed, happens to the unprepared. Though it might be more truthful to say that adventure comes easier to the uninitiated. I mean, when you haven’t got a clue what you’re doing, everything is an adventure, right? But you gotta start somewhere. We’ve paid our dues now. Next time we winter camp, we can travel smarter. But then how far will we have to go when we’re looking for adventure?
Well, ‘til next time, keep your skis waxed. And keep in touch. Drop me a line c/o Rich Furman and Morgan MacBain, 901 East Geranium Avenue, St. Paul MN 55106 or editor@canoe-kayak.org. Let me know how close to home you’ve managed to find adventure. Remember, Uncle Wally promises to 1) tell the truth so no one would ever believe it anyway and 2) never reveal your true identity to anyone, not even Will Steger.
