Whoda Thought?

I went camping with our Boy Scout troop Friday night - think 30 degrees and pouring rain - with the intention of getting to go letterboxing while they were doing their Boy Scout thing. I showed up at Mission Tejas equipped with my clues, and I also took with me several coordinates because the geocaches in that park are also said to be very good.

Back to Friday, it rained and sleeted and snowed off and on all day and my co-workers would walk by my desk and ask me if I was really going camping in "this weather", to which I said "Unless it gets called off." (Meanwhile, chanting - Please call it off, Please call it off). I got off work and it was still raining and sleeting and Fearless Fox had already called the Scoutmaster to see if we were still going. Yep. Still going. "The boys NEED a cold weather campout." Need is a strong word.

So Fearless Fox loaded his truck up and went on down to Mission Tejas to start a fire and Lightning and I met the troop at the church that sponsors them. As I stood there listening to the Assistant Scoutmaster repeatedly tell (and think grinchlike grin here) calling parents "Yes, we are still going. The boys NEED a cold weather campout.", I tried to remember if I had ever camped in cold AND raining conditions. There WAS the Brazos Bend gathering, very wet but not terribly cold. There was the summer I spent camping in Canada and the Northwest, and that got down into the 30's, but I don't remember it raining that summer. And then camping in the Florida Everglades for nearly three weeks - it rained every day, but again, it wasn't cold. There was the one and only girl scout campout I ever went on when it started raining after we got set up and I had to show the other girls (newbie campers that they were) how you should NOT touch the sides of the tent, so we all touched the sides of the tent and the tent flooded from the inside out, but that was relatively warm too - just horribly messy. I just don't remember putting cold AND wet together on a campout, but maybe NacTrailCat can remember something along those lines from my growing up years. So anyway, after 2/3 of the expected participants cancelled at parental insistence, I started to wonder if I was being a good parent by not also keeping my son home. SJZ called me one last time to say "Are y'all really going camping?" to which I replied "The only way to have an adventure is to go on an adventure" - I only wished I felt so cavalier. I just felt the impending cold and wet feeling starting to seep in before we ever got a start.


We had so many cancellations that we didn't have to haul a trailer and there was even room for me and my gear on the van, so I parked the car, grabbed my gear and piled into the van, settling into the front seat next to the Scoutmaster and made up my mind to make the best of things. We spent the next hour tring to ignore the rain, talking about scouting, and me generally picking his brain as I like to do whenever I have a Scoutmaster held captive.

We got to camp and thanks to the dismal weather it got much darker even earlier than usual, so we set camp up in the drenching dark. Thankfully, Fearless Fox had arrived and gotten a fire blazing and it was going well enough that it could withstand the waves of heavier rain, so we alternated setting up camp and warming up by the fire, until finally the kitchen was in place, the tents were erected, and everything was settled.

Lightning's tentmate was one of the cancellors, so he wound up with a tent by himself. I was a little worried about that because his last rainy camping experience was with me at the Brazos Bend gathering and he still doesn't speak fondly of that occasion, so I wondered how he would fare by himself on a rainy night. And I wondered if he would stay warm without a tentmate to help warm the tent. He never asked to bunk in with Fearless Fox and me, so we didn't offer either.

Once camp was set, we all gathered around the fire looking at each other. It's really hard to have a fun energetic campfire program when it's raining and cold, and it's hard to pretend you are enjoying sitting around the fire swapping stories when it's raining and cold too. Finally I suggested we go on a night geocache someone had recommended to me, so we had a few takers. We all got our navigation gear together, I got extra batteries and set my GPS. The Scoutmaster and I jumped back in the front seat of the van and headed out - I navigated while he drove. We finally got to the jumping off point for the cache and parked on not so firm ground, but we figured we had enough bodies that we could get ourselves out if we had to. We jumped out and set our flashlights into action because the idea was that we had to find the reflective paint that couldn't be seen during the day, thus finding the path that would lead us to the cache that would give us the coords to the next leg of the cache. Funny thing about rain on trees is that everything reflects! After roaming around for twenty minutes, spreading out and scouring the woods for what we hoped would be the magical path, we decided there was just too much reflection and none of it seemed distinctive enough to warrant calling it a path, so we bailed right back into the nice white church van and headed back to camp. We were gone a total of almost an hour, and by the time we got back Fearless Fox had orchestrated the erection of a tarp shelter next to the fire, so that we could all gather around the fire and rotate, taking turns being dry but cold for a bit under the tarp, then warm but wet for a bit by the fire, then cold and wet for a bit as we took our turns on the dark side of the fire that wasn't under the tarp. Finally, one by one we felt warm and dry enough to head to our tents and settle in. Being warm natured and a little claustrophobic, I never thought I would like a zero degree sleeping bag with a head cover, but I gotta say - it felt pretty darned good Friday night!


As I was drifting off to sleep, the nagging thought that I had been shoving back into the recesses of my mind came into full vision - what if this DOESN'T let up and I don't get to go letterboxing, which was the whole reason I came on this trip anyway???

But alas, Saturday morning dawned and it was absolutely perfect - cold, mind you, but sunny and beautifully crisp and clean feeling. I thought I was being funny when I went to join the guys already at the campfire with my wild morning hair and quipped "I don't suppose any of you have an extra scrunchy, do you?". Two of the men headed to their trucks and came back with scrunchies. Never underestimate Boy Scouts and their leaders, especially the ones that have sisters and daughters.

When you have to wait on Boy Scouts to cook your breakfast, you need to be patient, at least in our troop. I'm almost always up before them, but the name of the game with Boy Scouts is that they do everything and leaders should not do anything. Different than Cub Scouts, where I know that on a campout once I get up I'm going to be working until I go to bed again, so I may as well jump in and start breakfast right away. Consequently, I found myself standing around for awhile and finally I decided I could at least orient myself to the park. Although I've been to Mission Tejas many times, I've never been in a position of having to walk to wherever I wanted to be, so I wanted to make sure I knew the shortest route to anywhere. The state park maps are okay, but a walking view is much better. Between walking the main loop before breakfast and there not being leaves on the trees, I felt like I had suddenly turned the key and realized how close some things are to each other. Amazing! While out, I noted in my mind where I would have to be to find each box, and I also took my GPS along and roughly located where the various caches were. I was ready - all except breakfast.


I headed back to camp to find that dutch ovens were firing up and eggs were being cracked. It was starting to look like we might have breakfast before noon, er, I mean nine. They had brought far more food than we needed because there were supposed to be three times more people on the campout than there were. I got a kick out of the boys debating exactly how much of everything to cook because they normally cook it all. They are very exact in how much to allot to each person and how much to buy and they are not very wasteful (after all, Thrifty is the 9th point of the scout law), so when suddenly they had all that food it threw them for a loop. It's sorely tempting to jump in the middle of such debates and sort them out quickly, so it's hard sometimes for me to stand quietly aside and let them reach their own conclusions which, I'm glad to say, are usually the sames ones a sane adult would come to. Thankfully, we had our sausage patties crumbled into tortillas instead of served up like hamburgers...

Right after breakfast I sat down with my LB book one more time before setting out. The boys were getting ready to work on advancement but Fearless Fox wanted to play one quick round of Pteredactyl before they got started, so I jumped up and played Pteredactyl with them, then headed out to go boxing/caching. Now I had not gone far from the campsite when I realized that when boxing in the cold, it is very important how you arrange your clothes. I had two shirts and two pairs of pants on, but I had put the pair of pants with the pockets on underneath the other pair, so every time I went to put something in my pocket, I had to reach into the waistband of my top pair and had to be very careful to hit the pocket of the under pair, or everything would go straight to the ground. This proved to be a problem eventually.

So anyway, all of this is to set the stage for my letterboxing journey.

I walked toward the pond where there were rumored to be some boxes. After sleeping on the cold hard ground, I was feeling a little stove up, so I deliberately stretched out my step and pulled myself up as tall as I could. I started feeling better right away, so I started sucking in that glorious winter air. Perfect. Just perfect. It really was. My legs and back were stretched and my lungs were stretched and I felt GOOD!


I got to the pond area and once again coordinated my clues (I do much better if I can get myself into close proximity and then visualize where the clues are sending me) and I set off with the intent of first checking on Baby Bear's box. Unfortunately, I got so caught up in the view of the pond that I walked right by it, but I knew I could quickly check it on my way back around the loop. So off I went in the direction of LSQ's Indian Trails box.

Now you would think that as much time as I've spent in Mission Tejas, I would know it very well by now, but somehow it felt like a new park. Maybe I've just never been there in the dead of winter - I don't know, but I got really caught up in the views. This time though, I remembered to stop and look for the box. I really do have an aversion to sticking my hand into a blind hole, even in the wintertime when I know there should be no cold-blooded creatures to greet me, so I traipsed myself down the incline to look in to where my hand was going to go. I pulled my glove on just in case, removed the cover and there was the box, just as planned. There wasn't a soul to be seen or heard, so I thought I would just return and sit in the path to stamp in, but as I was scurrying back up I slid back down - I had already forgotten the torrential rains I guess, and the ground off the trail was slick. So I rolled around a bit in the wet leaves, got slightly damp, but no big deal. I tried again and made it, logged in, and went to return it. This time I slid down the hill almost to the water, and the stuff that was supposedly in my pocket skittered on down between my two pairs of pants to the water and just as I realized what was happening I saw my GPS bob under and return to the top along with my water bottle. Everything else was somewhat disposable (especially since it sank like lead weights), but I really did need to retrieve my GPS and my water. In summer, the brackish tones of the pond at MTSP are charming in a green sort of way, but in the winter, they are just intensely green. I wasn't real excited about sticking my hand into that green water, which I was pretty sure was also very COLD water, but I didn't seem to have a choice. I really couldn't tell where the edge of the water began (leaves and all, you know), but I knew I had to get close to the water to reach out and get my GPS. Knowing my own luck, I fully expected to find myself stretching out to get the stupid thing, only to fall full out on my side in the cold green water. I got close enough about the time I felt my toes feeling squishy for the second time in 24 hours, but I was able to get my GPS without any further incident. I was feeling especially pleased with myself and got back to the trail and gathered my stuff up to head out, especially in a hurry because the area was really starting to smell like a fresh pile of scat. Ewwwww...


So off I went in the direction of the next box, which I felt would be quite a way along the trail. I stopped briefly to get a drink of water, and I realized the smell wasn't any better. I went to wipe the top of my water bottle off on my shirt, only to find WHY the smell wasn't any better. Big ewwww....somehow I had managed to get it on BOTH shirts, and it was on my top pair of pants too. It wasn't a fresh pile of scat I was smelling, it was a newly reopened one - by me. In one of my two slides down the hill.

Well I was about as far from fresh water as I could've been, so I resolved to use the green water to at least clean up a little bit. I managed to rinse the scat out of my shirts and get most of it off my pants, but at that point I was really wet again. I shed the top shirt and carried it and tried not to breathe too deeply, and I tried to forget I was cold. I reminded myself that I had survived cold, wet, and miserable the night before with some modicum of my sense of humor, and I could certain do it in the daylight too.

I came to the decision-making trail split - do I hightail it back to fresh water and fresh clothes, or do I keep letterboxing? I gave it a minute or two of thought, but I finally opted to box on. I mean really, by then I had sort of gotten used to the smell and my skin was numbing and I didn't expect to run into anyone I knew on the trail. It wasn't like Walmart where you run into everyone you know if you don't put on makeup and good clothes before you go. This was the stinking woods, emphasis on stinking in my case!

So on I went - boxing on. I reached the area where the next boxes were to be and I began working the clues with no luck. I decided I had gone through so much to get there that I wasn't going to give up easily. I tried the clues every which way I could, to no avail. Well I say that, but I do think I know the general area where one was - squarely in the middle of a blocked off area where a tree had fallen across a bridge. Eventually I had to concede that I wasn't going to find those boxes, and I took myself back to the trailhead.


By this time, I knew it was approaching lunchtime so I decided to head back to the scout site to eat, but I realized I had a problem. I looked like a bedraggled rat. And smelled like a bedraggled dead rat. Somehow it finally occurred to me that I was right at a water faucet, so I could rinse all my clothes one piece at a time and wring them out, then leave off one pair of pants and one shirt and return to camp. As a bonus, I had also already loaded my camping backpack into the truck, so I could arrange the vehicle doors to create a dressing room at camp and change into clean dry clothes. This I did and no one in camp was the wiser to my experience as they only first noticed I was back in camp when I bopped in with a light step, carrying my boots and walking in my wool socks. That struck them as odd, but they were busy so they never thought again about it. That is, until a half hour later or so when Fearless Fox got me alone and said "Okay. What happened to you?" I don't know if he noticed I wasn't wearing the same clothes as when I left, or if my silent re-entry tipped him off or what, but he had figured it out. When I told him what had happened, I thought he would never stop laughing at me!

We ate lunch and started packing to head home. I ran out of time to hunt the other boxes, and quite frankly, after all of that, I ran out of energy too. I have never been so happy to see my own shower as I was Saturday.

The kicker of the story is - a day or so later I got an email from Jim (Palestine) and he and his crew had been in Mission Tejas the same day. Boy, am I ever glad I didn't run into him!

So anyway, I headed to Mission Tejas with the intent to reach 300+ and to get seven boxes and several caches. I wound up getting my 299th - and it was a good one - LSQ's boxes always are! But I think I had as satisfying and enjoyable a weekend (even the miserable stuff was pretty fun) finding that one little box as I could've had if I had found every box there (not that I wouldn't have had a great time finding them all!). And I promise you - I will always remember that day when I see Indian Trails in my logbook. Thank you, LSQ, for the experience! Wish you'da been there so I could've shared the wealth...(just kidding) (well not really) (well yeah, I wouldn't wish some of that on anyone) (well, but nahhhh...just kidding) (sort of).

-- Barefoot Lucy"It's not about footwear, it's about philosophy"