A Winter Campout

I drove out to the property the day before we were scheduled to begin, in order to pick out the camp site and set up the main tent. The Big Blizzard of 2011 had come through just a couple days beforehand so the country roads over which I travelled were still coated with a thick mixture of slush and snow, and the woods and fields were sitting under nearly two feet of white powder.

It was beautiful.

The entrance to the property lies at the southern end of a cul-de-sac road atop a small hill; the driveway drops down into a little valley before curving to the right and then rising again to a second little hill on which the house is set. The driveway diverges before it reaches the house: part of it wends down and around to the back of the house where the barn is located; the other part continues upward to the front door of the house, ending in a circular drive not unlike the ones found in English country homes. It is a beautiful house.

Our campsite lay even further southward past the front of the house towards the woods. The yard drops away from the hill on which the house sits, down into bottom land which is somewhat swampy during the springtime, covered with low-lying shrubs and scrub oaks and pines which gather their nourishment from a wide stream which cuts across the property from west to east. At the base of the hill, just before the shrubs and scrubs begin, a bowl-shaped pit with three mounds of debris sits. A well-worn trail runs from east to west next to it, in winter marked by the flattened snow of a cross-country track. It was here that our campsite would be arranged, owing to the dearth of tree coverage and the relative flatness of the ground near the mounds.
The first task, digging out a rectangle on which the tent could be set up, took me nearly an hour. Two feet of snow in a rectangle roughly twenty feet by twenty feet, so that there would be sufficient room on the sides to place the supporting poles (and some room to walk around it).

The second task was to bring all the gear down from the top of the hill near the house, down to the campsite. This was not a trivial thing. The snow depth varied across the hill, ranging from nearly three feet in shadow-covered areas to barely a foot in the sunny spots; due to my reluctance to try to carry all the items one at a time, I used a plastic sled, loading it up with piles of gear and towing it beside me down the hill. That worked rather well, except in cases where I'd neglected to properly secure the load to the sled; with those, the sled's center of gravity caused it to roll over into my footpath (which was about two feet lower than the sled trail I'd made), spilling the contents out into the snow and further delaying my progress.

After I'd brought down all the equipment for the tent, I set it up.

Once that was set up, it was getting dark, and getting significantly colder (due to the drop in temperature or the amount of sweat I was generating, or both), and rather than stay to try and put up the kitchen gazebo, I elected to return home and wait until the next day to complete the campsite.

The next day, I returned early and started setting up the kitchen area. It took nearly the same amount of time to clear out a space for the gazebo as it did for the tent. Then it was another half an hour's work to put the gazebo together, followed by another hour or so to unpack and arrange the cooking area so it was ready for use.
Aftwerward, as the time was rapidly approaching when it would be necessary to make my appearance at the church to "gather the troops", I abandoned my plan to set up the 'warming' tent (which is a tent containing a heater used for keeping liquids above the freezing point during the extremely cold nights) and instead raced home to gather a few last-minute (and nearly forgotten) items before heading over to the church.

The first disappointment was waiting for me there; out of the fifteen or so people signed up for the campout, only three teens actually showed up. We had four adults and three teens. Seemed a bit of an overloaded ratio. And it meant that most of my activity plans were shot to pieces. Hard to do any team competition games when there aren't even enough people to form teams. But I had my backup plans, so we soldiered on. The youth minister took the kids in the church van and I led the way to the campsite (while the other two adults went on their own, since they already knew where they were going).

Once at the campsite, the kids used some additional sleds we'd borrowed from the church to bring their gear down the hill and toss it into the main tent while I set up the warming tent. The other two adults set up their tent on the opposite side of the campsite. Then one of them started a fire in the little fire pit area I'd selected. And I started boiling up some water for hot chocolate.

Another person showed up right before we were about to head off on our first little Adventure - a college kid, a grandson of the property owner. So I elected him to lead the Expedition into the woods (which would replace the Search & Rescue activity from my original plan) with the assumption that he was somewhat familiar with the territory.

To the teens, I handed out my crudely-drawn map of the area along with a compass, pointing out a few landmarks to help them get their bearings, and sent them off with their 'guide' on an hour's worth of hiking, with instructions to look for interesting and remarkable things. I'd already noticed quite a few things during my hike the previous week: two man-made bridges over the stream; several downed trees of incredible girth; various animal trails (deer, rabbit, dog, and some kind of large cat). They were instructed to mark the interesting items on the map so that our steps to those things could be retraced the following day.

While they were gone, it was time to start dinner prep. I had enough food for fifteen, and now had to cook for six; I had let the kids choose which of the three soups (chicken noodle, beef vegetable, potato with bacon) they preferred; far and away, they chose the potato and bacon. Being boys, they probably would've picked anything with bacon in it. Bacon has a nearly magnetic quality among males, especially when they are out in the woods.

The soups were still mostly frozen, so it took quite a while to defrost them in my little cooking pan. Due to the small size of my pans and the relatively large amount of soup to be cooked, I ended up cooking half, setting it aside in a container to (hopefully) keep warm, then cooking the rest so that it was ready to serve right at dinnertime; then while everyone was completing their first bowl, I re-heated the first container so that it was at the right temperature by the time they were ready for seconds. Which they all were.

I had been hoping (and planning) on several fun activities after dinner, before time for devotional; but the snow was too deep for real sledding, and too deep for our 2x4 skiing. Fortunately, it was just right for building snow forts, so that's what the boys did. They built a nice, big fort next to the kitchen area, even putting a tunnel through the bottom of it, and then commenced a snowball battle with the adults.

For some reason, the adults stayed right next to the fire pit, which meant that all the snowballs were flying between the fire pit and the kitchen and back again. So one of the adults was yelling at the boys to stop throwing snow in the fire (he was afraid it might put the fire out), while I was yelling at the adults to stop throwing snow at the kitchen (because they might knock over the cookstove or the lantern). It was very loud.

We never did get around to a devo that night. Because of this, I was sorely disappointed. But it is my own fault. I was waiting for the youth minister to say something, and he was probably waiting for me to say something, and in the end, everyone else sat around the campfire and roasted hot dogs (which one of the other adults had run out to purchase because, although it wasn't in my plan, he thought a campfire wasn't a campfire unless there was a hot dog attached to a stick and floating over the flames).

Afterward, we had another, briefer snowball battle, drank some more hot chocolate, and then the kids got into the tent and snuggled down for the night and went to bed.

The college kid decided not to stay because he was needed at church on Sunday morning, and didn't want to be late getting there. So he left.

The youth minister and I stayed up for while and talked about our plans for the next day, which included a devotional and Communion. I made sure we both agreed on this before heading off to bed myself.

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The morning was cold, and there was the smell of snow in the air. I got up very quickly to start the hot water - and breakfast - and noted that the other two adults (besides myself and the youth minister) had left. They, too, had tasks to perform at church that morning. And they probably wouldn't be back. So it was just the five of us remaining.

Just about the time the kids were waking up, the bacon and eggs were ready, and some hot water for oatmeal. The kids surprised me by eating not only the bacon and eggs, but also two bowls of oatmeal each! But I suppose they'd burned a lot of energy keeping warm in the night.

After breakfast, we broke down the tents and packed away our gear and then sat around the now-relit fire and had our devotional, followed by a Communion meditation.

Then it was time to head home.

We thought.

The road had other ideas, however.