White Mountain Camping - Part 1
July 3rd, 2009 
so camping last weekend…where to begin? well first off, we had a pretty solid number of people once again; probably close to 20. normally that’d be a little too many for a camping crew, but the majority of them were already close friends, and everyone else was really chill and easy-going. plus the place that we’ve gone camping (two years in a row now) is on private property, so we don’t have to deal with the shenanigans (yes, shenanigans) of surrounding campers. we definitely didn’t do quite as much as last year, but it was still a great time. i think the threat of the weather might’ve prevented us from venturing out to climb local mountains, or simply go hiking. other than a few passing storms (mostly at night) we really got lucky though. the problem this year was dealing with all the beetles, black flies, and mosquitoes (the trifecta). surprisingly the worst, and most painful of all these bugs were the beetles. they were relentless, and felt like they had stingers when they bit you. i still have a few welts on my forehand, arms, hands, legs, feet, and chest. and i was pretty well covered when they were present. but onto the fun stuff. i actually braved the ice cold river for a few seconds (that’s literally all you could take), which was even colder than last year. a few summers ago i swam off the coast of maine, and i remember the temperature reading in the low-50s. that was painful at first, but i could brave it for a bit, and eventually it almost felt normal. well this river had to have been at least ten degrees colder than that. it generally doesn’t ever reach 60 in the height of the summer, due to the fact that it’s a new england river running down from some of the tallest mountains in the northeast. well due to the enormous amount of rain, and the fact that it hasn’t even hit 80 degrees yet this summer that river was just frigid. but even though it was painfully cold it helped to wake me up, way more so than all the coffee i drank, and of course clean my body in an instant after jumping off the cliffs.
some big highlights of the weekend were simply burning things. uh…yes, this sounds ridiculous, and i passed that fire-obsessed phase in my life about 18 years ago, but there’s something to be said about a nice bonfire (if you have the space and some wet grass of course) when camping. so it all started with this enormous box of unwanted baseball cards that dan brought along with him. and let me just say that i’ve never known anyone in my life to be able to rattle off baseball stats (from any era) like dan. about 95% of the cards going into fire were baseball players that none of us had ever heard of. well for a solid hour we quizzed dan on them and he knew every stat. i think he earned himself the nickname “rain man of baseball stats.” we burned the baseball cards probably close to a hundred at a time until saturday night when we dumped the remainder of the box in (thousands upon thousands of them). next came the dresser. i should probably add that any furniture came from mike’s grandfather’s trailer, and was really old, or otherwise useless. so the dresser went up in seconds, due to the fact that it was kept indoors, and probably even had some tasty chemicals on it from treated wood. somewhere inbetween the dresser and our finale came the fireworks set off by a crazy local, who seems to really look forward to us coming around each year now. i think toward the end of the fireworks we had a joint effort in throwing this huge doghouse onto the fire. this one took a good half an hour, and some repositioning to get going, but once it did we had a full-on bonfire that almost got out of control a few times. the joke became yelling out “GRASS!” and then having a few of us throw some water on the burning grass. i’ll eventually get some videos of this up on my flickr page, and possibly my youtube page as well.
i was a little disappointed that we didn’t see a single moose this year, but apparently there was a bear outside mike and nancy’s tent early sunday morning. i thought i heard something large wandering about, and breathing pretty heavily, but with the earplugs in it didn’t sound like much. i can’t really say what i would’ve done if i peaked out my tent to see a bear standing there.
on sunday morning we packed up and headed over to loon mountain where we took the gondola to the top for some spectacular views. somewhat similar views to last year’s venture up to cannon mountain, but not as many trails to wander around. also, no steep cliffs like cannon. more of a gradual climb. my hope is to still go up to acadia national park at some point this summer to do some camping. ideally i’d want to go in two weeks, but we’ll see what happens.
