camp stories

[diamond hitch]

I know many of you have stories to share so I will start.

In the 80s we would pack camp in by September in order to cut the packing distance down. We would pack in a mile and set up camp. In October the FS closed the road and we were instantly 5-6 miles behind the gate. The drawback to that was that the forest critters would have time to explore the new hotel facilities. One year we followed our normal routine and when we packed in the moonlight (a wonderful experience) and set about settling in. We lit the lanterns, rolled our beds in the tent and stored our gear. In the middle of that I lit a fire in the stove and went out to strip and feed the stock. When I walked into the tent with my partners, we were greeted with a wall of tear inducing vaporized packrat pee in the form of a white fog in the tent. They had been staking their claim on the facilities by peeing on the stove.

We cleared the tent and settled in to go to sleep. A ruckus ensued and when we investigated we found that a herd of packrats were stealing our potatoes and apples and were moving them to the horse hay stack. We secured our food supply and finally went to bed. About an hour later my partner woke me up and said hold real still. In my fog of sleep I saw a packrat perched on my foot eating a candy bar. My partner had his 45 revolver out and was preparing to resolve the problem. He is a hell of a shot but that was one brick to far and I declined the opportunity with a jerk and the rat went to the kitchen where he was dispatched leaving us with a ringing in our ears.

We did well hunting. Maybe because all of our clothes had a faint tincture of "ordour de rat". No need for cover scent.

 

[diamond hitch]

Obviously not many of you have spent a lot of time in a remote camp. Come on somebody has to have a story. Here's another one.

we had packed a number of miles into the Vermillian and set up camp on the edge of a clearcut. Since the FS had clearcut well over 1000 acres, firewood for the camp stove was at a premium. The Wheeling army surplus stove was designed to burn lump coal. I found a place that stocked that and packed a number of gunny sacks of coal into hunting camp. On the first night which was warm I banked the stove and curled up to sleep.
A couple three hours later I woke up to the tent filled with stinky coal smoke. I opened the damper but there was no improvement. Gagging and coughing I opened the tent flaps and window and lit a lantern. The stove was burning fine but the chimney appeared plugged. It was in segments so I took the bottom two segments apart and they were clear. I took the top off and couldn't see through it so my partner tapped it. In a flash a couple of lbs of fine white soot coated my head and upper body. I looked like a ghost with a nasty taste in my mouth. My partner laughed so hard I thought he might have a heart attack.

 

[kwyeewyk]

Wasn't a remote camp, but tagged along with a couple friends who had rifle tags for mule deer, I had archery tag. One friend is paralyzed in a wheelchair, he decided to stay in camp in the morning because he wasn't feeling well, so I stayed with him and our other buddy's young pit bull who had been neutered recently and had been chewing his stitches and was wearing a cone, but his owner removed the cone before he left to hunt thinking he was healed enough to leave it alone. We're laying in the tent playing cards and the pit bull starts gagging and pukes up some big ball of nasty shit all over his owner's pillow. It stinks to high hell and I bolt out of the tent, leaving my paralyzed friend to fend for himself. He came dragging himself out by his arms proclaiming "THAT DOG ATE SHIT!" The pitbull didn't care and laid there with his face in it on the pillow, I finally got him drug out of there and the dirty pillow and sleeping bag, meanwhile the pitbull chews his stitches open again. So my friend comes back from hunting to find his sleeping gear laying in a bush and his dog with a 2 1/2 gallon plastic water jug made into an improvised cone on his head. He determined that his dog had followed him out and ate his morning pile. I know some people love them, but man I don't see much use in pitbulls!

 

[Muskeez]

Thanks for the tears of laughter! Much needed !!

 

[Straight Arrow]

kwyeewyk, you have just validated my opinion. Unless hunting birds or waterfowl, take no dogs hunting. Never take dogs camping or backpacking ... or your fun will be diminished, as well as your chances for wildlife encounters and peaceful respites.

 

[glass eye]

Two stories, both about my older brothers. Both stories took place camping in Hawaii. Sleeping in a 70s era pup tent, during the night the one bro feels the other laying heavily against him. He elbows him and tells him to move, and suddenly hears a pig grunt and realizes it's a pig laying against him from the outside of the tent. The other story; Neil and Jeff go to sleep hungry because the meal they were supposed to eat became covered with fly larvae. During the night Jeff dreams of making a ham sandwich and when he finished making it he was squeezing the two bread slices in hands, ready to bite it. Just then Neil says " Jeff, what are you doing? Jeff wakes up to find he was squeezing Neil's butt cheek.

 

[dirtclod Az.]

〽Trout fishing in Northern Az. and had taken our dogs along.My partner had a young Lab pup that was running all over eating pine cones,
pulling up weeds and chewing on dead birds and whatever else was available.He was young and having fun on his first trip...
That night while we were asleep in the tent the puppy kept wanting to go out.My partner was tired and wanted no part of it, as it was
raining and miserable outside.The puppy then stood over him and divulged everything he had ingested that day onto my partners chest
and into his sleeping bag!RALPH!!!
We spent the next hours in the rain in our tighty whiteys cleaning and venting the tent standing next to the fire in the rain.I took advantage
and had a few more cold ones.Back in the tent damp and tired all is well...puppy lets out a huge Buuuurp!
Everyone is outside again cussing and stomping around.Puppy is just smiling;false alarm.
Dogs are great fun on camping trips. 〽

 

[Birddog916]

I grew up hunting whitetails in southern Indiana on an old tobacco farm. Our deer camp was made up of a motley crew of my uncle and his buddies. I have been very lucky to have grown up hunting that farm and now actually own part of the farm and still hunt there every November during the rut. The hunting crew in those days (early 1990s) stayed in the old tobacco stripping shed, a room in the barn where in the fall the farmers would strip off tobacco leaf from the stalks and bail it, the stripping shed was re-purposed into a bunk house with a giant potbelly stove. We referred to her as the Manville Hilton, being that the cross roads near the farm is called Manville, Indiana. There were old adds for chew, beer and topless young ladies pinned up all over the walls and had a dirt floor. There were mice and they would quite often attract black rat snakes into the Hilton. It was always good fun to put a rat snake into the stove for the first guy to light a fire to find and jump out of his skin when the stove door would open and a 5 foot snake would come out. One year during the opening weekend of the shotgun season it rained very hard and everyone's cloths were soaked. My cousin and I were sent into town to the laundromat to dry everyone's cloths for the next day. Being teenagers we always did the least desirable jobs like drying everyone's cloths, and climbing up half rotten wooden tree stands to fix, or removing poison oak from the sides of the barn. On this trip to the laundromat little did we know that one of my uncle's buddies left 2 small bottles of sent in his pocket. One was Doe-n-Heat and the other was skunk cover sent. As we sat watching football on the laundromat's television the smell started to hit us like cooking skunk butt mixed with urine! Soon the whole place smelled of skunk and doe pee. We packed up everything as fast as we could while being scolded and cursed out by the lady running the place. I think I'm still not welcome in that laundromat...

 

[dirtclod Az.]

I grew up hunting whitetails in southern Indiana on an old tobacco farm. Our deer camp was made up of a motley crew of my uncle and his buddies. I have been very lucky to have grown up hunting that farm and now actually own part of the farm and still hunt there every November during the rut. The hunting crew in those days (early 1990s) stayed in the old tobacco stripping shed, a room in the barn where in the fall the farmers would strip off tobacco leaf from the stalks and bail it, the stripping shed was re-purposed into a bunk house with a giant potbelly stove. We referred to her as the Manville Hilton, being that the cross roads near the farm is called Manville, Indiana. There were old adds for chew, beer and topless young ladies pinned up all over the walls and had a dirt floor. There were mice and they would quite often attract black rat snakes into the Hilton. It was always good fun to put a rat snake into the stove for the first guy to light a fire to find and jump out of his skin when the stove door would open and a 5 foot snake would come out. One year during the opening weekend of the shotgun season it rained very hard and everyone's cloths were soaked. My cousin and I were sent into town to the laundromat to dry everyone's cloths for the next day. Being teenagers we always did the least desirable jobs like drying everyone's cloths, and climbing up half rotten wooden tree stands to fix, or removing poison oak from the sides of the barn. On this trip to the laundromat little did we know that one of my uncle's buddies left 2 small bottles of sent in his pocket. One was Doe-n-Heat and the other was skunk cover sent. As we sat watching football on the laundromat's television the smell started to hit us like cooking skunk butt mixed with urine! Soon the whole place smelled of skunk and doe pee. We packed up everything as fast as we could while being scolded and cursed out by the lady running the place. I think I'm still not welcome in that laundromat...

At first glance I thought you had a hardhat on...and I though Az. was a tough hunt! 〽

 

[Birddog916]

At first glance I thought you had a hardhat on...and I though Az. was a tough hunt! 〽

Yeah it's a lucky flat bill trucker hat that has muskie skin print on it. All my buddies say I'm old to rock the flat bill, but it works well with my extra large melon.

 

[diamond hitch]

Over the years experiences tend to redirect our paths and our way of thinking. Sometimes the trip to camp is as much an adventure as camp.

In the early years the formation of camp tended to be an acquisition of one item at a time as encountered. Enough horses was as tough as some horses. As we put together the string on a particular trip we found ourselves with the dilema of make do or make another trip. We chose to make do. We were a horse short so the youngest of the camp had to make do by riding on top of a pack horse. All the food got allocated to the hard sided pack boxes for safety. The eggs got wrapped in baggies and packed in the grain but a tough decision was how to pack the bread.

A confab was organized and our youngest member offered to redistribute his personal gear and put the bread in his backpack and carry it by itself. We got everything loaded up, stuffed Tom on top of the packhorse and started up the trail. The access trail had some steep pitches and the packhorse was a little green and when a stick went between her legs things got a little western. There was some hopping and our young partner rolled off the horse onto the bread pack. He was well cushioned but their wasn't much recovery to the compressed nature of the bread.

The next morning as sandwiches were being made we found that some sandwiches had as much as 5 slices of bread and were only slightly thicker than a normal sandwich. There simply was no way to uncompress those loaves. To this day when bread loaves are compressed in a unrecoverable state the term used for it is "Tommy bread".

 

[diamond hitch]

Please forgive my impatience but here is another one.

In the 70s the US Bureau of Mines was inventorying mineralized land in proposed wilderness areas of the west. I was part of the crew assigned to the Absaloka Wilderness area in southwest Montana. In mid August our assignment was a portion of the Slough creek basin. As was the custom we packed food and gear for ten days and drove into a staging area to set up camp. The road up the Boulder river was nice but past the parking lot at the end it degenerated into a collection of tank traps and craters that challenged our ability to stay seated. Gear and people bounced around inside the rig at the slowest of speeds all of the way to Independence. We turned off the road in the bottom and headed upbto the old mining camp then crosscountry into the basin. Following our trend, in first gear at idle we continued to shake rattle and roll all of our gear and personel under we found an old log building we could resurrect for a cook shack. Tarps were strung, tents were pitched, and we settled in for the duration. Dinner was normal with a dutch oven roast but at breakfast we discovered that careless packing had somehow allowed the white gas stove fuel to be in close proximity to the pancake flour and bread. In the jostling on the way in a leak had occurred. Not serious but enough to taint the flavor of breakfast with the gas. White gas belches and farts became the flavor of the day for the entire tour of duty. As we continued or assigned tasks a storm came in and we were snowed in for a period of time. Misery is when you have time on your hands because of the conditions and a constant reminder of your mistake. The highlight of the trip was when we came out Nixon had resigned.