I Can See It Coming

Have you ever been able to see disaster coming right at you, with little means of avoiding it?

About a month ago, I signed up for a Leave No Trace Trainer course which will qualify me to conduct LNT Awareness Workshops. I love the out-of-doors; I love camping. I want to help preserve nature for my own enjoyment and for the benefit of my kids (and perhaps grandkids one day). When I signed up a month ago, it was freezing cold and snowing every day. I was looking forward to some fresh springtime weather for a change. And this course involves camping for two nights, Friday and Saturday; gotta like that.

Well, according to the forecast, it will indeed be fresh springtime weather. There is a 60% chance of rain Friday night; 30% chance of rain all day Saturday; and 40% chance of rain on Sunday. I can already see how this is going to work out.

Oh well, I have been camping in the rain before, and no doubt I will go camping in the rain many times after this next weekend. At least the forecast gives me plenty of warning so that I can go well prepared. Tomorrow night after work I am headed for the sporting goods store to purchase a new rain suit. I already have a tall pair of rubber boots in addition to my regular kit of outdoor gear. This is going to be fun regardless of the weather.

Next week I will write about this little adventure and let you know how it turned out.

Speaking of camping in the rain, last July I went out camping in the second worst rainstorm in which I have ever camped. It was the last night of Webelos resident camp (a total of three nights of camping on this trip). All day Saturday there had been threats of rain on the horizon, and my son Primogenitor and I made the mistake of lingering at the camp dining hall a bit too long before beginning the mile long hike up the hill to our campsite on a wooded ridge line.

About half way there the drizzle began. About two hundred yards from camp the downpour started. This was about 10:30 at night and it was pitch black on the trail that wound through the woods in the ravine below our camp. We were fairly damp by the time we got back to the tent (a cabin style tent set up on a wooden platform) and after shooing away a wolf spider about the size of an Eisenhower dollar from inside the tent, we bedded down with a steady racket of downpour hitting the canvass above our heads. The lightning started before 11:00, and for the next four hours there was a constant din of non-stop thunder, with little respite. On the rare occasions when the noise of the thunder wasn't deafening, the roar of the rain was.

Sleep was impossible under the circumstances, and occasionally I would take a peek outside to check on the rising torrent of water streaming through the center of our campsite. The rising flash flood was a bit alarming considering that we were camped on the crest of a ridge and theoretically there should not be a flood at the top of a hill. Fortunately there was the ever-present flash of lightning with an immediate report of thunder indicating an uncomfortably close strike that took my mind of the threat of being washed away in the flood. I was thankful for the wooden platform upon which my tent was pitched because that raised us off the ground by about 8 inches. However, upon my last check outside I found the stream had almost reached the top of the platform. I wasn't interested in looking outside anymore after that.

The storm never lost any of its fury until it suddenly stopped (almost as if someone had turned off a faucet) around 3:30 in the morning. Primogenitor and I finally got to sleep around 4:00 and I let him sleep late the next morning. I have camped out in one other storm that was more relentless and lengthy in duration that this (about 12 hours of steady downpour, the last six of which included galeforce winds), but this thunderstorm was the worst I have encountered as far as near misses from lightning.

The next morning in the cool misty dawn as survivors crawled from their tents to survey the damage and the signs of flotsam left in a trail through the center of camp, conversation naturally turned to each individual's experiences and observations from the night before. One of the adult leaders informed the group that he had monitored the storm's progress on his Blackberry which was able to retrieve weather radar data. Ordinarily storms in this part of the country are oriented north to south and proceed from a westerly direction. This storm, on the contrary, was a series of super-cells aligned on a east-west orientation, but yet still tracking from a westerly direction. Since the storm passed directly over our camp, we were subjected to the terrible brunt of the tempest.

As we stood about chatting, a tree just outside our camp that had been undermined by the flood suddenly came crashing to the ground.