[Elspode]

Pennsic Wars sounds a lot like tales I've heard of Lillies War...SCA event, is it?

I've had rather a lot of camping disaster tales, but the most notable would be from my backpack trip into the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho back in 1984. One of my best friends had moved out there a couple of years prior with his wife, and so my wife, my best friend and myself drove out for a planned five-day backpack to Leggit Lake, just about eight miles uphill from Atlanta, Idaho (an old mining town with a nice campground and hot springs adjacent to it at the trailhead).

As soon as we got out of the car and donned our packs, it began to rain. We put on our ponchos and started off gamely. The rain intensified until it was a deluge, with rivulets pouring down the trail we were climbing. It was entirely unpleasant, and so when we reached a nice plateau with a sizable meadow and easy access to a fork of the Boise River for water, we hurriedly pitched a half-assed camp site, and hunkered down to wait for it to stop.

It did stop by morning, and we awoke bright and early to a beautiful but soggy day. There was nothing for it but to unpack *everything*, make clotheslines and dry stuff out. It was, however, still decidely cool and dampish, and starting a fire turned out to be nearly impossible. We used a whole tube of that waxy firestarting stuff, to no avail. Finally, in frustration, my friend leaped up, grabbed a camp shovel and a frisbee, and ran screaming into the forest.

We didn't know quite what to make of it, until he returned about a half hour later with the frisbee filled with chunks of pine resin he'd harvested from the base of a standing, dead Lodgepole Pine. He dropped a couple of small chunks into the smoldering mass of damp branches, and within moments we had a roaring fire.

We spent a really great day there, having a family of deer sprint right through our encampment and leaping, tabletop BMX style, over our spread-out tarps drying in the now sunny day. As we finished packing up the next day, we heard the sound of a whining vehicle engine in the distance. Now, this is a Wilderness area, and there aren't supposed to be motorized vehicles, but there had been reports of hikers being waylaid and robbed in recent weeks. We quickly took cover, with guns drawn, and waited. After a bit, a big 4 x4 pickup stopped at our site, and so a couple of us guys walked out, weapons holstered, to talk (we left the women in the brush with the guns still at the ready, just in case).

After a bit of conversation, it was clear that the guy was just a miner working a grandfathered claim on his way up to his mine on up the trail (thus, he still had rights to bring equipment in, much to our later chagrin). He was very friendly, and in due course, our women came out from the bushes, holstering their sidearms. The miner didn't miss a beat, glancing over at them, smiling as he said, "Bushwacking, huh?"

Imagine our later embarassment when he gave us several apples, a few cans of pop, and some good advice: "See those marks up on the tree trunks around here? 'Bout twelve feet off the ground or so? Those are claw marks. This is bear country, kids, and you want to be mindful of that." We assured him that we were quite aware; thus, the guns.

"Ya'll are goin' up into some high country here. You want to watch out for thunderstorms. Mountains ain't a good place to be in a thunderstorm."

We thanked him profusely, and he motored on up the mountain. We finished packing, and started on up the first really steep portion of our journey. The trail got worse and worse. We discovered later on that the reason was because the miner's bulldozer had been hard at work widening the trail for vehicle access, and had gotten stuck before he could quite finish. That was part of the reason he was there...to get the Cat running again. There was a lot of fallen timber that he'd pushed over, but hadn't gotten out from across the trail. Big stuff, four, five feet across...big enough that we had to take off our packs and climb over in some cases.

After a couple of hours of plodding, we'd gotten beyond the turnoff to the mine shaft, and got back into walking nicely forested, loamy trail footing. Late in the afternoon, we came into a large, wide valley, actually the lower extent of an ancient glacier whose remnants still awaited us at the level of the lake which was our goal. It was a rough walk to cross it and get back to the wooded area at its Northern fringe, but we finally pulled in, and set up our second camp.

Just as we'd gotten our fire going and started cooking our dehydrated meals, the bugs set in. There was an incredible variety of interesting creatures. My favorite was what we called a "Mars Fly", a red-bodied, robust insect that looked for all the world like a house fly, except three times as large, and with eerie, golden multifaceted eyes. The only thing that this plethora of buggies had in common was that *they all wanted to suck our blood*.

For most, it wasn't such a big deal. The DEET seemed to keep them at bay, but the deerflies were unbelieveable. Some were as big as the distance from my fingertip to first knuckle, and they could actually bite through jeans! We quickly retreated to our tents until the sun set, and the temperature dropped. The creatures then disappeared. When they were gone, you could actually hear how much quieter it was in their absence.

(Coming up later...the rest of the horror story).