I had a great time, froze my ass off, shot some guns, stared into the campfire for hours, ate lots better than I normally do while camping, drank some beers and booze (not before the shooting, of course), finally met some of the great ZSers that I have only met online before this weekend, talked about and tested lots of gear under severe conditions...and firmly fixed my insanity in the minds of many of my friends and family...
I've been getting ready and psyched for this weekend of camping for a long time, and it didn't disappoint! I'm grateful to the 6 who drove all the way up to the Northern New York for
NNY08WCT, and sorry to have missed those who wanted to come but couldn't, for whatever reasons...we'll do this again...maybe in the dead of winter, but definitely in the gentler seasons of this beautiful area...
Anyway...on to the pictures...
Festus was the first to arrive, and we spent some time setting up camp and gathering wood, and getting to know each other...
The rest of the
NNY08WCT crew arrived en masse, and we spent some time shaking hands, picking out tent spots, and talking about the weather and the drive (snowy...on both counts)...Famine may have been the first, but was certainly not the last, to generate a high quality snot-sicle...
OutOfOrder2Day had to dig-in to make a spot for his tent (as did most of us)...it mostly varied between 1-2 feet deep...the initial footprint-hole is never big enough...
CommonHighrise set up his tent over a layer of Balsam boughs, at the end of the trip, there was still powdery snow under his tent...
CavemanSam and his roomate
(not a ZS member, and I didn't want to post her name without permission) set up their tent
Lotsa Booze...
Testing out the dryer-lint firestarters...the ones that I made stink (because of all of the pet-hair) but worked very well at lighting a fire...
I handed out bottles of "Bad Medicine" to each
NNY08WCT attendee, and urged them to try out the magic formula...
The reactions were immediate and positive...
Festus Hagen had made and brought a metric crapton of chili, which we heated and ate in short order to help ward off the oncoming chill of the night...it was great!
After (and to some degree, before) we hung out around the campfire, shooting the shit, drinking a bit, getting to know each other, and guessing about how cold the night would be...
It was incredibly cold on Friday night, 17 below, by the nearby airport at Lake Clear, and on the thermometer in camp (which wasn't checked until after 7am, because I couldn't bear to get up before then)...
A beer popped, but left mostly full (by the notorious sissy Famine) was frozen up and out of the can, and when it was chopped open with a hatchet (yup, that's how we roll), there was a can-shaped beer-sicle...
Peppermint Schnapps, and some of the other lower proof beverages froze solid in the cold...
Even the Ouzo, and some Jim Beam I brought along, partly froze in the night...
It wasn't hard to tell whose camp this was, although when the Forest Ranger came by to check how we made it through the night (he had seen us the night before when he was on a call to deal with a snowmobile fatality a couple of miles away)...
We spent a lot of the quiet and cold morning trying to rehydrate and warm up by the fire and stuff calories into hungry bodies...
Caveman Sam wanted to make pancakes, and started - I swear - to make a spatula out of a branch...
Mid-morning we heard a popping sound a little different than the popping the trees had been making all night in the extreme cold...it was a can of coke exploding...it sent coke shrapnel in all directions...
Sam finished the spatula, and he and his roommate made some great pancakes that were greatly enjoyed...
The spatula came into play again later, when we all enjoyed some steak, basted with "Bad Medicine"...it was actually really tasty on the steaks...
After lunch, we went over to my redneck range, which some asshole had buried under 18 feet (well, 1.5 feet anyway) of snow...we improvised, adapted, and overcame the adversity to set up a range and shot at zombie targets and a bunch of $-store frying pans with a wide variety of firearms...
We all got to try out each other's shinies, and a good time was had by all...
We made lots of noise, and I got to fire an M1 (OutOfOrder2Day's) for the first time...
I also had fun shooting Famine's side-by-side 20 gauge, which you can see Festus loading, appropriately happily...
After the trip to the shooting range, we headed back to camp and got ready for the cold and dark to come back and make us their bitches again...we ate and drank lots more stuff in trying to get ready for the cold...
Famine had to deal with "bean surprise"...the surprise was that the beans were frozen into an immovable block of beans...
Once we were all essentially fed, we settled down to the serious business of trying to keep warm in the face of a thermometer that was dropping even more rapidly than the night before...
Unfortunately, some socks got singed in the pursuit of warmth
We all enjoyed some rabbit stew made by Caveman Sam and his roommate...it was hard to see through all of the smoke and steam generated by us, the food, and the fire...
The night was cold, but not as cold as the one before, it was 4 below by the time we went to bed, but when I dragged my ass out of bed at a bit after 7am, it was already a touch above zero...my optimus stove (pimped out in gold rustoleum) performed like a champ the entire weekend, making cubic yards of snow into quarts of water...
After cleanup had pretty much finished, and the first couple of people had left, Famine and CommonHighrise played a pickup game of Frozen-Totally-Solid-Egg Baseball, using a cane knife in place of the more traditional bat...
After the eggball game, we four got together for the traditional end of NNY__WCT pants pulled down runaround picture...we noticed afterwards, with some sadness, that we had all been wearing long underwear...
I lead the way out of the woods, and the four of us stopped at McD's for some fat and salt...the "restaurant" was really hot and really noisy inside, compared to what we had been enjoying for the last couple of days, but...it's good fat and salt...
I look forward to future camping outings with these and other people in this area, and at ZCON-08!!!
nfa
