Girls’ Night Out: Part 1
Prologue: Recently, when we published our post “3 Types of Fun” we asked our readers to shoot us a message if they had any Type 3 fun stories they wanted to share. We heard from a few people, most who’d already posted their stories online, but we heard from one who had yet to tell the story of her adventure gone awry to the world. We enjoyed her story so much that we offered to post it as our first guest post on our blog. The words that follow are by Kelly Fowler: Jill, Marwa and I hiked five hours only to find ourselves huddled under one sleeping bag, three in a row, in the dark, in the drizzle. I didn’t know exactly where we were. I did know we weren’t at Fairy Meadow – no fire burning in the hearth, no chilled Chardonnay, no pasta. Beneath the towering pine, the granite boulder, the Glad garbage bag and my purple MEC sleeping bag, the whistling of a lone wind travelling up and through Marwa’s nostrils echoed in my left ear. My right ear, however, contended with the conflicting hammer of my desperately beating heart and the solid methodical gait of a massive beast approaching from behind. Jill was practically wedged beneath the boulder, Marwa in the middle, and me on the outside, flanked only by our packs. Hiking pole tightly gripped in my right hand. Oh yes. We got lost. And now we were about to be eaten by some ravenous beast of the Selkirks whose presence had been made quite clear to Jill and me as we had hiked into the backcountry earlier that day. After many stories and beer to match, our planned 0600 hrs start morphed quickly into a groggy shuffle towards the car by 1100 hrs. Armed with pasta and bottles of red wine, our weekend getaway was nothing short of a chick flick. While Jill and I had both hiked extensively throughout Banff National Park, Marwa was still a virgin to the backcountry. My beautiful Egyptian friend prefers city lights and international men to eating berries in the wilderness, but she has a stubborn streak and a defiant stare that challenges anyone to tell her she can’t do something. This would be her debut with Mother Nature close at hand, experiencing true camaraderie, peeing in the woods. Wanting more than a little hike up to the tea houses around Lake Louise, which were far too touristy for our liking, I proposed that we venture out from our favourite trails into uncharted territory. Destination? The Alpine hut at Fairy Meadow in British Columbia’s Adamant...
