Girls’ Night Out: Part 2
< Girls’ Night Out: Part 1 The words that follow are by Kelly Fowler: We made camp in an outcropping of two huge granite boulders sitting ninety degrees to each other, nudging the base of a pine tree. One boulder had a curious indent in its shadow, enough for three wanderers to sleep like sardines. Solid to our left and backs, the path ran from above, down to the right and onwards through the rocks and scrub. It felt safe to stop. We ate some trail mix, drank some water. Nobody was all that hungry. Our little area received minimal coverage from the pine tree, and the rain still fell. I collected the food and hung it several metres away, as high as I could string it in the tree. That bottle of wine looked very lonely. We spread out Marwa’s sleeping bag on the bottom of the indent and prepared for the night. Everyone was surprisingly calm. I wanted someone to lose their cool, to cry or shout. Then the other two would have a purpose to console, to rally. Instead, each of us was mature, practical and almost serene. The plan was to rest until daybreak, and we would gain our bearings and make a decision to move on or go home. The darkness thickened and we could barely see past our hastily assembled camp. The two of them settled, and I was the last to get in, pulling the three packs in close to my right. After all, I was the one out in the open with Jill practically gone under the rock and Marwa snug in the middle. That wall of synthetic backpack material and extra wool socks was my pseudo protection from evil leprechauns, prancing ponies or other mythical forest creatures that dispersed from Fairy Meadow when the sun went down. I covered us with my sleeping bag and then a garbage bag. Fully clothed. Boots still laced. Glasses on my face. Wine unopened, hanging far away in a tree. And it rained. Not exactly your dream weekend, but the potential for an amusing story around the water cooler should we survive. There’s nothing quite like the sweet sound of rain on the roof of a tent when you’re snug inside. The tippity-tap-tap of water soothes and comforts. For us, the rhythm was a hazy, sleep-deprived version under a dark green Glad garbage bag. Our makeshift plastic bag duvet cover was, at least, keeping us dry. The sounds of the forest had long stilled. Until I heard it. It was heavy and low to the ground. It moved with purpose and it was coming...
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...
4 Years, 4 Summits
Four years ago today, April 14th, 2014, myself and Spring finished our journey from Ireland to Canada and set foot in our new home in Squamish. Spring was returning to her home country after living away in Ireland for 6 years and I was moving somewhere completely new and foreign. The trip to Canada was not enjoyable. We ended up on a 9 hour flight in the middle seats of the middle isle of coach on the plane, wedged between an individual on our left who drank himself into a stupor within the first 45 minutes of the flight and an older, spindly lady on our right who packed the area around her seat with bags and clothes and then fell asleep in a ball on top of them. To add to this, in the seats in front of us were two mothers with newborns. They fully reclined their seats into our laps in the first minutes of the flight and they stayed that way for the duration. The crying and teething stopped us from being able to sleep through any of this. When we finally, wearily arrived at Vancouver airport, made our way through immigration services and went to pick up our rental car they told us that we could not have it. Spring had a driving license and I did not. But the credit cards we had were all in my name. The rental car company insisted that they’d only allow us to take the car if we provided a credit card in the drivers name. Without options, we got a taxi to the nearest Hotel and decided to figure this all out in the morning after sleeping off the day. The next morning, my first morning at my new home, I opened the curtains and the day was glorious. Blue skies and sunshine. We turned on the TV and switched to the news. Our jaws instantly dropped. Breaking news was coming in of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, an Icelandic volcano, and European airspace was shut down. Had our flight been a day later we’d likely have been stuck in Ireland now. This delay may have also impacted my chances of getting my permanent residency in Canada. The permanent residency application insists that I be in Canada within 12 months of taking the medical exam that it requires. That 12 month deadline was on April 15th, my first day in Canada. The qualms we’d had with the previous days flight and being refused our rental car washed away. We were at least here, our 3 meager suitcases of clothes had arrived with us and we were fine....
Therm-a-Rest NeoAir XTherm Review
Bottom Line: Super light, super packable, very comfortable, air mattress. Might need to be babied on uneven or sharp ground to avoid puncturing it and it does make a crinkling noise when you move around on it but overall it’s an amazing piece of gear. Highly recommended. We use ours 12 months a year. How I chose it: Before buying this pad I had been using a Big Agnes Insulated Air Core, the largest one they sold. It weighs ~0.9kg and took the better part of 10 minutes to blow up, usually leaving my lips feeling like rubber but it was really comfortable. I slept like a log. I still use it now for car camping. But, there came a time when I wanted to climb higher in the mountains and do it faster and to make that endeavour easier I started to research ways to reduce my pack weight. The Big Agnes was also too large to fit in the tent I wished to buy, The Sierra Designs Convert II. I needed a pad with a mummy shaped design that took up as little space when inflated as possible. After some research I decided upon the Neo Air XTherm. Some friends I knew were already using it and it came highly recommended online. Directly on snow in a snow pit Inflated and in use in an MSR 3P Tent Relaxing and warm on top of snow. Observations since using it: I’ve used this pad exclusively since purchasing it for every backpacking trip that I’ve been on. It’s incredibly light and packs down really small. In regards to comfort, which is subjective, I’ve found it to be reasonably comfortable. It inflates quickly. It is recommended in Winter to not inflate these pads by breathing into them as the water vapor from your breath will condense back to a liquid when it cools and remain in the pad. Therm-a-Rest supplies a stuff sack with this pad that has a valve attached to it so that you can inflate the pad by opening and closing the stuff sack and rolling the air from it into the pad this way. I’ve never used this method of inflation. I find it slow and laborious compared to just blowing into it. I’ve been using the pad through all 4 seasons for the last 2 years and, so far, I’ve noticed no water staying inside it. Pros: Light: The regular size, which I bought, weighs 430g’s/15oz’s. For a pad that inflates to 6cm/2.5” thick which can be used through the depths of Winter on top of snow and ice this weight is simply amazing. Packable:...
