Broken boats, injured crews, and other brushes with death: Day 1 of the 116 summer sailing trip, 2010

Sailing: Day 1

Key Largo to Rodriguez Key. [Repeat]

Our 41-foot Hunter was called Blue Moon, but we nicknamed it "The Camry," because on two separate occasions we found ourselves in a situation in which we could sail it just fine… we just couldn't make it stop.

First day out, we got a late afternoon start because the tides trapped us in the Key Largo Marina. To relieve the boredom of waiting, I arranged to be nearly brained by the anchor of a hanging boat.

In which we almost lose one boat (and I almost die) before we even get out of the marina

Blue Moon was a whole lot bigger than Captain Rhoad’s own boat, a 29-footer (I believe) he keeps on the Chesapeake. So I don’t blame him. He was being forced to get the hang of this gargantuan new boat in a terribly narrow marina channel, in a blasted rush, with the locals yelling at him to hurry up, and at full speed.

This is because, though we had been told we'd be stuck in the marina until 5pm or 6pm waiting for the high tide to open an exit, no one had mentioned that the fuel station, which we had to visit before setting off and which lay just a few hundred yards down at the end of the marina, would be closing at 5pm.

By 4:30pm, we had just started loading our gear and a week’s worth of food onto the boats (most of it was still in the parking lot, being staged and divided between the Blue Moon and our other boat, a 36-foot Pearson called Stargazer), when someone from the fuel station wandered up and warned us of their imminent closure.

We started frantically slinging gear on board both boats. In the process, some people’s personal gear ended up on the wrong boat, other bits were misplaced for the duration, and a few pieces managed to get lost entirely.

Every five minutes or so, the fuel jerks would swing by to remind us of the ticking clock in nasty tones.


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116-Rafting Montana, Day 3

On the third day, we broke camp early for a change and drove back through Missoula (pausing to stock up on groceries and, for the adults, to call home quickly and be sure families and work were getting along OK without us) then headed west on I-90 to rip some serious rapids and get a change of scenery along the Clark Fork of the Columbia River.

Got off Rte. 90 about a half-hour west of Missoula at Cyr for the river put-in. While Stew and Dan did the truck shuffle to leave a vehicle at the take-out point, the boys readied the raft and duckies. It too them a while to finish due to the distraction of dozens of bikini clad women all around them also preparing for the river. (Plus one disturbing man: paunchy, pasty, bandy-legged, and wearing naught but a miniscule and virulently colored Speedo.)

In the ogling boys' defense, they weren't the only ones in the group to get "Itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, red polka-dot bikini" stuck in their heads for the rest of the day. (Trust me, it was red, not yellow--what little of it there was, that is.)... Full Story

116-Rafting the Blackfoot, Day 2

I was awakened nest morning by a woodpecker practicing his Morse code and the honking of Canada geese. Though hiking can take you to a greater variety of places, river trips trump backpacking in two key areas. You can just roll off your craft for a refreshing dunk in the river whenever you get overheated, and the boat can carry a ton of stuff--think: steak dinners with wine (not that the Boy Scouts guzzle Cabernet, but for rafting or kayaking in general).... Full Story

116-Rafting the Blackfoot, Day 1

The great thing about having former members of 116 scattered to the four winds is that the troop retains the right to call them back into service at any moment. Agnew and Dave Henderson were tapped to purchase the new van we had waiting when the troop arrived in Colorado. I came along to held lead (i.e.: drive) for the second half of the trip (and Agnew for a week of it). And, when we hit Missoula, Montana late one night, we crashed at Dan Berger's place.

Since graduating from the troop just a few years behind the likes of Agnew and I, Dan has become not only a journalist but also a professional river guide on the side. This meant that, rather than shell out $250 per person per day for a multi-day rafting trip with some outfitter, we were going to get three days on a pair of Montana rivers for free. All it cost the troop budget was the food, the beer, and the cost of renting a couple of duckies--an inflatable type of kayak--to supplement Dan's raft...Full Story.

116-Across the Backbone of the Americas

"You guys want to take the shorter, easier trail over that low pass, or the longer, harder one straight up that way?" As soon as I asked, I knew I had sealed my fate. Also, John Agnew's. No way six teenage Boy Scouts were going to let their adult leaders take the easy way over the Continental Divide.

Never mind that we'd already hiked eight miles at high altitude in the Canadian Rockies--in some places using knotted chains to haul ourselves up vertical cliffs around waterfalls. It didn't matter that we'd climbed nearly 2,000 vertical feet over the last mile alone.

The boys weren't even taking into consideration that we hadn't gotten to bed until 5am that morning, or that Agnew had arrived from Denver late last night expecting to spend his first day on the trip sightseeing in Calgary.

The vote was unanimous for the thigh-burning, lung-aching, nearly vertical little trail--Canadians apparently don't believe in switchbacks--barely scratched into the scree and dust that led up over the highest pass.

We had managed to drag ourselves out of bed at the crack of 10:30am, backtrack north to Kananaskis, and head up the trail along Ribbon Creek in the Spray Valley Provincial Park, Stew leaving us to it in order to drive around to meet us on the other side.

It threatened rain all day. In fact, it sprinkled on us at Ribbon Falls Lake campground where we stopped for lunch and to keep an eye on the weather while we were below the tree line and within an easy lope of the ranger's station should we need to escape a thunderstorm.

Hours later, at the top of the Divide as we hollered our triumphant yells and frightened a few local marmots, I felt more stray raindrops. It was humbling to realize that those drops landing on my left were bound for the Pacific Ocean, while those on the right would eventually make their way to the Atlantic.

We scrambled down talus slopes on the other side, back into fir forest, then finally to the dirt road where the van and Stew were waiting. After some debate, we had dinner at a park picnic table by a little lake, followed by a long drive during which Agnew and I jerked awake occasionally to see an impressive solitary elk or cavalcade of soft brown deer by the roadside and tried and keep up a conversation with Stew so as to keep our driver awake.

Finally, we finally found some forgettable campground by the side of the road that was open where we could flop for the night. Agnew and I set up my tent and fell instantly into deep, well-earned sleep.

116-Yoho, Yoho, It's over the Pass We Go

We marched out to the van two by two--we always have to try and confuse hoteliers as to how many more people than we claimed we had were actually crammed into their rooms--and munched on cold, greasy pizza for breakfast as we drove east into Yoho National Park (www.parkscanada.ca/yoho).

Yoho receives a mere fraction of the visitors at world renowned Banff, which is what they call this exact same stretch of wilderness on the Alberta side of the border.

We stopped briefly at Natural Bridge, a Greek-Key–shaped spit of rock over a riotously rushing section of glacial melt-off thundering under the stone and gushing down the stream beyond in a flurry of freezing white water,

We pulled into Emerald Lake intending merely to take a quick spin around its cool, shockingly reflective waters--the deep color caused by light refracting off microparticles of glacial rock--and to point out to the boys the famous Burgess Shale deposit of rare, Cambrian-era fossils of soft-bodied marine animals that have taught scientists more about the emergence of early animal life than any other site in the world.

During our circuit, Stew and I noticed a second trail diverging up and over Yoho Pass. It was only 6.6 miles, so while Stew went to drive the van around to the trail's other end, the boys and I strapped on hiking boots.

Over the Pass
The trail that began in mud flats braided with streamlets and bridged by thick wooden planks quickly gave way to a narrow, steep track through wildflowers. We sang "Yoho, Yoho, across the bridge we go" and, once we realized there were seven of us, quickly assigned dwarf names to each person. Quinn was Dopey, Dan Bashful, Ezra (given his snuffly bean contact low of the evening before) Sneezy, Mike was a natural for Sleepy, Ari became by default Grumpy (though that didn't really fit his character, as even when he was bitshing it was with an infectious enthusiasm), equinamable Karis was Happy, and me, I was Doc. We argued hwo best to break the news to Stew that he had become, by the process of elimination, Snow White.

The elevation gain from the lake to the pass was 1,700 feet. We did the 1,200 of it in one fell swoop over the course of a mile, the cool rush of a nearby mountain stream, invisible off to the left, teasing us as we climbed.

Thunder was grumbling and dark clouds peaking over Emerald Glacier by the time we got to the main falls, so we scrambled across a wide talus slope made up of several old avalanches to the safety of the tree cover. A giant guardian boulder stood athwart the path right at the tree line like a gate to the forest. Just beyond it, we paused to eat apples in the shade of the fir trees while the grumbling storm decided not to hit our valley and moved on.

At pretty little Yoho Lake on the other side of the pass, we hollered a hello to two French-speaking Canadian girls looked frightened that we might decide to stay and ruin their gorgeous (and, until our arrival, quiet) campsite. Stew was waiting for us there, enjoying an afternoon of incredible wildlife spotting: mountain goats, black-tailed deer, elk, black bear, and a grizzly mother with her cub.

The trail bottomed out by a dirt road by the Whiskey Jack Hostel beyond which the trail continued to an 838-foot-high waterfall called Takakkaw, a Cree word whose meaning could apply to the whole region: "It is magnificent."

There was another squall of fat rain as we hustled up the trail, and we got soaked in mist at base, but that didn't stop the boys from scrambling over wet boulders as close to the base of the falls as they could get. Shivering, I retreated along the trail back out of the mist zone.

A Late Lunch and A Change of Plans
We finally got our lunch of cold cuts at some picnic tables near the falls. Of course, it was 10pm, but we called it lunch. In our defense, we thought it was only 9pm because we had made the mistake of determining the time by asking Ezra, and Ezra had not yet reset his watch to Mountain Time (which doesn't, incidentally, start where it should, at the BC/Alberta border along the Continental Divide, but rather over along the ridge of the Columbias, around Glacier NP).

We decided we'd be late enough (like, and hour) picking up Agnew at Calgary, so rather than take the time to find a campground in Banff and unpack so the boys and I could set up camp while Stew went and collected Agnew, we just all stayed in the van and zipped through Banff then hauled down to Calgary where, of course, we made several wrong turns trying to find the airport.

"Let's go back to that seedy part of town and look for a cheap motel," said Stew, so we all piled into the "suite" at the Traveller's Inn motel where I found free WiFi. The boys watched Gremlins 2 while Stew, Agnew, and I chatted until Stew asked, "Is the sky lightening out there?"

"Of course not," I said, blaming the city lights of Calgary as I stepped over Ari in his sleeping bag to jigger aside the curtain a bit more and look out. Sure enough, the sky was brightening. "Oh my God," I said and fumbled for my cell phone to check the time. It was 5am, so we decided maybe it would be a good idea to get a little sleep.

See, although Agnew was still under the impression that tomorrow was to be spent calmly sightseeing in Calgary, he was forgetting that, during a six-week circle tour across the continent by Troop 116, the only bit of the original schedule we ever stick to are the airport dates for swapping out adult leaders, most of whose jobs, families, and stamina only allow them to spend a week or two on the road.

In other words, we weren't touring Calgary tomorrow. No, we had decided to check out early and head back north for a little 14-mile hike over the Continental Divide.