The weather was beautiful this weekend (temperatures in the 80′s during the day, and the upper 50′s at night) and I spent most of the day on Saturday lifting logs, running, and working out around the camping area (yes, that’s my idea of relaxing!). In my previous post I mentioned there would be bugs, ticks, and mosquito’s in a few weeks and that it was nice camping without them. Well I was wrong; they’re already there! Within a few minutes of arriving, I found ticks crawling on me around the area where I camped last weekend, so I decided to just pick a random spot in the forest near the stream.

The night was so warm that I didn’t even need a fire for heat, but I built one anyway (a camping ritual, or something). I pulled stones from the stream to build a small fire pit and used birch bark to start the fire. During the night I heard something moving around the leaves outside the tent and I kept getting up to look around with the flashlight. Finally I discovered a tiny frog was periodically jumping through the leaves making all the noise.

The weather didn’t call for rain and the sky was clear when I went to sleep, so I assumed I wouldn’t have to worry about rain. Stupid me. I’ve lived in New England long enough not to assume that. I woke up around 7AM to the sound of rain drops. The front of my tent was open, and a small puddle of water had already formed inside the tent. My pack, which also wasn’t covered, got wet too. Oh well, it was still warm (50 degrees) so the water wasn’t that uncomfortable. While it drizzled on and off, I started a fire just to see how difficult it would be while everything was soaked — it was easy (birch bark is amazing, even in the rain!). After eating a breakfast of oatmeal, dried pineapple, a banana, and peppermint tea, I packed up and headed home.

I didn’t take many pictures this time, but here are a few anyway.

On Saturday I decided at the last minute to go camping in the White Mountains. I arrived at the entrance to the trail around 5:30pm. On my hike in, there were patches of half melted snow all around with moose and deer footprints everywhere.

That’s when I heard a stick crack and looked to my left. Standing not more than 20 feet off the trail and totally oblivious to my presence was a huge 8′ tall female moose. As I stood there admiring the huge creature, a sense of fear quickly settled in when I realized how screwed I was if she decided to charge at me. This was a seriously big animal. She noticed me standing there after about two minutes and after that she didn’t take her eyes off me. When she made a grunting sound, I knew she was nervous and uncomfortable, so I slowly started walking away. Much to my relief, she too turned around and walked in the opposite direction. From that point on, I made noise (made up songs and talked to myself) to help prevent any further accidental run ins with big game wildlife.

The rest of the evening was quite uneventful. The place I camped was next to a river where huge ice shelves had formed. Without much daylight left, I quickly started gathering wood and material for a fire. Using a magnesium fire starter, my knife, and a small piece of birch bark, I had a fire going within thirty seconds. The fire didn’t last long after I stopped feeding it and laid down to sleep.

The night was cold (<30 degrees) and constant gusts of wind made it worse. I woke up several times during the night from the cold, but managed to get about 5 hours of sleep. I awoke at 6:30am, shivering and freezing. It started to snow. I did some jumping jacks to warm myself up and then collected wood to get a fire going. Once again, the magnesium fire starter with some birch bark did the trick. I spent the next few hours feeding the fire and keeping warm before finally making the short one-mile trek back to my truck.

I didn't bring a camera, but I took a couple of pictures with my iPhone. (This is the picture of the moose, but she’s extremely well camouflaged. She’s standing behind the clump of trees in the long patch of white snow.)