{"id":228,"date":"2008-06-29T21:35:25","date_gmt":"2008-06-30T04:35:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewysz.com\/wyszdom\/?p=228"},"modified":"2008-06-29T21:35:25","modified_gmt":"2008-06-30T04:35:25","slug":"nelson-has-a-hatchet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/2008\/06\/nelson-has-a-hatchet\/","title":{"rendered":"Nelson has a hatchet"},"content":{"rendered":"<table style=\"width: auto;\" border=\"0\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td><a href=\"http:\/\/picasaweb.google.com\/michaelwyszomierski\/Yosemite\/photo#5217514838469552818\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/lh5.ggpht.com\/michaelwyszomierski\/SGhWGh1OqrI\/AAAAAAAAjhQ\/jc_izzw6_t0\/s400\/IMG_0380.JPG\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"font-family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-align:right\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/picasaweb.google.com\/michaelwyszomierski\/Yosemite\">Yosemite<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>This weekend, a few friends and I went camping at Rancheria Falls in Yosemite National Park. I&#8217;m a terrible flat-footed* hiker, and probably won&#8217;t be invited to go camping again anytime soon. Thank goodness.<\/p>\n<p>I had never been camping before, aside from school trips where we stayed in cabins or sleeping in a tent in my backyard. But I figured I could handle it. Walk around, look at nature, make s&#8217;mores&#8230; how bad could it be? During the email threads in the planning process, something about a &#8220;six mile hike to the campsite&#8221; was mentioned a few times, but I never got too concerned about it. I&#8217;ve hiked over six miles before and survived, so why should this be any different? Well, a few things were different. We were carrying camping gear. That stuff is heavy. A broken strap made it worse. And the trail was a lot rougher than we expected; lots of rocks and ups and downs as we walked along a beautiful yet unforgiving ridge. It was also hot (in the 90s I think), and smoke from the wildfires didn&#8217;t help our lungs. On top of all this, most of us (but admittedly especially myself) underestimated the amount of water we would need for the hike, due to the factors I just listed.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t want to get too dramatic, because I&#8217;m sure there are plenty of stories about &#8220;the longest hike ever,&#8221; but it was pretty intense. It got to the point where my pathetic dehydrated self just couldn&#8217;t walk any farther, and I had to stop on the side of the trail, with no idea how I was going to continue. I was even hallucinating by that point, thinking that different colored rocks and patches of moss were water. Fortunately, my stopping point ended up being only 1\/4 mile from the campsite, and Nelson was able to save me by running back with water. I can&#8217;t really remember that part too much, but I think there was something about a snake hole.<\/p>\n<p>The actual camping part wasn&#8217;t bad. We had some issues with the water filter pump, but Nelson had brought some water purification tablets from his Google-issued earthquake survival kit, so we were able to use those instead. It felt good to finally sit down and just have some soup. I don&#8217;t even know what kind it was; I think it probably had rice and stuff that I would normally never eat, but at the time it was delicious. We also had s&#8217;mores, which I always enjoy. Sleeping was uncomfortable as one would expect when camping (in our case hot and with limited padding), but I&#8217;m about to crawl into my own bed so that part is a fading memory.<\/p>\n<p>The hike back was much better than the hike out. We all drank a lot before we got going, and I carried more than twice as much water with me than I had walking out. One of my water bottles was actually a wine bottle, so I&#8217;m sure people passing us on the trail got a kick out of that. Traumatized by the previous day&#8217;s hike, I took it extremely slow on the way back, and Nelson and Koklynn ended up beating the rest of us by about an hour. They are inhuman.<\/p>\n<p>Special thanks to Reid for planning and Nelson for saving my life. I&#8217;m going to eat dinner in my pajamas now.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Updates:<\/strong><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/picasaweb.google.com\/nbradley\/RancheriaFalls\">Nelson&#8217;s photos<br \/>\n<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/picasaweb.google.com\/koklynn\/Camping\">Koklynn&#8217;s photos<br \/>\n<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewysz.com\/wyszdom\/2008\/07\/rancheria-falls\/\">It was longer than six miles.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>*Diagnosed by some guy in a ski shop.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Yosemite This weekend, a few friends and I went camping at Rancheria Falls in Yosemite National Park. I&#8217;m a terrible flat-footed* hiker, and probably won&#8217;t be invited to go camping again anytime soon. Thank goodness. I had never been camping before, aside from school trips where we stayed in cabins or sleeping in a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/2008\/06\/nelson-has-a-hatchet\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Nelson has a hatchet<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-california"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}