A Little Survival by Matt Carey

In November 2007 our team (CJ, Mike, Shane, and I) went to Green Canyon for a one night campout.  Now, when we got to the entrance of Green Canyon, Reed thought the gate was closed (which it wasn’t) so we had to start hiking from where we parked to the gate entrance.  Luckily, we found out it was open before we got too far, and we rode to the gate and further up, where we would’ve had to hike, which normally was not a problem, but for this campout we took along an eight-man tent with us, and we couldn’t fit it in our packs, so two of us at a time had to carry it.

When we got to our campsite and figured out where we were going to put the tents, we got the big boy out.  Rule for an eight-man tent:  follow the color-coded instructions.  Because Shane, genius he is, decided to start putting poles together without looking at the color of the poles.  Needless to say, it took a while for us to put together our tent.  Tanner and Stephens had their tents set up in about ten minutes, while it took us a half hour (or more) to set up ours.  We agreed it was worth it though.

            Later in the afternoon we started working on making cordage with Juniper Bark.  We figured out the basics of how to make it, then we were told we should make about ten feet of it on our own time at home, and whoever made ten feet of good cordage the fastest would get awarded a prize.

            Now, when we got back in the tents, it was getting pretty darn cold.  So we decided to warm ourselves up faster than getting underneath the covers of our sleeping bags.  We got a lighter, curled our hands, and pumped them full of butane, and lit it.  It didn’t really hurt, unless you held you fist for a while and didn’t open it, but we only did that a few times, and the benefit was warm hands very quickly.  Then we decided to do the same thing to a bag of Doritos, that was nice, a very loud pop.  We also tried blowing up other various items we had with us.  However, we didn’t spend the whole time blowing up stuff, we played games.  The best one we did (in my mind) was BS.  However, we eventually got tired and went to bed (at about twelve or one).

            CJ had to leave early in the morning to be able to go to Moab for the weekend.  However, he left us nice gifts for us in morning in the form of trash.  However we got all that bagged and put away our tents, we went on the hunt for some Juniper Trees for some bark.  We eventually found some and got it the truck, and headed home.  However, since CJ left us some gifts, we paid back the favor.  We got the trash we bagged up and put it on his bed for him to find when he gets back (on Monday).