Hamilton Reef
02-04-2005, 05:04 PM
Okpik Scoutmasters turn to Inuits to learn survial
http://www.mlive.com/outdoors/fljournal/index.ssf?/base/sports-1/110745841083850.xml
THE FLINT JOURNAL FIRST EDITION, Thursday, February 03, 2005
By Elizabeth Shaw, eshaw@flintjournal.com • 810.766.6311
KALKASKA - David T. McGregor and his crew don't sleep in the snow because they have to - they do it because they like it.
And last weekend, they taught me and 13 others how to love it, too, during the annual Okpik outing at Camp Tapico, the 1,200-acre camp just outside Kalkaska run by the Boy Scouts Tall Pine Council of Flint.
Okpik, the Inuit word for snowy owl, trains Scoutmasters and teen Scouts in the cold-weather camping skills needed to take troops out year-round. This year, McGregor allowed me to join in for a firsthand look at the rigors - and fun - of winter camping.
"I don't do anything more than once if I don't like it," joked McGregor. "I've been running Okpik since 1996, so I must like it a lot."
As it happens, 1996 also was the year a record eight people died on Mount Everest in the most extreme winter conditions imaginable. Yep, I watched a documentary about it the night before leaving for Okpik. Good prep work, I figured: Compared to Everest, Kalkaska was going to be a trip to the Caribbean.
That night, I spread my gear out across the floor - two sets or more of every layer for head, feet, hands, legs and torso: base liners to wick moisture outward, polar fleece for insulation, windshell outerwear. By the time I'd added two sleeping bags tucked inside each other, tarps, a closed-cell foam mat, snow shovel and basic camp gear, the pack weighed 50 pounds.
Which leads me to the first great thing about winter camping: sled-packing. Forget backpacks - equipped with a waist harness, snowshoes and rigid pulling poles, a properly loaded sled glides behind you like a shadow on the snow.
It was 8 degrees when we arrived at camp on Friday night - positively balmy compared to Everest's 30 degrees below zero average.
During the briefing session, McGregor broke us up into the crews that would spend the rest of the weekend eating, sleeping and working together out in the field.
I was a Snow Snake with John Boone of Mundy Township, a Dearborn firefighter, and three Ohio Scoutmasters: Irvin Martin, an environmental-management specialist; his brother, Al Martin, also an engineer; and Bill Antoszewski, a National Guard engineer. The five teens were grouped into the Snowshoes, while the other four men made up the Snow Shovels.
We Snow Snakes, by the way, didn't fail to notice our military-issue backcountry skis and snowshoes loaned by Camp Grayling were a far cry from the sleek, high-tech gear sported by most of the Snow Shovels.
"Oh, so that's how it's gonna be," quipped Bill. "Oh yeah, it's official now. It's on."
The staff roused us from our sleeping bags promptly at 7 a.m. Saturday for a hot breakfast of sausage and pancakes. The hot food worked. Within an hour, every sled was ready to roll - toboggans, molded plastic shells, even Tupperware tubs on runners.
By now, a 6 mph northwest breeze had dropped the temperature to just above 3 degrees. We all were second-guessing our clothing layers and wondering if that second wool hat might be the better bet.
We needn't have worried. Ten minutes along the trail, I'd unzipped my parka and fleece top. Al was stripped down to his long underwear and others were likewise shifting layers to shed heat.
We also quickly learned the beauty of a low center of gravity for sleds, as the more top-heavy loads tipped over, one by one.
The Snowshoes and Snow Shovels reached camp first and staked out prime spots. We Snow Snakes, meanwhile, took the why-work-harder-than-you-have-to approach and grabbed a spot with a picnic table conveniently buried in the snow. While the other crews drug out trenches for snow kitchens, within minutes John had a pot of snow and water simmering on the alcohol stove.
Soon all three crews were shedding layers of clothes to avoid sweating as we shoveled snow to build the quinzees, the Inuit snow shelters we would be sleeping in overnight. With four 6-foot-plus men to house, my crew was creating a monster.
Since I was the only female in the group, the Okpik staff - Tom Brown, Miles Lombard and Randy Kilgore - helped me build a smaller, separate quinzee nearby. Being the only female also meant a quarter-mile trek on skis or snowshoes to reach the kybo, a Scout euphemism for an open-shelter commode. I quickly learned to plan ahead of nature's calls.
By noon, it was a cloudy and pleasant 24 degrees. We cut and gathered firewood, then dug into our goodie bags of ready-to-eat military rations. I'll admit, with a stomach full of warm food and a cup of coffee in hand, it was almost embarrassing to consider this "roughing it."
By 2 p.m. the mounded snow had hardened enough to dig out the interiors - a little unnerving at first, burrowing in headfirst and wondering with every shovel-full if the roof will cave in.
But it doesn't take long before the hole is big enough to sit up in, using a sled to ferry out the excavated snow. Heck, it's even beginning to feel a little like home.
That's about when I realized I'd neglected to put my waterproof mittens on before digging and now my base liners were soaking wet and worse than useless for keeping my fingers warm. Within a half-hour, they were frozen solid.
Finally, the quinzee was finished - big enough to stand bent at the waist, and wide enough to stretch out my sleeping bag across the middle with plenty of room for my pack - that is, until I'd scraped the floor clear and discovered the frozen tree limb sticking up dead-center. Too late to do anything but shove my bedding along the sidewall and hope it wasn't as cold as it looked.
It was time for a break then, and two of the Snow Shovels, Robert Lawshe of Royal Oak and Jim Seay of Livonia, invited me to join them on a cross-country ski trek through woods.
If this was a clever ploy to knock off the rival crew one-by-one, it almost worked. Remember that nice gear they brought from home? My military-issue skis felt like 2-by-4s as I struggled to keep up. Soon, McGregor's lectures about the dangers of sweat were as crystal-clear as the growing layer of frost on my back.
My own crew, of course, made it just as clear there'd be no sympathy for shivering, exhausted would-be traitors skulking back to camp. Believe me, until you've been this wet and cold, you'll never fully appreciate dry underwear and a hot cup of powdered soup.
At least my feet stayed warm, thanks to former Okpik grad Ryan Pickard, who had advised me to bring bread bags as vapor barriers on my feet. For someone whose toes freeze watching TV, that thin layer of cheap plastic was nothing short of a miracle fabric.
At nightfall we all gathered for a campfire, swapping tales about past outings when temperatures plummeted 50 degrees overnight or waist-deep snow buried everything in sight.
Armed with that healthy reminder of our own ideal weekend weather, eight of us set off for a two-hour snowshoe trek through the dark woods and across Grass Lake. Circled by the black outline of pines along the frozen shore, the clear night sky reared up around us in a perfect bowl of stars - perfect the way only a northern winter night can be.
Later, huddled in my sleeping bag and munching a Cliff bar, I couldn't stop grinning as I stared up at the glow stick stuck in the snow above my head.
This, I knew, is why people fall in love with winter camping.
Naturally, all that romanticism vanished at 2 a.m., when the temperature had dropped back to 12 degrees and I woke up shivering like a short-circuited Barcalounger. A quick body check revealed one arm had rolled off the foam mat and the top of my head was firmly attached to the snow wall. Ah, how quickly love fades when you're bleeding body warmth like a leaky gas tank.
Of course, none of that mattered by Sunday morning, and none of us seemed in a hurry to strike camp, collect our merit patches, say our good-byes and head home.
Mount Everest? No, thanks.
But like most Okpik grads, I'm already hoarding bread bags to do it all again.
http://www.mlive.com/outdoors/fljournal/index.ssf?/base/sports-1/110745841083850.xml
THE FLINT JOURNAL FIRST EDITION, Thursday, February 03, 2005
By Elizabeth Shaw, eshaw@flintjournal.com • 810.766.6311
KALKASKA - David T. McGregor and his crew don't sleep in the snow because they have to - they do it because they like it.
And last weekend, they taught me and 13 others how to love it, too, during the annual Okpik outing at Camp Tapico, the 1,200-acre camp just outside Kalkaska run by the Boy Scouts Tall Pine Council of Flint.
Okpik, the Inuit word for snowy owl, trains Scoutmasters and teen Scouts in the cold-weather camping skills needed to take troops out year-round. This year, McGregor allowed me to join in for a firsthand look at the rigors - and fun - of winter camping.
"I don't do anything more than once if I don't like it," joked McGregor. "I've been running Okpik since 1996, so I must like it a lot."
As it happens, 1996 also was the year a record eight people died on Mount Everest in the most extreme winter conditions imaginable. Yep, I watched a documentary about it the night before leaving for Okpik. Good prep work, I figured: Compared to Everest, Kalkaska was going to be a trip to the Caribbean.
That night, I spread my gear out across the floor - two sets or more of every layer for head, feet, hands, legs and torso: base liners to wick moisture outward, polar fleece for insulation, windshell outerwear. By the time I'd added two sleeping bags tucked inside each other, tarps, a closed-cell foam mat, snow shovel and basic camp gear, the pack weighed 50 pounds.
Which leads me to the first great thing about winter camping: sled-packing. Forget backpacks - equipped with a waist harness, snowshoes and rigid pulling poles, a properly loaded sled glides behind you like a shadow on the snow.
It was 8 degrees when we arrived at camp on Friday night - positively balmy compared to Everest's 30 degrees below zero average.
During the briefing session, McGregor broke us up into the crews that would spend the rest of the weekend eating, sleeping and working together out in the field.
I was a Snow Snake with John Boone of Mundy Township, a Dearborn firefighter, and three Ohio Scoutmasters: Irvin Martin, an environmental-management specialist; his brother, Al Martin, also an engineer; and Bill Antoszewski, a National Guard engineer. The five teens were grouped into the Snowshoes, while the other four men made up the Snow Shovels.
We Snow Snakes, by the way, didn't fail to notice our military-issue backcountry skis and snowshoes loaned by Camp Grayling were a far cry from the sleek, high-tech gear sported by most of the Snow Shovels.
"Oh, so that's how it's gonna be," quipped Bill. "Oh yeah, it's official now. It's on."
The staff roused us from our sleeping bags promptly at 7 a.m. Saturday for a hot breakfast of sausage and pancakes. The hot food worked. Within an hour, every sled was ready to roll - toboggans, molded plastic shells, even Tupperware tubs on runners.
By now, a 6 mph northwest breeze had dropped the temperature to just above 3 degrees. We all were second-guessing our clothing layers and wondering if that second wool hat might be the better bet.
We needn't have worried. Ten minutes along the trail, I'd unzipped my parka and fleece top. Al was stripped down to his long underwear and others were likewise shifting layers to shed heat.
We also quickly learned the beauty of a low center of gravity for sleds, as the more top-heavy loads tipped over, one by one.
The Snowshoes and Snow Shovels reached camp first and staked out prime spots. We Snow Snakes, meanwhile, took the why-work-harder-than-you-have-to approach and grabbed a spot with a picnic table conveniently buried in the snow. While the other crews drug out trenches for snow kitchens, within minutes John had a pot of snow and water simmering on the alcohol stove.
Soon all three crews were shedding layers of clothes to avoid sweating as we shoveled snow to build the quinzees, the Inuit snow shelters we would be sleeping in overnight. With four 6-foot-plus men to house, my crew was creating a monster.
Since I was the only female in the group, the Okpik staff - Tom Brown, Miles Lombard and Randy Kilgore - helped me build a smaller, separate quinzee nearby. Being the only female also meant a quarter-mile trek on skis or snowshoes to reach the kybo, a Scout euphemism for an open-shelter commode. I quickly learned to plan ahead of nature's calls.
By noon, it was a cloudy and pleasant 24 degrees. We cut and gathered firewood, then dug into our goodie bags of ready-to-eat military rations. I'll admit, with a stomach full of warm food and a cup of coffee in hand, it was almost embarrassing to consider this "roughing it."
By 2 p.m. the mounded snow had hardened enough to dig out the interiors - a little unnerving at first, burrowing in headfirst and wondering with every shovel-full if the roof will cave in.
But it doesn't take long before the hole is big enough to sit up in, using a sled to ferry out the excavated snow. Heck, it's even beginning to feel a little like home.
That's about when I realized I'd neglected to put my waterproof mittens on before digging and now my base liners were soaking wet and worse than useless for keeping my fingers warm. Within a half-hour, they were frozen solid.
Finally, the quinzee was finished - big enough to stand bent at the waist, and wide enough to stretch out my sleeping bag across the middle with plenty of room for my pack - that is, until I'd scraped the floor clear and discovered the frozen tree limb sticking up dead-center. Too late to do anything but shove my bedding along the sidewall and hope it wasn't as cold as it looked.
It was time for a break then, and two of the Snow Shovels, Robert Lawshe of Royal Oak and Jim Seay of Livonia, invited me to join them on a cross-country ski trek through woods.
If this was a clever ploy to knock off the rival crew one-by-one, it almost worked. Remember that nice gear they brought from home? My military-issue skis felt like 2-by-4s as I struggled to keep up. Soon, McGregor's lectures about the dangers of sweat were as crystal-clear as the growing layer of frost on my back.
My own crew, of course, made it just as clear there'd be no sympathy for shivering, exhausted would-be traitors skulking back to camp. Believe me, until you've been this wet and cold, you'll never fully appreciate dry underwear and a hot cup of powdered soup.
At least my feet stayed warm, thanks to former Okpik grad Ryan Pickard, who had advised me to bring bread bags as vapor barriers on my feet. For someone whose toes freeze watching TV, that thin layer of cheap plastic was nothing short of a miracle fabric.
At nightfall we all gathered for a campfire, swapping tales about past outings when temperatures plummeted 50 degrees overnight or waist-deep snow buried everything in sight.
Armed with that healthy reminder of our own ideal weekend weather, eight of us set off for a two-hour snowshoe trek through the dark woods and across Grass Lake. Circled by the black outline of pines along the frozen shore, the clear night sky reared up around us in a perfect bowl of stars - perfect the way only a northern winter night can be.
Later, huddled in my sleeping bag and munching a Cliff bar, I couldn't stop grinning as I stared up at the glow stick stuck in the snow above my head.
This, I knew, is why people fall in love with winter camping.
Naturally, all that romanticism vanished at 2 a.m., when the temperature had dropped back to 12 degrees and I woke up shivering like a short-circuited Barcalounger. A quick body check revealed one arm had rolled off the foam mat and the top of my head was firmly attached to the snow wall. Ah, how quickly love fades when you're bleeding body warmth like a leaky gas tank.
Of course, none of that mattered by Sunday morning, and none of us seemed in a hurry to strike camp, collect our merit patches, say our good-byes and head home.
Mount Everest? No, thanks.
But like most Okpik grads, I'm already hoarding bread bags to do it all again.