I have been thinking a lot about the times I spent at the Little Sioux campground. Mainly because of the tragedy that happened there last week. I have been having good memories about the place though. I think one of the camping trips I remember the most is our "wilderness survival" trip. The object of this trip was to work on requirements toward the wilderness survival merit badge. Now, as a scout, I do not remember being highly motivated to work towards merit badges or advancement in rank. I mostly just enjoyed camping, hanging out with my dad, farting around the campfire and goofing off with the other scouts.
I remember working on this merit badge though because one of the requirements was rather intimidating as a kid. It involved sleeping out in the woods overnight by yourself in a shelter that you had constructed. Not so hard by itself I suppose, but we had the added challenge that we were camping in the middle of winter (not sure what month, but it was COLD and the ground was covered in snow) in Nebraska.
Winters in the midwest can be pretty frigid and this weekend was no exception. Dad might remember better what the actual temperature was because he always had a really hard time getting me to wear a coat, even if it was well below freezing. I would be running around the campsite in sub-freezing weather wearing nothing but a t-shirt and I remember him asking me repeatedly to put on a coat, a reasonable request. What I don't remember is why I was so determined to give him a tough time, I guess it is a mystery only kids know about.
Anyway, I spent the better part of a Saturday out in the woods constructing my shelter. I think that there was a distance requirement of how far "out in the woods" you had to be, maybe 100 yards from camp or so. I had read in my scout manual about snow shelters and decided that it sounded like fun to make myself an igloo like an eskimo. The scout manual had some basic instructions for igloo construction and said it would be a good insulator to keep me warm at night. The snow was rather deep but had been around for a while because the top layer was ice. It was the kind of snow that is crunchy on top but loosely packed on the bottom. Perfect for making igloo bricks.
I spent a couple hours carving out rectangular bricks of snow, using my hand like a knife to cut the snow. I stacked them in a circle about as wide as I was tall. I continued making and stacking bricks until the shelter was tall enough for me to fit inside. I used a blue tarp to make the roof and I think I had even made a block of snow that I could cover the entry way with to help conserve heat. My shelter was finished, I headed back to camp and the other scouts and I nervously waited until nightfall when we would test our wits and will against mother nature.
The next part of this story is a little unclear in my head, but I will do my best to make it interesting. After dinner, we sat around the campfire, doing what boys do best, seeing how far they can push their dads to the edge of insanity. To the dads' disapproval, we would constantly experiment with new things to throw in the fire, soda cans, insects, magnesium shavings, socks, various food items, each other, rocks, flammable liquids, etc. Another favorite game was to make "torches" either with burning marshmallows or burning sticks and then walk around the campsite until somebody got poked with the hot end of the stick, game over. Then there was the ever-popular past time of melting your brand new pair of snow boots by using the fire-ring as a foot rest, very entertaining to the dads.
After the campfire, we grabbed our flashlights and headed out to our various shelters. I crawled into my igloo, pulled the snow block over the entry way and nestled into my sleeping bag. I remember sitting in the igloo with my flashlight on and watching my breath. It was SO quiet, snow really has a way of muffling sound, and being inside a pile of it, the only thing I heard was my own heartbeat. As far as I can remember, I fell asleep inside my igloo without any issue. I can't recall how long I was in my shelter until something BESIDES the sound of my own heartbeat woke me up. It was the sound of something, rather, several somethings, crunching around in the snow directly outside of my igloo!
The coyotes were very curious about the most recent resident of the woods and his curious snow-shelter. I heard them sniffing all around the edges of the igloo. They started pulling on
the twine that I had used to tie down the tarp I was using for a roof, making the tarp shake. I knew they were coyotes because they were making the little yip-yip noises that coyotes make and panting a little, like my dog at home. I have no idea how I resolved this situation, dad had always told me that coyotes are not to be feared, they are more scared of me than I am of them and I truly believed in this. I was still pretty much terrified though. I don't know if I shouted at them and made them run away, or if I cried for help and dad came to save the day, or if I just lay there, completely silent until they left. However I dealt with the situation, I just know that I ended up back at camp and slept in the back of our caprice classic station wagon with my dad. All in all, it was a very fun trip and a great memory, however, the wilderness had won this round, sleeping in the back of a station wagon in the woods doesn't exactly count as "wilderness survival."
