Happy 2025!

I’m back – at least I’m trying to be. I knew that the biggest obstacle to keeping up a site like this was maintaining the routine – and after a few years of dogged semi-consistency, I found too many excuses to STOP. I always told myself I wouldn’t be one of those people who felt compelled to explain my absence – feels a little presumptuous to believe that anybody wants to know it – so I won’t!

Just merely accept it as a resolution for the New Year, I’m going to try and reinvigorate the “Squirrel”. It’s good for me, and I hope it’s good for others. It’s certainly not hurting anybody!

First Camp of 2025

To start off, a little micro-adventure to kick off the New Year. I think it serves as a good example of how a quick excursion close to home can really be an exciting change of pace.

It’s been years since we’ve had decent snow in Maryland. (At least in my part of it). And a week ago we finally got some. A solid 8 inches with only a little bit of freezing rain mixed in. Even better, it stayed cold enough that the snow stuck around long enough for a SECOND snowfall to pile up on it a week later.

My goal – go spend the night out IN the snow, and let the new snow fall on me while I was out.

I had hoped to get out of work early enough on Friday to go find a spot and set up before sunset, but that didn’t happen. So I enjoyed a Friday evening with the family, had dinner at home, and then changed clothes, loaded up a backpack, and trudged out the front door with a headlamp and trekking poles at 11pm just as the new snow was falling.

Entering the woods (mostly oak and American holly), I encountered deep snow that was still light and powdery, and I found deer hoof-prints leading in multiple directions. I tried to follow a set of prints for easier bushwhacking through the trees, and just kept going as the snow intensified and the illuminated flakes in the beam of my headlamp made it hard to see very far.

Eventually, I found a spot that was fairly level, fairly open, and secluded enough that I couldn’t see neighborhood house lights or hear traffic on any nearby roads (but to be clear, I was essentially camping in the backyard). And I lit a fire.

It wasn’t cold enough to NEED a fire, but I thought it was lovely ambience. I made a little platform of sticks on top of the snow, and built a fire lay on top of it from twigs I was able to break off standing trees. “High and dry” dead limbs and twigs are a great source of tinder and kindling in wet and snowy weather – they’re almost always dry enough to burn, certainly better than anything you’ll find lying on the ground.

While the fire crackled, and the snow kept falling, I walked a back-and-forth pattern to break up the snow and check for unseen obstacles in an area roughly the size of my tent, propped up my pack (under a pack cover) against a nearby holly tree, and got to work putting up a tent in the snow while trying to keep as much falling snow OUT of it as possible.

It’s challenging to get a tent up during active precipitation and not get the inside of the tent wet, but I’ve had to do it twice in a row now (more on the previous attempt later). The trick is to lay the fly on top of everything and then get the poles in place and erected underneath, without letting the fly slide off while you’re doing it.

Somehow I managed it. I got my bag inside, my ground pad inflated, my sleeping bag out of its stuff sack and situated. Its benefit exhausted, I went to put out the fire (it wasn’t much more than a few glowing coals at this point anyway, it had never been very big), and was rewarded by a nice satisfying “hiss” every time a placed a handful of snow on top of the dying coals.

As I got undressed and settled into my bag, getting everything situated – Boots in the vestibule with laces tucked in so they wouldn’t freeze to the ground; pad and body placed so my foot wouldn’t slip off the insulating pad and onto bare snow; knife and lighter in the mesh pocket by my head; headlamp, phone, water bottle and glasses on the floor nearby where I could find them by feel in the dark – as the snow kept falling. Pif, pif, pif as the flakes hit the tent, and an occasional shick as an aggregated berg slid down the tent fly.

The clouds were thick but the moon was bright, so there was enough of an ambient glow to see the tent fly becoming opaque. The snow would shift from light, icy flakes to heavy wet ones, and back…

And then I woke up. It was silent. The tent fly above was completely covered. I was slightly chilly – but nature was calling with the demand to address compulsory biological functions. It was 5:30 am. More time had passed than I thought. Still, I was cozy, and I didn’t want to leave the protective warmth of my bag, so I lay there fighting denial and tried to convince myself I could ignore it and go back to sleep. Some people swear by keeping an extra bottle on hand for just such an emergency, so they don’t have to leave the tent. But it wasn’t THAT cold! I eventually threw on some pants and my fleece shirt, tapped the ceiling at the top of the tent to force snow to slide clear of the door zipper, and went outside.

It hadn’t snowed much – less than the 1-3″ forecast, more like 1/2 inch, tops. But it clung to the trees in a way it hadn’t the night before.

I got back in bed, leaving my extra clothes on, and slept again. The next time I was conscious it was 7:40. The sun wasn’t OUT, but it was UP, and the world was considerably brighter. It was deathly quiet, in the way that it is only after a fresh blanket of snow muffles the sounds of the forest. The snow wasn’t heavy, but it was new.

I got the tent down, only spilling fresh snow off the low holly branches into the tent and down the back of my neck a few times. I tried to follow my own steps back out, but quickly lost the trail. The snow accumulation was light, but it was thick enough to obscure my footprints from the night before – my tracks and the those of the deer were now equal, featureless depressions in an otherwise smooth blanket of white. Besides, the limbs were hanging lower under the weight of snow, and I could see farther. My course out would have to be different, and ducking and weaving through the trees was better achieved without reference to mistakes of the night before.

And just like that, I was back at the house – still the only one up – with a fresh pot of coffee brewing to start the weekend. It only took roughly 9 hours, and I was asleep for most of that, but I had a great little adventure. This one took a little specialized equipment in the form of a cold-weather bag and a good insulated ground pad, but otherwise it wasn’t complicated. It was enough to reset my mood, refresh my spirit, and set the tone for the weekend such that I’m still thinking and talking about it two days later.

I resolve to do more. Maybe we all should.

Get Out There

http://www.flying-squirrel.org