A Lesson For All

Last week, Ted Ropple mentioned in a blog about hiking in the mountains—one of his favourite pastimes—that a woman had recently frozen to death, having gone out unprepared. I had a mind to comment on his post, but the comment kept getting longer and longer, so I thought I’d blog about it, instead.

Then, before I could get to it, he followed it up with a very informative post about what to bring when you do hike in the mountains.

And so, now that Ted has laid the groundwork, here is my story about a near miss, hiking the North-South Lake Loop:

This all happened because I was smitten with a young woman in my office. She was shorter than me, which I found attractive enough, but she was also achingly pretty. In short, out of my league. But I couldn’t get her out of my mind, so I finally mustered up enough courage to ask her out. She, of course, said, “No.”

However, the next day, she changed her mind, and said she wouldn’t mind spending some time with me. I was astounded. We chatted and agreed to go on a hike together.

Now, I am (or was) an experienced hiker, and I certainly knew my way around the North South Lake Loop, just southwest of Catskill, New York. I had hiked it a number of times, it was relatively nearby, and it was a very scenic five-mile stroll. Perfect.

We went on a Sunday, in late April and, due to haste and some faulty assumptions, I made a number of rookie mistakes:

• Both single and living alone, neither of us told anyone where we were going or what we were planning to do.
• I took no gear or provisions. Why would I? It was a gentle hike on familiar ground.
• I didn’t account for the time of year. I was aware that nights got cold in the mountains, but that wasn’t the issue. I had assumed—because this had always been the case during previous visits—that the trail would be populated with other hikers, and that there would be rangers in the vicinity. If there were any problems, which there certainly would not be, help would only be a shout away.

As it turned out, when we got to the campground to find the trailhead, the place was deserted. My car was the only one in the lot, and there was not a sole around. That didn’t faze me a bit, however, and we set out, confidently, on the trail.

It was a lovely hike on a stunningly warm and sunny day. The only problem was the spark I had hoped for did not ignite a flame. Early on, she decided we were not going to be dating, so we finished the hike in awkward silence. Then we ended up in an empty parking lot.

I realized that no one had stolen my car; we were simply at the wrong lot. So, we wandered around the deserted campsite, in search of the other parking lots. I had never been in the campground before, so I had no idea where I was going, with predictable results. We walked, and walked until we realized we were going in circles, then we tried to go a different way. If we got back to the trail, we reasoned, we could track it back to the correct parking lot. But, although we found the trail, it was not a familiar section.

We continued on the trail, however, but I didn’t recognize anything, and we never found the parking lot.

By now, we were tired, hungry, and thirsty. And the sun was going down. That early in the season, dusk descends quickly, and the nights turn very cold, and we were not dressed for it. Additionally, she had gone from deciding we weren’t going to be dating to actively disliking me for having gotten her into this mess. If we were going to survive the night, however, it would only be by clinging together for warmth, but my feeling was that she’d rather freeze to death on her own.

But I don’t believe she was entertaining such a bleak scenario. She seemed simply angry at the inconvenience and the fact that she was hungry and tired, while I was pushing down a rising panic, so I wouldn’t panic her with the knowledge that we had about fifteen minutes of daylight left, and if we didn’t find the car in that time, we were going to become statistics.

Then she got really angry and agitated, and I tried to calm her so I could think clearly, but that didn’t work, and, in a strop, she stalked off the trail and headed into the forest.

Allow me to pause and point out here that this is something you should never, ever do, as it assures you an almost 100% chance of some hunter stumbling across your bleached bones in fifteen years’ time.

Cold reason dictated that I just let her go and save myself, but being a gentleman, I went after her. When I caught up with her, we discovered that—through sheer dumb (and undeserved) luck—we were on a different part of the trail. And not just any part, a part I remembered. Suddenly, I knew where I was, and where we had to go to find the car. My panic cooled, my fears ebbed away, all we had to do was turn right and…

“We need to go left,” she said, and my panic returned.

I was one-hundred-percent certain I knew where we were and where the car was, but convincing this woman—who I had been leading in the wrong direction for the past several hours—to agree that I was right and she was wrong, was not a prospect I relished. As I recall, we argued about it, and I eventually convinced her—against her better judgment—to put her trust in me one last time.

So, we went the way I chose and, as expected, found the parking lot and the car a short time later. Then I drove her home, enduring an awkward silence deeper and more protracted than the previous one.

Strangely, this woman and I somehow became fast friends, and palled around together up until I left for England.

So, the moral of this story, obviously, is: go ahead and ask that pretty girl out; you never know what might happen.

And if you take her hiking in the mountains, be like Ted.