Tempestuous Fury

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Week 3

Week 3 was pretty good. We ended up with 9 campers in Mountain Man, and program happened without incident. Camp-wise, a bunch of stuff happened though. We had a major supercell thunderstorm come through on Wednesday. Our Moutain Man camp only caught the edge of it, but it still dumped a bunch of rain on us. This inconvenienced dinner, but wasn’t a big deal.

What was a bit more humorous was what happened to Cavalcade A, which was colocated with us at the Pole Pens. They were a mostly female group, and ended up with a severe hygiene product shortage, which required an emergency resupply. It being Boy Scout camp, they tried to communicate this over the radio in a delicate fashion, but it just didn’t work out quite exactly that way, heh heh.

It’s going to be a record year for injuries and incidents I’m sure. It’s probably to make up for the lack of such last year. This week, Cavalcade B had a broken arm, our tallest staffer in camp hit his head on a door and required two staples, and another staffer nailed a cow with his car on the ranch road. No injuries on that last, thank goodness. There was also some piddly stuff too, like one of the Outback crew members going into it with their Ranger with “I can’t walk anymore.” That last was just funny; the Ranger ended up calling it in and proving to the kid that yes, they won’t send anyone to get you and they will make you walk out. Assisted, yes, but you won’t get carried, you’re not injured.

So anyway, this is added on to the injuries of previous weeks: the guy on week 2 I saw carried out with what turned out to be a broken tibia, not an ankle, and the medic for that week who nailed his hand through some stupidity and required stitches there. Toss on the flipped car incident for staff week, some more piddly stuff like those two outback crew members who got picked up and escorted from Mountian Man camp last week because they couldn’t go any farther (so they said), my foot getting stepped on by a damn horse, and you can see that Lady Luck is out to get us this year. Response by staff has been top notch and fantastic in all cases, but the volume of stuff is just incredible I think.

Oh yes, and I saw my first desert flash flood this week! About 23:45 as Steve and I were just falling asleep on Wednesday, I heard a rumbling and crunching sound, followed by the sound of water flowing. The creek is now running again after having been dry for several days; that supercell I mentioned dumped enough water to get us three feet up at Mountain Man camp. I’m still a bit upset; I lost 3 cans of Mountain Dew and 2 Jones Sodas, Green Apple flavor, that I had cached in the creek. I had figured the cans would stay sunk in the event of a flood, but they didn’t, and now they’re gone. Major lesson: Don’t store stuff in the flash flood zone, even if you think it’ll stay, because it probably won’t. Hardcore serious weighting is required, and even then it’s iffy because the current when it first starts is incredibly strong. My cans are now somewhere between Mountain Man camp at the Pole Pens and the Notch. Oops.

And now I’m off to kick off my weekend. Seeya!

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Saturday was nice. I spent the day on a nice day hike with our exchange staffer from Taiwan, Ching-Lien. Considering the elevation she was from and this being her first time out here, she did fairly well. I sort of wasn’t thinking about her ability, and was thinking more about getting her out there and showing her everything. She moved at a pretty good pace though. After, I took her to a steakhouse in Alpine, because she told me the food she most wanted to try in America was a steak, and I figured why not? So we had steaks. It was alright; the steaks were a bit tough though.

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I carried a massive ~60 lb. load up to Mountain Man camp yesterday on the 24th. We have a final official number of 38 people, when we should only have an official max of 36, and that last max is very high by Bob’s standards. Much of the week will be spent just making sure all these people are fed, so skills will suffer. I discovered the idiots at base camp will take any walk on moron and put them in the program, which is why our planning numbers always swell. We can only plan on the number of reservations because that’s the only number we get; however, a massive load of people can and sometimes do sign on at the last minute. So the planning number really is more of a guranteed minimum. It gets better: the next two week’s latest numbers are 44 and 41, respectively. And that’s just the youth; no adult leader numbers yet. We will easily crack 50 next week, and going to just be hell. Bob has gone from pissed to resigned, and I don’t blame him. He may not be back; he says he’s gone over the need for hard limits time and again, and time and again they apparently get blown past without regard. It’s looking increasingly like we’ll need dedicated personnel just to carry out our food; the camp director and his superior seem intent on making us into base camp lite, and we aren’t cut out for that with what we have and our program. It’s extremely frustrating, and appears more and more likely that the whole program will just get slammed BOFH style by all of us veterans of it next year when no one wants to staff it. It isn’t fun anymore for any of us.

Food in base camp has gotten a bit suckier too. Not only does there never seem to be anything in the staff fridge anymore on the weekends, but I now hear they serve corndogs for dinner on Wednesday. Fucking corndogs! For DINNER! Goddamn insane! And the reasoning is great. Wednesday is Scoutmaster’s Dinner, where the Scoutmasters (read adult leaders) get STEAK. So staff entertains Scout youth for a an hour or two, and then they all go in to eat when kitchen gets around to them. Apparently, someone had the bright idea that the best way to reduce complaints was to make the youth (and coincidentally the staff) all eat corndogs for dinner Wednesay, so that meal got skipped over for the adult leaders who were most likely to complain. So now, no more chicken fingers like before, which were actually decent. Not that I eat that garbage anyway; I’m in Mountain Man with decent food we make as part of program. But still, it’s a bad thing. Screwing staffers is a short-sighted way to make things “better.” The quality of the staff is what makes things good; when they leave, things will go into the shitter soon thereafter.

Enough ruminations on how things seem to be going downhill though. As of Saturday, my bootzillas were in Mesquite, TX, being shipped via UPS Commercial Ground or something like that from Tennessee. They ough to be here in couple days. I’m excited to try on my new armored boots. It isn’t quite a suit of Mandolorian armor, but it’s a very close start to such. Here’s a link to the ad that sold me on them at Brigade Quartermaster:
http://www.actiongear.com/cgi-bin/tame.exe/military/level4.tam?M5COPY.ctx=23958&M5.ctx=3151

They have Gore-Tex and a crapload of other modern stuff like Vibram soles and even some Dupont Kevlar in the mix in addition to all the stainless steel armor plating. I’m finally joining the 21st century in boot technology in a big way. Like I said, exciting.

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Week 4 has concluded. Our program went fine, except for an incident on Thursday when on our hike four guys ignored an order to stop for a headcount. Headcount out there went four short, and I thought they were lost on the mountain for a bit, but they made it back to camp like we figured they’d headed off to. I wanted to spank the bastards, but of course one can’t do that at Scout camp.

We lost three staffers this week, two on last Sunday and one at the conclusion of this week, all fired in disgrace. The last one was pretty mundane: a new staffer lost his cool at the pool and slugged a camper that was bugging him, which is of course gets you instant walking papers. The other one was much more spectacular and hilarious, and involved someone getting shot. Yes, dear reader, firearms and mental instability are a volatile mix! Who’d have thought? On Wednesday, Bob took me aside and related quite the funny story. You might recall during week 1 that my second-in-command at Mountain Man camp flipped out and we had to get him out of there? Well, to protect the innocent and especially the guilty, we shall designate him M. After Mountain Man, he went to the corrals with the understanding that he could work under daylight only rules. Well, he went to town with another wrangler, L, on that weekend. Apparently, while on the way back from Alpine, M in the backseat of L’s truck looked around and found a gun in the back of L’s truck that L had forgotten to remove. M then looked some more, and found the bullets for said firearm, after which he loaded the firearm and then SHOT HIMSELF IN THE FOOT. Then, even better, they decided to COVER IT UP, as if you could do such a thing. So instead of going back to Alpine, three miles away, where Big Bend Regional Medical Center is, they come to camp and tell the medic a horse stepped on M’s foot. Freakin’ hilarious! The medic of course took one look and knew it was a gunshot wound. The hole in the boot and the exit wound sort of gave it away. Hell, even I could have figured that out. What, you think a horse with cleats did that?

And so M was finally fired, and managed to take L with him, and the corrals are now severely short on staff. Hence my opening comment in the title to Breezy, who was the lead Cavalcade wrangler who came by on Wednesday and told Bob all this.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint), M used a low caliber, probably only a 22 LR. I would have preferred at least 9 mm. He didn’t break any bones either. Ah well.

And I still have his pack! He didn’t exchange it for me with the med supplies, and so now I’m stuck with it. He’ll have to send postage money or it’s mine, and it’s worth much more for sale than some med supplies.

My Bootzillas came in and I walked in them today. They performed extremely well; they only have an issue with a little stiffness on the right boot with flexing up and down at the ankle. The package had a crapload of tags, at least a pound: Gore-tex, Cambretta or something like that which makes the inside feel like a sock, a tag for each steel piece, and a really funny one saying that the Kelvar was for preventing damage in only your more extreme situations (landmines perhaps?). One of the wranglers took a look at them and declared them to be “space boots,” and he’s right: they sorta do look like something you’d see out of a Sci-Fi Starship Troopers type B flick. So in deference to that sentiment and accounting for their armoring, I have decided to name them the Stormtroopers, or Stormies for short. It seems fairly appropriate.

Who knows what week 5 will bring, eh? *laughs*