My First Camping Trip in Over Ten Years

I've been meaning to blog about my trip up north for a while now, but I've just been too overrun to do so until now. As it is, I'm not presently in the most literary of moods, so I'm afraid this entry, while full of detail will be sparse.

While Paula and Poesy had managed to convince me to attend The Gathering over August long weekend, the massive rock slide on the Sea to Sky Highway pretty much decimated plans for the event and it was cancelled. I wasn't too keen on attending in the first place though (I'm not a fan of mixing other people with my faith) so I wasn't too heartbroken.

Chris had other plans for me anyway and was pleased to hear that I was suddenly free. He was going camping with some friends up at Lake Nahatlatch and was hoping that I'd come along. He even provided a tent and sleeping bag, since as the title says, I'd not been camping in a very long time.

Some ups and downs from the weekend:

• Ups
  • The view at night. I'd forgotten what the night sky looked like without all the pollution. It's amazing how many stars you can see when there's no interference.
  • The cool, clean water. We setup camp next to a glacier fed river with fast-moving rapids and beautiful (drinkable?) water. It made for nice background noise at night and a nice wading area during the day.
  • A helicopter! One of the rapid-riders fell off the boat, hit his head and needed to be air-lifted to hospital. The chopper set down just a few dozen meters from our site.
  • Singing Tenacious D's "Fuck Her Gently" with drunken friends Mark and Mark at 3am around a camp fire.
  • The view. British Columbia is so beautiful.
• Downs
  • Drunk people are not more fun while camping. In fact they are much worse.
  • Dirt. I like being clean. This is very hard to do while camping. I didn't shower for 4days and while the first thing I did when I got home was peel off the dirty clothes and shower for 30minutes, I emerged from the tub still feeling dirty. It may take a few days to get back to normal.
  • Bugs. While there weren't as many as I expected (I was barely consumed at all), there were still way too many. One big ugly beetle even hitched a ride home in my bag. He's gone now.
  • The temperature change. 30°C+ during the day, and single-digit temperatures at night make for a rough couple of days. I didn't have an air mattress and my loner sleeping bag had a hole in it the size of my foot... The first night was tough. Nights #2 and #3 however were spent in the back seat of Chris' Jeep which was far more comfortable (and warm) than it sounds.
  • Other people. Blasting rap music from your truck at the beach (thankfully, not where we were camped, just where we were visiting) is Not Cool. Neither is stealing firewood. Sadly, some people are unaware of this fact and made our trip less fun as a result.
  • More bugs. I think I may have run across an Asian Longhorned Beetle though I can't be sure. There were a bunch of them there, but I didn't having anything in which to capture them, so I only have a crappy cellphone picture. I'll send what I have to the forestry folks and let them figure it out.

Overall, I had a very nice trip and would like to go again, though next time I think I'll make sure I come better prepared. Also, non-drinking co-campers might also be nice. Next time :-)

Regardless, Chris gets big points for getting me out there. Thanks Chris! Oh, and for those of you who are interested, I have a few shots in my Snapshots section as the only camera I remembered to bring was my cellphone.

Update: 2008-08-07 07:59:50

I talked to Jessica, my old TEV director back in Ontario and she pointed me to an informational site on the Asian Longhorn Beetle. I poked around there for a bit and eventually found this page describing the qualities of the bug as well as a list of commonly confused bugs. It looks like what I saw was the "Oregon Fir Sawyer" which looks just like the ALB but one of its dots appears near its head and its shell is matte while the ALB shell is shiny.