I recently had a conversation with a friend about the perception of reality. You look at those around you and you see what is chosen and selected for public consumption. This happens in everyday life, at work, in relationships, but to some special level within the outdoor community.
You see the beautiful sunsets, high summits and perfect yoga poses. But there is much left to the imagination. You don’t witness the innumerable shots to get that skyline just right, you don’t feel the numbness and phantom pains that stick around for months after long distance backpacking, you can’t smell that delightful mix of garbage and rotting human that the backcountry gives to every person eventually. The reality of the wild is not always, or even usually, a nice one. Don’t get me wrong, the benefits are beyond worth the struggle. But, to use a simple phrase: the struggle is real.
The day before had been a hiker trash dream, restful and happy, with good people around us. Bird, Whiskey, and I enjoyed a zero day (a day in which no miles are hiked) camped out at the Tehachapi Airport. We played card games, drank the cheapest of boxed wine and laughed too loudly to hear the interminable sounding of train horns as they passed by.
The next day, after grabbing a hitch from a local in the bed of his pickup, we were back on trail. We spent the day picking our way through cactus fields and far more bees than I thought possible in a place with no water. We took a half day at only 12 miles, and decided to set up camp early. Bird, Whiskey and I decided to make camp in a small grove of joshua trees, on a mountain side overlooking the desert floor we had come across that day. It seemed a beautiful spot, with eastern views for the sunrise in the morning.
Here is where I say, we should have known better. The area that we had just hiked through, was the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm. The joshua trees we deemed so idyllic, had piles of wind worn sticks and rocks built up around them as a fortress. The ground was swept clean and the trees were hunched. Every single sign of high winds were there, and we simply ignored them.
After a quick dinner Bird retreated to his tent and we to ours. Within minutes we were all asleep. I woke at around 11 PM in the dark to the howling of wind and the violent flapping of nylon as our fly struggled to free itself from its mooring. I don’t know why, but thankfully, Whiskey and I had decided to fully stake out our tent the night before, even using one of the trees as an anchor point, reinforcing our stakes with rocks. At that moment I was not grateful, but genuinely frightened, and felt as though the wind would pick us up and carry us in our sleeping bags down the side of the mountain.
As we lay there, debating what to do, the sand spraying through the mesh from under our fly, into our faces and every nook of our gear, we noticed that our poles were not doing well. The supportive crossbar was bending, almost beyond it’s breaking point,and the whole tent was leaning in a sharp angle, straining the guylines. With a quick look between us of, “Oh, shit!”, we began bracing the main pole and for the first time I felt the force of the wind. We could hardly push back against it. Whiskey crawled out from under the fly to check the stakes, while I held the tent together, and found that he couldn’t stand, but only crawl low without the risk of being blown away. It seemed the structural integrity of the tent was all that was keeping it upright, one stake pulled, one zipper unzipped and it would collapse and fly across the desert like a tumbleweed.
As we sat, tired and sore, bracing our home from destruction, we came up with a plan to outlast the wind. We decided to take turns. There was no taking the tent down, it would tear like tissue paper the second it was unzipped. One would support the poles for 45 minutes, while the other napped, and would then trade. We had 20 miles to hike the next day to a water cache and needed the rest. Hours passed, in a haze of half sleep and stress.
All of a sudden, around 2 AM, a loud snap and a litany of cursing came from next to us. Bird. His tent had given way. We stuck our heads out from under our fly to the image of a 6'4", 250 lb man punching his way out of his collapsed tent, howling louder than the wind. His gear blew across the campsite and the remains of his tent flew and caught on various cacti and shrubs nearby. Whiskey and I tried to help, but quickly realized there was nothing to be done in the dark, with winds so high you couldn’t even stand. We retreated back into our tent, while bird cowboy camped with his sleeping bag pulled up around his face to shield from the whipping sands.
We spent the entire night in this position. Trading back and forth between sleep and using all of our arm strength to hold the tent together. Finally, around 6 AM, the winds died down enough to get the tent put away. Bird was still huddled in his sleeping bag, and the campsite looked like a bomb went off inside a backpack. Shredded mesh and nylon dotting the landscape, broken pieces of poles stuck in the sand.
Eventually we packed away the remains of Bird’s tent, along with the rest of our gear, and continued on. What else is there to do. There is only forward on a long trail. The point of the story, I guess, is that sometimes nature sucks. Reality is not what you see on the Internet. Reality is hard, brutal, exhausting and painful. However, it is more rewarding than anything else I have ever experienced. Yes, that night was extraordinarily difficult, but it is now one of my favorite stories. I will forever laugh at the image of a grown man punching his way through a $500 tent. The following days were some of the most beautiful in the desert section, filled with unique rock formations and stunning wildflowers. Had we allowed this horrid night to stop us, we would never have seen them. Outside perception is not reality. Reality is so much more.
