Random Stories #1

So with it being so incredibly hot outside I thought I’d write about all the different types of weather I’ve experienced and explain why excessive heat is one of the most annoying things ever. Today at work it was 94°F but it felt like 98°F. I was outside all day, but I like working there so no real complaints from me. Something like this happened before. When I went on a trip to Dallas to go to 6 Flags Over Texas on one of my off days I was outside in the brutal 102°F heat for around 8 hours. However I got zero sunburns because I had 100SPF sunscreen on all day! To this day I swear by it. True it makes you all greasy, but better than blistering in the sun I’d say.

Back when I first went to Philmont in 2011 I remember we were hiking up Mt. Phillips and it started hailing. We had to hide under the dining fly and wait it out. It only lasted about 10 minutes, but still a first for me. Usually hiking in New England you might get rain or a thunderstorm, but I don’t think I’ve ever hiked in hail up here in the Northeast USA.

When it hails at Philmont, sometimes the ground turns white like as if it snowed. The roads turn into rivers. Usually storms come over the Tooth of Time into basecamp, but you always have to be ready if one comes the other way. When I was staying in a tent the tent flaps (doors for you city folks) were facing away from the tooth. This is important because it means when you leave for work you don’t have to worry your stuff will get soaked. Always close your windows though. It’s too risky to leave them open in my opinion. The first summer I didn’t have a tent mate ~which was AWESOME~ so I could put my stuff on the other bed and arrange it how I wanted. In the picture you see the bear locker on the left. It’s used as a safe for your smellables: food, soda/juice, shampoo, deodorant, that shirt you got chocolate on… I usually swept my tent out at some point on my off days. I liked a clean tent with no dirt on the floor.

One fun fact about the tents in 2015: if it was raining and you touched a tent wall water would start dripping on you until the storm ended. Very important to not touch the tent when it’s raining. If it’s raining and the wind blows too hard then the wall of the tent might blow up against your face while you sleep and get you wet.

I have a horror story to tell you. So one week a few wasps decided to come into my tent. I freak out hardcore when I see bees. Especially wasps. The way it happened was that a wasp crawled under the tent flap while it was closed and velcroed. I ended up slowly getting out of bed and waited for it to land on the floor. Then I smashed it. Ok so the 2nd day another one comes and I whacked it with the towel. Dead. On the third day, I got up at 8am and was about to get out of bed when I see a wasp crawling under the flap. I was instantly overcome with fear again. I took my shower towel to whack it like the day before and I hit it, but it was still alive. It started flying around the tent! I’ve never unvelcroed a tent so fast in my life. I made a plan. The plan was to re-velcro my tent shut and spend the day in the staff lounge watching movies. (This was before I had a car and did epic road trips on my off days.) The idea was the wasp would get so hot from being inside the tent that it would work hard to find a way out or die of dehydration. I went back to the tent 8 hours later and gingerly opened the flaps it was gone. Mission accomplished?

Sometimes when it rained and I had nothing to do we watched movies. (As mentioned before) There were around 100 VHS tapes back in 2015/2016 and I’ve watched basically all of them. I’d highly recommend Super Mario Bro’s live action. It gets a 0/10 in the CGI department, but the story is mystical. Now, ‘Airplane!’, ‘Flint Stones live action’, ‘Dune’, and ‘Monty Python the Meaning of Life’ are possibly some of WORST movies I’ve ever seen. Fight me. Another great thing to do in the staff lounge during a nasty storm or even during a scorching hot day is Jenga Monopoly.

So the concept is similar to regular monopoly: win the game. This version is different though because it takes way way way less time to finish. I’ve heard that 6 players playing monopoly would take a whole day to finish. In Jenga Monopoly it takes less than 2 hours with 6 people. Every time you go past Go or Free Parking you pull a block out of the Jenga Tower and place it on top. If you accidentally knock the tower over then you are instantly eliminated, your properties go back to the bank, your money back to the bank, and you sit in stunned silence at your crippling defeat while everyone else watches.

Now another cool weather phenomenon is tornados! I happened to see a mini tornado while coming back from Taos, NM. First I went through a wall of hail and decided to push through it unlike the wimps who pulled off the highway to wait it out. Good thing I went for it because not more than a football field away was the start of a tornado. By the time I made it to Eagles Nest it had grown in size and had basically shut down the road that we were on. Pretty neat. (I’m pretty sure no one was hurt). Then it tried to go over the lake at Eagles Nest. I was going to wait to see the water spout, but a park ranger told me to leave. 🙁

One of my favorite things to drive through is Midwest lightning storms (without hail) because it’s just so mesmerizing to watch lightning fork across the sky. Watching it from afar is better than driving through it because it’s less dangerous. I remember in 2016 my friends and I used to sit in lawn chairs and watch the storms go by. One time a storm was so close that when lightning hit a water tower nearby you could feel the ground shake. That freaked us out so much that it was the end of our outdoor lightning storm watching parties.

Have you ever looked for the boogeyman in a thick fog? Well, I’ve looked for elk in thick fog. Imagine going 65 mph and hitting a 700Lb elk. That would ruin your day! I hate driving through fog. Especially on I-25 in New Mexico because you can’t exactly slow down. The speed limit is 75 mph so imagine if you went 45mph to be safe in heavy fog and someone slams into at 75mph because of the fog. It’s so nerve racking. Now fog from your tent is cool. Makes Philmont look at mystical and mysterious.

Ok so another terrible thing is a wildfire. We had a huge 32k acre fire at Philmont in 2018 and I’ve driven past more than one before that. The first one I’ve seen was on my way to St. Louis at around 9am. We saw smoke on the horizon and boom 40 miles later a prairie fire on the side of the highway. Fire department was there so no worries although I’m not sure how that ended. I’ve seen a wildfire from my window seat on a plane too. Interesting to see one while flying.

See I was coming back from Philmont last year and I got a ‘basic economy’ from united airlines. That’s a story for a different time though haha. Grrr I hate flying United. In 2018 I got to drive through a mile of smoke while passing through west Texas. See a farmer was using a flaming cultivator to burn weeds out of the ground. It just so happened that the wind was blowing the smoke across the road. Thick gray smoke right across the road like fog. It wasn’t pleasant.

Ok time for another fun story. Back in 2015 my friends and I discovered these old fence posts. We all ordered flags of our choosing and lashed the fence posts to our tent frames. I bought a 5ft long x 3ft wide Massachusetts flag and proudly displayed it on the side of my tent. Most people represented their states, but some got interesting flags like the Irish flag, Vatican flag, and U.S. Marines flag.

I had neglected to buy enough rope for the lashing so I used a roll of duct tape. My flag held up through the fiercest of thunderstorms. The wind can get pretty wild so you needed to make sure that your flag wouldn’t get shredded. The next year (2016) when I came back I came more prepared. A roll of duct tape and 500ft of nylon rope. That year we secured these 20ft tall metal poles from the grounds department. Turns out they weren’t using them. I put more effort into lashing it this time, but sadly a super legit wind storm came though and bent the pole clean in half. This is a pretty heavy pole by the way, not a little toy pole. It was quite a surprise when it bent. I think the following year the staff guidebook added a ‘no flagpoles in staff area’ rule.

Philmont in the winter is fun because when it snows it’s just so beautiful. The way it coats the Tooth of Time and covers the Villa. I’ll save pictures of this for random stories #2.

Back in fall 2017 I bought a 2000 lumen spotlight to help me make my way to the staff lounge for my all night gaming sessions. Before I was using just my iPhone flashlight to see. When you shine your iPhone light at an animal, all you see are its eyes. I wanted to know what exactly was looking at me. A bear? Skunk? Deer? Bear? Mountain lion? Coyote? Raccoon? One time I was walking back from the Silver Sage Activities Center (staff lounge) at around 4am. It was 40°F, windy, and very dark. There I was with my iPhone light when I heard them. The howls of what seemed like 100 coyotes off in the hills. That’s when I decided to buy the light. The idea was I wanted to at least see what was off in the distance before it killed me. Most of the time it was a herd of deer, but I did manage to catch a lone coyote in my beam of light.

Have you ever really wanted something from the store, but it was too risky to go get it? Like you want steak for dinner, but there’s a tsunami. I have! I once had a craving for bagel bites, but there was a pretty large snowstorm out so it was too dangerous. Family dollar was open however so there I was pacing my duplex room deciding whether or not I should go. In the Midwest usually plows don’t plow from 7pm to 5am so the roads are usually messy in a storm at night.

Well this was one of those moments where you couldn’t see the road, the sides of the road, or very far in front of you at all because it hadn’t been plowed yet. I. Wanted. Bagel bites. Eventually I decided to go and the drive was pretty treacherous. I ended up driving in both lanes most of the time because I didn’t want to end up in the ditch. Don’t worry though because no one else was foolish enough to test their courage. The way back was trickier because I needed speed to make it up the big hill at the start. Too much speed and I wouldn’t make the turn at the top. Long story short, I got the bagel bites and didn’t crash.

I think that this is enough random stories for today so I’ll end it here. I hope no one is suffering in the hot Boston temperatures like me. Drink plenty of water! I’ve got to go check my various gaming apps. Bye bye!