Are You Grizzled? SWEAT Part II

Posted 12:40 AM, August 28, 2006, by tenforde

Two of the hard realities of spending three days in the wilderness are that running water only comes from a stream and deodorant is synonymous with bear attacks. As a result, personal hygiene suffers greatly. Despite these inconveniences, our group grew closer and more grizzled together.

Now what is the definition of grizzled? From a game show parody on "Saturday Night Live" called Who's More Grizzled?, the term grizzled is defined as being the roughest, toughest, most hardbitten old-timers around. At the conclusion of the first day, we learned that someone forgot to pack toothpaste for our group. Before departing Stanford, we were warned that anything with fragrance (including deodorant and toothpaste) could attract wildlife, specifically bears. When we prepared for bed the first evening, we learned that our toothpaste rations had not been prepared. We could attempt to contact a different group that was traveling counter-clockwise on our trail loop, but we would not cross their path until the next day. Unfortunately, that meant we would have to go without brushing our teeth for the nigh. Little did we know, the next day held much greater challenge for us.

After backpacking for four miles our second day, we stopped at our lakeside campsite. Each person was traveling with two Nalgene bottles, and we filled them daily by using a water filter. The resulting water resembled tap water (it would be a stretch to call the water quality and taste identical). When we attempted to re-fill our water bottles at the lake, we learned that the pump was failing to function properly due to a faulty filter. The lake water needed some form of cleaning performed, as giardia is common. Giardia is a parasite that causes one of the most common forms of water disease. Side effects include diarrhea and intestinal distress. With one day of backpacking ahead and three meals remaining to prepare before we reached the trailhead, we needed to engineer a new method to prepare potable water. Our solution was to filter the water using one side of a clean t-shirt and then boil it for five minutes. Our water may have been clean, but it tasted horrible – like drinking bitter water with ash (I'm pretty sure that some of our filtration left remaining debris in our final product).

In addition to concerns regarding giardia, we learned that bats were traveling over the surface of our previous lake. Tyler astutely pointed out that bats are the leading carriers of rabies. This made the idea of bathing in the lake extremely unappealing and added to our failing hygiene. Combined with our trail travels and day hike to Elephant Rock (see photo), we decided to amend our group name to the grizzled sloths.

At the conclusion of our backpacking trip the third day we were filthy, dehydrated, smelly, and starving. When we sat down at Lake Alpine Lodge at the trailhead and finally saw ourselves in mirrors, we were impressed by our transformed images. The discussion arose regarding who was the most grizzled. Ariel and Philippa had the most cuts and bruises on their legs. In addition, Ariel's white t-shirt had a splotchy-brown appearance, giving her the edge on Philippa. However when Jason took off his hat to reveal a dirt-line that separated his exposed face to his hat, he was the hands-down favorite of our group as being the most grizzled member of our team. As we sat down and enjoyed a pitcher of beer, ate burgers and fries, and joked together, no one in our group seemed to mind this transformation.

Our group at Elephant Rock (from left): Ariel, Philippa, Jason, David, me, Tyler, Luiz, Lisa