Adventure Story Contest :: Matt Lepine :: It Was a Cold Night... Very Cold!
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It was supposed to be a nice relaxing overnight. My friend Chris and I were going to climb Mt. Mansfield in Vermont and spend a night out. A storm the previous day shed about 16 inches of snow on the mountain, and covered any form of trail. We tried using the white blaze markings on the trees, and though we were doing a pretty good job of it too!! After wandering for about an hour after sunset, we realized we really weren't doing such a great job. It was getting late in the day and we found that a clump of wet snow on the side of the tree looked an awful lot like a blaze mark. Both of us being pretty experienced, we didn't panic and instead kept moving until we found a nice spot to settle down for the night. There was about three feet of snow on the ground, which took a little while to pack down with our snowshoes. It was a cold night... VERY cold. We quickly ate dinner and crawled into our shelter for the night. I own a Sierra Designs Omega and find it to be the best all-around tent on the market. After 15 minutes of rolling around trying to pack down the snow underneath us, I realized that for some reason I kept getting lower and lower. The snow just wasn't packing down, and I was sinking. I put my hand to the tent floor to try and move myself, and to my surprise, the snow gave way and my hand nearly went through the tent! Our excellent tent site turned out to be about 3 feet of snow suspended over dwarf pine bushes. Besides the 6 inches of snow underneath us, it was hollow. We were already exhausted and agreed that we would just deal with it for the night. In the morning after moving the tent, we found the much of the snow had fallen away and that we were really just sleeping on bushes. I think any other tent would have suffered at least a few rips. But not my SD Omega. Thanks to my tent, I only had to deal with an incredibly uncomfortable nights sleep, instead of a wet tent floor, and the possibility of having to buy a new tent. Oh ya', and did I mention that all this started because Chris forgot the map??? Click here to see how Sierra Designs was used by Matt Lepine, people in the know. |
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