April 1st, 2008
To understand the title we need to start Saturday morning at six AM. I woke up early to get in a run before school started; I went for about an hour on my favorite trail, which meant running on top of about three feet of ice. I only sunk in a few inches into the snow on top, but it was still work. I didn’t have time to shower before meeting my group of students for community service.
That was okay because our service project is to go up near that same trail and work on the yurts the school owns. I spent some time chopping up ice with an axe while students shoveled so that we could get into the yurt at all. Then we moved around some heavy wood stoves (removing a rather large mouse nest from one of them first).
I came back and had lunch and then had to meet up with the other teachers who are leading groups on Sophmore Expedition (SophX for short). SophX is a weeklong backcountry trip that all New Hampton Sophmores take instead of finals at the end of the year. As training this year the leaders spent a night winter camping. Partly it was a chance for us to get together and talk before we start meeting with our groups; partly it was a chance to take us out of our comfort zones.
We hiked (or rather snowshoed; it was in fact my first time ever on metal snowshoes) a couple miles off trail. Ostensibly our goal was the top of Hershey Mountain, but we we probably a mile from the summit when it was time to make camp, and that was fine with everyone. I learned how to set up a tent in the snow and we dug out a large table from the snow - we dug down at least three feet for that and didn’t seem near the ground.
All of that was easy; everything up until we went to sleep for the night. I have an old sleeping bag, and I think it was rated 20 degrees when it was new but it doesn’t have the loft it once did and I might not remember right, plus it was colder than that on Saturday night. I didn’t sleep much and the one long stretch when I did I dreamt of being very cold.
I got up around sunrise and ran laps back and forth from the tent to a nearby clearing to try to warm up; then I volunteered to help cook breakfast. By the time the sun was up I was doing well. In fact, once I ate breakfast I had a wonderful time; we saw snowshoe hare, coyote, and otter tracks on the way back and had a blast sliding down steep hills on our snowshoes.
I helped get our gear put away and ate lunch. Then, knowing I had to train then or never, I headed out for another hourlong run.
And that is why when I got back and finally got upstairs, I had a long hot shower which inspired the title of this post.
