Overnight

Friday, April 24, 2009

Hoffman Challenge Course, Dryden, NY

            Because our only van-certified instructor (Chris) couldn’t make it to the overnight, we had to recruit Mark to drive us up to HCC, where we parked in the corn field along side the woods, unloaded our considerable amount of baggage, and hiked in to the platform.

            The weather was gorgeously warm, though a little wind, but Mark had heard that there was a chance of scattered thunderstorms later, so he left the van with us in case we needed to leave in the middle of the night.  We pulled ropes and rigged two full circles, and Andy and I jugged up first and switched on to our motion lanyards to help the students transfer on to 

Happy campers, waiting to climb

anchors.  Dana stayed down as ground crew, and once the students were up, she hooked the sleeping bags and pads onto one of the ascension lines so that we could haul it up.

            By now, dark was falling as everyone started setting up their sleeping arrangements.  I opted to sleep in a hammock, even though our class was small enough that I could have fit on the platform.  I climbed up in the canopy and settled into my sleeping bag, pulling off my shoes and helmet but staying on my motion lanyard for the night.

            After a while of enjoying my cozy sleeping bag and the tree swaying in the wind, we started to see lightning on the on the horizon.  We all half-thought we were imagining it, because the sky was clear and we couldn’t hear any thunder, but the more we watched, the more obvious it was.  In a tree is probably the last place I’d want to be in case of lightning, so we opted to bail out now when the lightning was still far off rather than wait and have to leave in a big hurry.

            The part that took the longest was packing up the sleeping bags and pads—usually, we drop them off the deck in the morning, then pack up on the ground.  But as it was dark, we would have had a hard time finding them, so we had to be careful as we packed up to keep everything clipped to something else so as not to lose it over the edge.  Once we had the stuff under control, we started sending students down, with Dana on the ground already to give a fireman’s belay.  Then Andy and I sent the baggage down and rappelled out.

            I was glad that I had just done the hike from the platform in the dark the night before, because there is no path and getting lost was not something I wanted to add to the list of the night’s excitement.  We had a little adventure driving back, as Andy had never driven a COE van before, and then we were nearly locked out of Bartels (where we needed to return our equipment), but we found the one door that comes open if you give it a good hard tug.  In spite of the crappy circumstances, our class took it pretty well—at least they had gotten up to the platform and enjoyed the night a while.  Not to mention, no one got struck by lightning.  Always good.