Day 44

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Today started really early! It was Andres last day at camp because he was a counselor for the 4 week kids, so to commemorate him and for a great good bye, we hiked Piermont…..at 4:30am!!! It was Andree, Jessica, Wes, and Fred. Yes yes I know in my last entry I mentioned that Piermont is closed….and it was….but it was only because there was so much rain and there was a lot of debris in the path. (For those of you asking why Piermont Mountain….here is why, the only entrance to hike it is in camp, (camp owns the path) and to go on other hikes we all have to hop onto a bus for an hour to get there….so Piermont made the most sense.) We do have a lot of tourists come to hike Piermont, so throughout the day we may see a couple strangers. Ok…so back to my story, it took us an hour to hike and for the first half hour we needed our flashlights, but by 5:00am it was light enough to see the path in front of us. The path was pretty muddy and there were lots of new streams that I do not remember from our first hike at the beginning of the summer. I got muddy, stepped in what I thought were puddles but were knee deep! What fun!!!! So, it took us an hour to get up…no rest breaks and we were moving fast! We were able to catch sunrise which was glorious! We stayed at the peak until 6am and then decided that we needed to make our way down so we could all shower before Reveille. I literally SKIED the way down….no joke….sometimes on one foot! Wes even told me “Man I have never seen someone with so much talent and balance! I am impressed you have not fallen yet!” I did make it down without falling but I do think that going down the mountain is just as hard as going up. It did take us an hour to get down….no breaks…..and I felt SO accomplished!!!! (And ready for breakfast!)
Today and tomorrow 12A (my cabin) and 2A (our brother cabin) leave for our gypsy trip. A gypsy trip means that it is a camping trip with fun activies in between. So we left and went to “The lost River” which was pretty cool, it was a gorge between 2 cliffs and random caves that we were able to explore. We then had our traditional lunch PB&J’s or cheese sandwiches……which I do not want to see another PB&J ever again!!!! We have them on every trip we go on…Baker River, all of our hikes, and gypsy trip. We then made our way to the campsite and set up our tents, we had 2 tents for the girls, 2 tents for the boys, 1 for the girl counselors and 1 for the boy counselors and 1 for Connor..remember him? He is the Irish campcraft guy who saved us at Baker River. He was a lot of fun! Unfortunately it rained on and off the whole evening…I made Mac and Cheese on a portable camping stove…and Connor made bacon to go in it! The kids were ravished and enjoyed it! We then tried to have a campfire in the rain and we were able to make a couple of somores before it started to downpour! We then had to rush the kids into their tents (which were soaked inside and out!) and make sure everyone was in their jammies and all of their belongings in the tents! While all the counselors were putting the kids to bed Connor and Andy (our unit leader) snuck out to get late night snacks for us! We eventually got all the kids settled and back to the girl’s tent for some counselor time! All 6 of us were scrunched into the tent eating chips and salsa and drinking Sunkist! We were in bed by 1030 which is really late especially for me starting my day at 430! The boys had to walk back to their tent in the pouring rain…the only way to explain it is that we thought our tent was going to get carried into the river because there were puddles everywhere and everything in the morning was soaked!

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