We prepared very well for this trip, having done our research and homework about what to see and expect. A big surprise, however, has been the daily thunderstorms and cloudy night skies of the Dakotas. It has rained almost every night, and my much anticipated stargazing in these incredibly dark and wide-open spaces hasn't happened yet. The pattern of the days seem to go like this:
Morning: Cool, pleasant, 60's or 70's, usually a little cloudy giving way to sun
Afternoon: Hot, 90's (but it's a dry heat 😂), super-strong sun bathing you with tongues of fire with nary a drop of shade for miles
Evening: Clouding up, still hot, clouds getting dark
Between 12 and 1AM: Deluge from a wrathful, angry god
As anyone who camps a lot knows, rain does more than just ruin a planned hike. It makes everything about camp life magnitudes more difficult. Breaking down gear, covering stuff with tarps, wet clothes, wet tent canvas, muddy everything—rain is a pain. But, the west in general is in a drought, so we have tried to look at the big picture, smile, and soldier on despite the storms.
Then came the wind and lightning came.
The first significant weather event was early in our trip, in Minnesota at Open Hands Farm. The skies darkened, the wind picked up a bit, and then the storm hit during the night. Tree branches pinged off our tent canopy as lightning boomed, illuminating the scene in flashing moments of brilliance. It was intense, but at least we knew that the safety of a building was only steps away. We rode it out, cleaned up in the morning, and ended up packing away a damp canvas. All in all, no harm done.
Things got real in Makoshika State Park in Montana. We knew a storm was coming in, there’s no hiding it in those wide open skies, but we really weren’t prepared for the severity. We woke up in the middle of the night to, again, booming thunder and lightning flashes, but this time it was accompanied by whipping winds. We have no idea how fast they were, but our canvas walls were flapping like a flag about to fly off its pole. The entire camper rocked back and forth, and I had to wonder if the seams and zippers and grommets would hold. They did, and we packed up the next morning for Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, a little shell-shocked but happy that everything survived.
As we set up in a truly horrible site in TRNP (more on that in a future post), we got word of another bad storm due that evening. We had literally just finished setting up our free-standing rain canopy, because we thought it was just going to be a rain event. Nope. Lightning, hail and high winds expected. Again. Sigh. Just as I contemplated taking down the canopy, the park camp host drove by on their golf cart. He advised that these things are usually exaggerated, and we’d probably be fine if we just lowered the canopy to its lowest setting and staked it in. So that’s what we did.
Have you ever watched a disaster documentary, where, in retrospect, the subject reflects on how weariness and frustration lead to them making a bad decision, one that had serious repercussions down the road? Yeah, that's me. Taking down the canopy would literally have taken ten minutes, but by then, due to the stress of the night before and being cranky about setting up right next to smelly pit toilets, I decided to listen to the guy. He gave me the out I needed to be lazy and say “F**k it, let’s leave it up.”
Cue another crazy night of roaring 70 mph winds, insane and intense, even worse than the night before. I tossed and turned, imagining the tent canvas ripping off, the lateral cottonwood tree branch we were under snapping, and our pop-up canopy flying away like a lost umbrella. Turns out I was 1 for 3 in predictions.
The tent canvas survived again. The branch held strong. The canopy…was 30 feet away, stuck in a tree. It had ripped from the ground, leaving two leg sections behind. Hanging awkwardly in some low branches, the bent metal legs looked like a wagging finger, admonishing me for my foolishness. I sighed, because it was too early to scream.
I spent the next few hours cleaning up other things. Our kitchen had tumbled over, the stove was on the ground, saved by still being hooked into a heavy propane tank. All of the wooden boxes we used for storage were soaked, along with all the stuff inside them. Everything was wet, wet, wet. But the sun was out, the sky was clear, and it all eventually dried off. By the time everyone else awoke, all was set to rights, and they found me sitting in a damp chair, sipping coffee and staring into the trees thirty feet away, at the mangled mess formerly known as the canopy.
Finally, I faced facts and dragged it into the open. The kinked metal poles almost guaranteed that the thing would never go up and down again, but miraculously, the fabric was intact. Anne figured it was worth trying to fix. I was dubious, but gave it a shot.
“Olive, grab me that little sledgehammer.”
A two-pound sledge is a beautiful little hammer. Heavy enough to impart your will, light enough to get a good swing in. And swing I did, hammering on the steel until it returned to a semblance of its original shape. We clicked the legs back together, which seem to have been designed to break away for instances just like this, and tried to lower it down. Hmm, not bad. Some more banging and bending, banging and bending, and—holy cow!—it worked. The canopy popped up and went down again, fitting into its original bag. I couldn’t believe it! Anne and I had decided to spend extra money on a good one, as opposed to a nameless Amazon knock-off, and it paid off. I am 100% certain a cheap one would've be toast and we’d have had to purchase another one at the next Target we passed. This heavy-duty EZ-UP, however, was obviously built to withstand some punishment. Let’s hope it doesn’t suffer too much more along the way.
We cut our stay at Teddy Roosevelt short by one day, due to facts I will expand upon later.We limped out of there and started the seven-hour trip to Bozeman, MT, where I looked forward to latching onto some good wifi , uploading some pictures, and finally posting my backlog of blog entries.
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