Pretty Close to Freezing
by Jim F.
Seattle, Washington

I'm not sure this really qualifies as a survival story...more a tale of stupidity. We did come pretty close to freezing, but there's nothing particularly heroic in that. We could just as easily have stayed in Issaquah and spent the night in the walk-in freezer at the Grange. Instead, my new friend Doug announced that we were hiking to Barclay Lake, up at Stevens Pass.

It seemed a bit early in the year, but Doug said he had called the Forest Service and it would be alright. I decided to trust him. He was a year older than me, and he had real hiking gear. He even had a tent, the kind designed specifically for hiking. This was in 1973, when everybody I knew who hiked just took rope and a plastic tarp into the woods. Aside from the
tent, he had access to a car, so he made a pretty convincing argument. Besides,it was an easy hike. You practically drive to the lake—it's less than two miles from the trailhead. So we went.

We headed out after school, figuring on a drive of a little more than an hour, and less than an hour to hike in. We'd have the tent pitched and a fire going by dark. Things went pretty smoothly up to the point where we left the main road and headed into the mountains. There shouldn't have been snow there. The snow got deeper as we climbed, but Doug's mom's station wagon held the road well, and we made it without delay to the trailhead.

Getting out of the car was the first stupid thing we did. The snow was a foot deep, and it was already close to sunset. But we set off anyway.

We weren't really equipped for the cold. Doug at least had hiking boots, but both of us were wearing jeans, and I had on tennis shoes. The trail didn't climb that much, but the snow was up to our knees by the time we crossed the creek that indicated we were about halfway there. That meant not much more than a mile to go, but it was getting dark and my feet were numb. Doug and I both trudged along looking down and feeling miserable. I was about five feet behind him; had been since we crossed the creek. After what felt like a mile, he turned around and said "When was the last time you saw a trail marker?" I didn't remember. We were both pretty cold by this time, and he started to lose it. It was dark, we were freezing, and we were
lost.

I had a bright idea. We followed our tracks back to the creek, and started hiking up the creek. We knew which way the lake was—or which way it would have been—had the creek not been frozen solid. Second really stupid thing we did: we should have kept following our tracks back to the car and headed home.

We trudged up the frozen creek bed for what seemed like a long time, looking down and feeling ever more miserable. After a while I realized that the sides of the creek had receded. I looked up and saw stars and a bright half-moon illuminating an awesome snow-covered mountainside. We had hiked about a quarter mile out onto the frozen lake.

By this time I was numb up to my knees. We made a beeline for the shore, whacked our way a couple dozen feet into the woods, and managed to clumsily pitch the tent. The lines weren't taut, and it wasn't on level ground, but we needed to be inside. We took our packs inside the tent, which made things a little cramped, but we were too cold to unpack. We numbly retrieved our bread and cheese, and soon were feeling better. Our body temperature warmed the tent enough that it wasn't too horrible once we got into our sleeping bags. The fear, cold, and food combined to make us drowsy, even though we were still cold. We slept fitfully, but managed to thaw our extremities and make it through to dawn.

The light was welcome but not warm. We knew we had to get out of there and back to the car, but were determined to eat something first. We were starting to freeze again by the time we were out of the tent, and my hands were too numb to untie the knots on the tent or manipulate the straps on my pack.

That's when I had the one smart idea of the trip. One of Doug's prize hiking toys was his carbide lantern. We'd used it the night before to light the space enough to set up the tent. He had a little tin of carbide fuel pellets for refills.

I had learned about carbide in junior high, when we figured out that you could use it to fuel makeshift cannons that would shoot sod out of drainage pipes. That would be another story... But the way the lantern works is, there's a little reservoir that drips water onto the carbide. The water causes a chemical reaction that produces a highly flammable gas. You light the little flame in the center of the mirrored metal lens, and you've got light.

If you pour the carbide fuel into the snow, throw enough matches onto it to melt a little snow and start the reaction, you've got a tiny, intense little bonfire. Good for warming your hands enough so that you can at least get your pocket knife open to cut the ropes on your tent, stuff what you can into your pack, and get out of there before you freeze solid.

The brief warmth of the carbide bonfire awakened sufficient common sense in our frozen brains to make us realize that it was more important to get moving than to pack up thoroughly. We had pitched camp away from any trail that we could detect, and we could return after the thaw to retrieve our belongings. We got out of there. In the daylight we could follow the trail, and the adrenaline and promise of a warm station wagon moved us along pretty
quickly. Once in the car we cranked up the heater, finished off our food, and laughed at our folly.

The punch line came six weeks later when we returned to retrieve the stuff we'd left behind. It took only about forty minutes to get to the lake with a clear trail. We grabbed our stuff, cleaned up the mess we'd left, and headed up the trail to explore what we'd missed in the snow. About 150 yards along the lake the trail opened into a Forest Service campground, with a nice cozy little cabin with a fireplace and a well-stocked woodbin. If only we'd read the hiking book....