Day One continued

On arriving, the first thing I did was to get my chair set up, have a rest and then venture down into the hollow to see if I could find any water. It was touch and go. The springs had dried up and I had to take water from a small pool. Looking closely, there was a trickle running, just enough to disturb the surface in some tiny puddles. I had been looking forward to another bath in the bathing pool, but it was dry. Instead, I took a ‘one-scoop bath.’ A scoop of water, around 12oz, into which I dipped my microfiber towel and used it as a flannel.

I had a church with technical problems which I needed to monitor. Knowing this part of the wilderness has good cell phone reception was another reason why I decided to camp here. When I got back to camp I checked my email for problems and discovered that Ginger had accidentally emailed me earlier in the afternoon instead of directly messaging my InReach satellite communicator. It wasn’t good news. She’d got two liters of water from a pool and that was it. The spring near her was dry too. I told her I hadn’t set up camp yet, and asked if she wanted to bale out on the trip.

I didn’t get an answer, and it was starting to get dark so I set up camp. We could sort things out in the morning.

After dinner I spent some time staring at the dark and listening to the coyotes. After a while I retired to the hammock and watched a couple of YouTube Videos (another advantage of having good cell coverage).

There had been lightning flashes and lots of rumbles to the west and north all evening. When I finally turned in the odds were it was going to be a restless and stormy night.

Sometime around two, a big storm hit, with lots of thunder, lightning, and torrential rain. I was nice and cozy. With the tarp in porch mode, the damp was misting in, but I couldn’t be bothered to drag myself out to snug it down.

Day Two

The morning was pretty wet, It didn’t stop raining until around eight, and it took ages for the trees to shake all the water off. I had breakfast out of the rain and drips under the tarp, and went back to sleep until gone eleven. It wasn’t until around noon that everything had dried enough for me to venture out. Ginger messaged me first thing, and told me she had managed to collect water from the rain, so we were set to stay until Monday as planned. After that, I sat around, did a little tiny bit of journalling, and mainly just looked at the trees. It was very humid! I didn’t hold out much hope of there being any running water in ‘Deep Hollow Creek’ but at least my little pool should have been replenished.

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