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[pct-l] Sleeping with Bears & Lightning



Good evening, Ms. Ramkitten,

I once had a very inexperienced tent-mate who repeatedly awakened me with,
"HEY, I hear a noise!  There must be a BEAR out there!"

Drowsy from a sound sleep, I did the usual guy-thing. I tried to apply logic
to what was probably not a technical problem.  I said, "If you hear
something out there, it's probably not a bear.  Bears have big, soft, fuzzy
feet and they usually don't make a sound.  Besides, the bugs and the little
night critters get real quiet when there is something big moving around."

Big mistake.  BIG.  HUGE!  From then on I was awakened with, "HEY, it's
quiet!  There must be a BEAR out there!"

Since I didn't learn my lesson when I peddled that logic-based bit of
advice, I'm about to make a similar mistake with lightning.  You rarely see
one bolt of lightning, so you can mentally plot how far away it is, and
whether it is coming closer.  The flash is nearly instantaneous, but the
BOOM travels about 1100 feet per second, or 0.2 miles per second.  When you
see the flash, start counting seconds:  Roughly five seconds to the mile.
You will probably find that the lightning is a lot further away than you
think.  The only time I was really concerned was during a mid-summer storm
when I was camped on a ridge in the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness in NE Oregon.
One BOOM was separated from its FLASH by less than a half second, and the
smell of ozone was heavy in the air afterward.  I don't really want to tell
you what the next smell was but, believe me, it was worse than the ozone.

Regards from the overly-logical,

Steel-Eye

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Deb Lauman" <ramkitten2000@yahoo.com>
To: <pct-l@mailman.backcountry.net>
Sent: Friday, October 01, 2004 8:27 PM
Subject: Re: [pct-l] Sleepless on the trail


> Okay, okay, I admit it; when I can't sleep on the trail, I'm often
thinkin' about scary stuff. I'm a weenie and that's all there is to it.
There were many nights out of my 178 nights on the A.T. that I didn't sleep
all that well, not because my flimsy (but lightweight) 3/4 Z-rest was on top
of a rock, and not because I was too cold or too hot, but because I thought
that if I listened long enough and hard enough I'd hear something BIG with
BIG teeth and BIG claws snap a twig oh so close to my tent. Why am I writing
this? No clue.
>
> Sometimes it was the thunderstorms that kept me up. Man, I'm afraid of
lightning. I'll take big scary things with big fangs over lightning any day.
I could be fast asleep, and that first little far-off rumble or barely
discernable flash would have me wide awake in no time.
>
> Best nights' sleep I got out there was when, barring a thunderstorm, my
tent was smack in the middle of a group of tents, or when I was in a
shelter, where other hikers would surely protect me from anything scary.
Then it was like, bring on the storms!  Silly, huh?
>
> Maybe I need therapy or something. At any rate, I'm planning a bunch more
semi-sleepless nights on the PCT in 2006. Yay!
>
> Ramkitten
> (Gee, that was cathartic)
>
>
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