Long's Peak Expedition 2009 Day 5

7-2-09

Today, we hiked out of the Boulder Field and headed to the trailhead.

One of the other guys headed down earlier. Seems he has cracked a tooth or somesuch and is going to see if he can get a cell signal a few miles from here. For some reason, there IS cell service down there. He's going to schedule an emergency dental appointment to get a root canal or something.
It always seems like SOMETHING with that guy.

Anyways, we told him to take off and we would catch up later. We're taking our time packing up.

He's also the same guy that flipped out on us when we got down from the peak. You see, he panics at the notion of danger. I revel in it. He managed to get another guy panicked too and they almost left us on the peak to go down and find a Ranger... 7 miles away!
Sure, we didn't TALK about a time that they could expect us to be down (it took 3 hours), but common sense should have taken over at that point and they should have waited before getting so freaked out. As it was, these two guys were pretty upset when we finally made it down.
We more or less told them to get over it. This was one of the guys FIRST backpacking trip and he needed to understand that we knew what we were doing. The instigator of the panic attack may not be coming back.

Other than that little incident, the trip was a HUGE success. A great time was had by all, and now we're talking about doing another trip for next year.
Maybe a canoe trip that crosses state lines up north, Maine and New York. Who knows, but it'll be good.


KoP