Emergency blanket: win

It’s 3:30 on a cold, foggy night and a woman tells me that my attitude is not helpful. “We’re all in this together,” she says.

And I think, “I’ve been ‘in this’ for 6 hours. You’re just now showing up.”

Let me rewind a little and say this: an emergency blanket is a windproof, waterproof material that reflects your body’s heat back to you and is useful in situations where hypothermia or shock are dangers. And, if you are not a backpacker, it’s fine that you don’t know what an emergency blanket is. In fact, if you only go out into the woods occasionally, it’s probably not a big deal if you don’t know what it is. But if you are leading groups of kids into the woods, you should absolutely know what an emergency blanket is and the proper protocol for dealing with hypothermia.

Tortoise (Sally) and I decided to stay at the Avery Col. campsite, which is situated at 4,000 feet between the two peaks of Bigelow Mountain. Even though there was a thunderstorm rolling in and the campsite is known to be cold, we camped out because we were hoping it would clear up the next day and we would get some beautiful view.

We arrived around 4:30 pm and most of the tent platforms were taken because a camp for middle schoolers was there, but I was able to snag one of the remaining platforms. Tortoise wanted to try out her backpackers tarp, which is a 3-sided structure that is ultra-light and sits close to the ground like a bivy sack. We looked for 30 minutes for a spot, but there wasn’t much around. Finally she found something that was doable but not ideal.

When I was setting up my tent on the platform, the wind was blowing so hard that I put my heaviest pieces of gear in each corner so that it wouldn’t blow over. Then I staked in down with rocks. At around 7:30 pm, another camp for 14 year olds rolled in, and there was hardly any space left anywhere. One of their leaders came to me and said, “There are a lot of good places where you could setup your tent. Would you move so that we can put up our tarp?” In addition to it being bad hiker etiquette to ask someone to pack up and move at night before a storm, it was a straight out lie and I knew that because Sally and I had spent all that time looking for spots for her. So I said no, I would not move, but I would share.

The counselor setup a tarp that was partially on my tent. This was not a three-sided backpacker tarp like Sally’s, it was a one sided tarp that would block rain if, somehow, it was only falling vertically. But we were on a platform on the side of a mountain with a thunderstorm coming in and the wind was blowing from both sides.

The counselors put setup camp for 4 girls under the tarp and went off to eat dinner. By this time, it had started raining. I checked their sleeping bags and they were already soaked. So I took the footprint (a waterproof tarp) from under my tent and strung it up on one side of the tarp to block the rain. “Surely,” I thought, “they must have some kind of backup plan. They wouldn’t make 4 kids sleep here under these conditions.”

I was wrong. The girls came back and crawled into their wet sleeping bags. I got out my emergency blanket, gave it to the girl on the side of the tent without the footprint, and explained how to use it. I told them, “If anybody gets really cold tonight, you can crawl into my tent.” It was then 9 pm.

About an hour later, one of them did. She was miserable. I tried to sleep but I kept hearing one of the girls cough and moan. She was obviously sick, and being sick and wet and freezing is bad news bears. So I got out of my tent, told her to go inside and get into my sleeping bag and I would sleep outside in hers. (And I would like to mention that I would never sleep in a small tent with two unknown minors.) Midnight and I had yet to sleep.

Because the tarp was too short for me, I had to empty my backpack, put my feet inside it and stick them outside in the rain. I asked one of the remaining girls if she needed the emergency blanket thinking that maybe she was drier because she was in the middle. She said she was fine and so I wrapped it around myself.

Not 5 minutes later, she began scooting closer to me, each time insisting (as a shy 14 year old) that she was fine. This went on for a while until I said, “Take this blanket, wrap it around your body and over your head, and we will share it.” She followed directions and kept inching closer to me. At 3:30 she was scooted close enough to me that I realized she had begun to shiver uncontrollably. I would have liked to give her the whole blanket, but at this point I was shivering too and worried about my own safety. I knew I had to get help.

“I’m fine,” she told me.

“No, honey,” I said, “you’re not.”

Unfortunately, the counselors had not told the girls where they were. The campground is setup with rock paths that are badly marked and it is easy to get lost or accidentally go off trail. With the fog and the rain, I was pretty nervous about going out there alone, but I had to do something.

Because none of the girls knew where their counselors were, I had to start knocking on tents and waking up anyone. I’d say, “Is there an adult in here?” I accidentally woke up kids from another camp. They tried to tell me where their counselors were, but I got lost trying to find them. Somehow, I was able to find the counselors from the camp I was sharing a platform with. (And they were sleeping in tents, mind you.)

“Do you have an emergency blanket?” I asked them. One of them laughed. She must have thought I meant “an extra blanket.”

“Look,” I said, “I have two girls in my tent and another one shivering uncontrollably.”

“We’ll bring her dry clothes,” they said.

I said. “No, she doesn’t need just dry clothes, she needs an emergency blanket right now.”

“What’s an emergency blanket?” one of them asked.

At this point I was livid. “You don’t know what an emergency blanket is? That’s elementary first aid!”

Enter here her comment about my attitude not being helpful and “us all being in this together.”

I took them back to the tent platform and one of them actually said, “Why is the tarp not working?” The girl crawled out and they offered her dry clothes. At this point, her face was pale and her lips were blue.

“That’s not enough,” I said. You will take her back and put her in your tent now.”

They asked if I would like for them to find a place for one of the girls in my tent to sleep and I thought, “Yes. I would actually like to sleep in my tent and sleeping bag tonight.” But all I said was, “That would be ideal.”

I slept for maybe two hours before the sun started coming up at six. The girl in my tent was still freezing, so I put my sleeping bag over her and walked around.

I told Sally, who used to be a nurse, what had happened. She looked at me and said, “I’m worried about your safety. I want you to drink something hot right away.” As I am a solo hiker, I was so grateful that she was there to help me take care of myself.

The counselors said thank you, but they never to responsibility for themselves or apologized for putting me in danger. I felt pretty taken advantage of. As we were leaving the site, we had to walk through their group and Sally said something delightfully snarky: “You campers better watch out for yourselves because your counselors won’t. We wish we weren’t going the same direction as us because we don’t want to see you all again.”

One of the kids told us to break a leg.

We hiked on for a while and one of the counselors caught up to us and told Sally, a wonderful 61 year old woman, to “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

It was the most surreal night I’ve had on the trail. I found out later that the group all hiked down to another campsite that has a caretaker. He taught them about Leave no Trace ethics. During a question and answer time, several of them started asking about hypothermia. I would have answered this way:

Safety rules
1. Don’t go to Waterfalls Camp.
2. Always carry an emergency blanket.

*Changed that name to prevent getting sued.

Related posts:

1. How to use an emergency blanket
2. Impossibly beautiful
3. Basic information on the Appalachian Trail
4. Becoming the enemy
5. A mash-up of Dressed in Dirt

Tagged as: backpacking, Biggelow Mountain, Emergency blanket