Getting around to it.
Last night Kate and I finally scratched off an item I’ve had on my todo list for six years…
…auditing my backpacking first-aid kit.
It’s a good thing we did… we’ve taken this first-aid kit on any number of trips over the last few years, but I haven’t taken stock of what’s contained in it since I put it together more than ten years ago. Under the brilliant leadership of Paul Davis, the University of Minnesota outdoor club Wuda Wooch! sponsored a “put together a first-aid kit” night (we could have called it a “put together a Chris Elness overnight kit”) where we crammed all sorts of great things into Granite Gear stuff sacks.
I believe that was back when Granite Gear was still making all their gear in Two Harbors. Shortly thereafter, pricing pressure forced them to move their production overseas, and then their quality went absolutely downhill. Working as a wilderness guide a few years ago, I can’t even tell you how many Granite Gear compression sacks I’ve torn out after barely a week of usage.
But, first-aid kits. Back in the day we stocked them with all the good stuff… sterile bandages, povidone-iodine wipes, Benadryl, Advil, compression wraps, triangle slings, safety pins… this is the stuff I’ve been carrying with me for ten years on all my (personal) wilderness exploits.
As I said, last night Kate and I finally got around to digging into it to see what needed refreshing. I’ve meant to do this ever since I took our wilderness first responder course (where the two of us first met) almost six years ago to the day, and I’ve meant to revisit my personal first-aid kit ever since then.
It’s a good thing we did, because these medications? Most of them expired five years ago.
Or more.
Even the sterile bandages had expired.
So. Awesome.
I threw most of it out, but I did keep some things. Most notably, these huge-ass horse pills of Sudafed, from 1999. The official stuff that you can’t get anymore, complete with the pseudoephedrine and everything. I don’t know what the street price is on this stuff, but I’m sure it’s hot.
We had a great Memorial Day today, tromping all over Mount Diablo State Park through what must have been a Critical Wood Tick Habitat Preservation Area. In the first five minutes of hiking up to Castle Rock (and fussing and fuming over the terrible-ass wayfinding signage that is suffered upon all California State Parks) I managed to pick up three ticks. Taking this as ill tidings for the rest of our hike, we made the fashionable move to stuff our pants cuffs into our socks. Kate, with her skinny hipster jeans that she uses for hiking for some reason, handled this far more elegantly than I did, in my rappy khaki hiking pants.
Think of a time when you were young that your dad embarrassed you in public, horribly and unforgivingly, because of something eye-rollingly lame he did.
That was these pants, personified.
Between the two of us we managed only six ticks total, and the rest of the hike was awesome, despite our traditional “Dane And Kate Need To Bushwhack The Heck Outta Here” finale, which seems to cap every one of our hikes out here in California.
On our descent from Castle Rock we were admiring the beautiful terraced landscape that was courtesy of hundreds of years of poor land management practices and cattle grazing, when we realized the trail we had been following had all but evaporated into a steep hillside of speargrass. We stumbled and slid down the hillside into a Critical Artichoke Thistle Habitat Preservation Area, and eventually wound our way back to the trail.
But this bushwhacking adventure was nothing compared to our winter trip to Point Reyes, where we followed a fire trail and descended a steep wooded hillside into a swamp of knee deep muck.
That was also the same adventure where I learned that you can get poison oak from simply brushing up against the leafless winter branches of the poison oak plant.
I learned a lot about poison oak after that, and I kept learning about it for many months afterwards, as my legs continued to ooze and crust. Indeed, after a trip to a friend’s ranch a few weeks ago I have become far more adept at identifying the many forms of poison oak (there are many, as it were) and avoiding it at all costs. Whether ivy or shrub or tree or vine I find it to be a horrible, hateful plant, one of the most unforgivable of nature’s creations. Near as I can tell, it truly should be the state plant of California, and I argue vehemently that they should start work on a poison oak vaccine immediately, even though no one in this moonbat state would actually take it.
Because we’re not so into things like vaccines and rational thought out here, but do we love our whooping cough.
Oh yeah. This Wednesday marks our official one-year anniversary of moving to California.
We’re going to celebrate by going to Crissy Field and covering me in fake blood.
