Mr. & Mrs. Link

Assateague Island is a bureaucrat’s dream.  Part national park, part state park across two different states with all sorts of new rules and regulations that vary depending on which side of an arbitrary fence you are on.  But it’s also a place where you can camp a hundred yards from the beach with wild horses.  Which is really cool.

It has been on the bucket list for a long time.  Tiff and I actually had a reservation for early this year, but the weather went nasty and we decided not to go.  So when some friends invited us to join them for a weekend, I had to take the offer, despite the fact that Tiffany was stuck on-call for her Medicine Rotation and couldn’t make it.  Medicine is one of the toughest rotations – in her write-up, Tiffany neglected to say how many activities she had to forgo for work.  She doesn’t complain about it – she never does.  But I sure miss her when she’s not there!

Once Brian and I finally found the campsite (after accidentally going to the Federal Park instead of one of the state ones), we had a great time. We red-cupped the beach for several hours as the sun slowly set, then grilled dogs and burgers for dinner. Brian and I had been in charge of firewood and as we drove in we passed a guy who was selling it off the side of the road. We went a bit nuts and filled the entire RAV4 with firewood. So we had plenty of firewood for the night.

Which was good because it got very windy – and very cold. It’s almost a blessing that Tiffany couldn’t make it because she’s not cut from Montana stock and she’s more sensitive to the lower end of the temperature spectrum. Eventually, we turned in, but the wind got even more intense.

My tent survived the night – although from inside it seems like to blow over at any minute. Several other tents didn’t fair as well. Kelly’s tent blew over with her inside. And hers wasn’t the only one.

And the next morning, true to form, the wild horses rolled through camp. They weren’t shy, and one suspects, they weren’t hungry either.

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I’ve gotten pretty far behind in posting, so we’re going to have to go back in time here.  All the way back to early September when Tiff and I joined some Capitol Hill Tubing Society friends Andy and Brian on an overnight camping trip to the George Washington National Forest.

The initial plan was a full loop that I found in Backpacker Magazine.  But we got a late start and dramatically underestimated the distance of the hike.  Worse, where we assume that we would be able to fill water bottles on the hike, the majority of it was along ridge-lines where there weren’t water options.

So instead of doing the loop, we knocked out the vertical on the trip and set camp at the summit of Meneka Peak.

Since it was just the one night, we packed in steaks and potatoes and had a delicious dinner around the campfire and relaxed.

It’s rare to camp on an actual summit.  Usually, you camp in a protected nook or valley where the ground slopes upward around you.  Camping on a summit is a strange feeling – the ground falls away from you in every direction, so you feel a bit like melted butter on top of a pancake – like you’re going to slide right off the side of the mountain.  It was  a bit disconcerting – both Tiffany and I kept waking up all night with a strange feeling that something wasn’t quite right.  Of course, everything was fine but things just felt weird.  I’ve camped all my life, but I’ve never had quite this feeling of vertigo.

Final point, despite all of the camping and hiking Tiff and I have done over the past years, this was the first backpacking trip we’ve done on the East Coast.  All our overnight trips have been in the Rockies and all our camping out East has been from the car.

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