The Trip of Awesome. We should all three be dead. However, as you well know, All-Star Perfectos always triumph. Here's a recap of the awesomeness. The brevity does not do it justice, but i know your attention spans are short.
On the flight to Phoenix the captain comes over the intercom to say, “Sorry folks, but there's thunderstorms over Phoenix and we can't land. This is about as common as snow in hell. We'll circle until it clears.” We circled in turbulence for so long I was praying we would run out of fuel and die, just to make it stop. Four people threw up. This was a precursor to our near future.
Finally I landed, met OJ, and retrieved Aaron. We all crashed at OJ's to prepare to enter the desert. Now, who in their right mind enters the desert in June? Madness.
Fortunately, the desert we entered was at about 6000 ft above sea level. However, it certainly wasn't a rain forest. So we stopped at the ranger station to inquire about water sources. Here we met Ranger Ho-Bag. (I will refer to her as this to protect her identity.) We should have known by her pink nail polish that she had never stepped out of the AC, let alone been on the Highline trail. She gave us lots of information that would later turn out to be completely false and cause us to swear by the Sun-God Mogdollah to kill her first-born.
We then earned our “Good Backpacker” merit badges by wisely caching water at strategic points along the trail. This was tricky since none of the spots/roads pointed out by Ranger Ho-Bag existed. However, after several miles, sweating and cursing, we prevailed.
We had almost a full moon that night, so we actually began the trail with a night hike. This was extremely awesome and i recommend you all do this at some point. Yes, we were sober.
On day 2 we met Mogdollah the Sun-God. He is an angry and punishing god. To appease him we tried burning small sticks filled with tobacco. He was unimpressed. We actually came across a few streams with water in them. Great, except for the fact that this negated all our work of caching water based on recommendations by Ranger Ho-Bag. Thus we poured the extra water all over ourselves...and angered Mogdollah. OJ angered him most.
Day 3 proved especially brutal. A big reason was that the desert/forest we were in had recently been visited by Trogdor, the Burninator. If you don't know who this is, I pity you. Visit this site now.
Trogdor! The Burninator!Now that you are cool, you know this means the forest was burned, offering no shade, and closely resembling Mordor. OJ began to fight a losing battle against sun and gravity. Notice in the pictures (coming up) that OJ is usually assuming the position of being bent over with hands on knees. (Not just in memorial to his prison days.) The only thing that saved us was that we found a shaded stream to hole up in until Mogdollah's power weakened somewhat. Once we hit the trail again, things got much worse for OJ. He would hike about a half mile, pause, throw up, and repeat. Ayo and I helped out by drinking whiskey and taking OJ's picture. We then camped at this awesome spring that appeared out of the hillside. OJ would have appreciated it if he was conscious or capable of standing. (We also saw some of the most spectacular views ever, see pics at end.)
The next morning (day 4) OJ had a pulse, so we pronounced him good to go. However, the new section of the trail we were supposed to take did not even exist. A big sarcastic thank you to Ranger Ho-Bag. We thus modified our route and headed south to exit the desert. Unfortunately, OJ went from bad to broken. We quickly realized we could not get both OJ and his pack to the next camp site. We had to leave one (OJ or his pack) behind. We took a vote, and despite the majority opinion, opted to leave the pack and get OJ out. Good idea, except OJ then went from broken to dead. We now had a man dehydrated and immobile, plus we were running low on water. The nearest water source was 3 miles away. Shit. Since Brandi (OJ's fiance) was picking us up, we couldn't kill him. We had to resuscitate him. Not easy. OJ crawled into the shade with a large ration of water whilst Ayo and I hiked to the nearest water source to get more. We then hiked back to find OJ in a somewhat more mobile state. We gave him more water and sent him in the right direction while we hiked BACK another mile to get the remaining pack.
On the way out we kept expecting to find OJ's lifeless body, but we never did. What did happen on the trail was that Aaron suddenly began shouting “Shit! Shit! Shit! Run! Shit! Run!” while he did an about face and ran into me, knocking me down into the desert bushes. He had come about 10 inches from stepping onto a 4 foot long, pissed off rattle snake. Unbeknownst to me, the procedure when you encounter this obstacle, is to shout profanity, run away, and throw your buddy down so that he dies, giving you time to escape. Aaron performed this procedure with excellence. We managed to escape however, and met OJ at the trail head.*
We managed to throw up the bat signal, and Brandi (who is awesome) came to pick us up, removing us from the desert. The rest of the trip consisted of air conditioning, Diamondbacks game, and Budweiser. Indeed, a Trip of Awesome.
Here's about 20,000 words-worth of pictures. Perhaps Ayo's and OJ's will be linked soon (that's a subtle hint to you two).
Pictures of Awesome* I was not carrying my snake bite kit which was generously provided for me by Greg Hessee.
