Summit the Summit

Thursday, July 10, 2014

I’m once again headed into the wild with the wild, or maybe not so wild Team and Crew 1106. We are a group of 28 including our 5 fearless leaders.  I’m pleased to once again be traveling with John Evans – it is always good when someone else is in charge.  We gather at the church at 7am, and depart, lets just say sometime after that.  Despite the deluge of emails informing, reminding, begging, and even pleading, we have folks who don’t have all their paperwork so that gets to be dealt with prior to them heading down.  But 4 cars leave the lot and head west then south.

Our group is quite diverse with both young and old.   It will be interesting to see if or how the group comes together

My car with Nate, Michael, Blake and Dillon have a relatively docile journey as the alternatively battle on iphones, sleep, talk mostly quietly.  John leads the way and manages to avoid the 5 or more speed traps our fine public servants have set up along the path.

We get to WV and drive though a town.  This town has an astonishingly high number of taverns/bars/gin joints.  Or maybe that is how every little town in WV is, I simply don’t have a large enough data sample to reach any conclusions. 

 We finally turn into the Summit Bechtel Scout Ranch and note that the steel sign is already rusted (queue the Love Shack line Nate and I both sang).  We drive into the ranch about forever – seeing a fawn and a wild turkey on the way and arrive at the gate at exactly noon.  We couldn’t have been more punctual.  But since we are on time, we get to wait at the gate for 15 minutes while someone comes out to pick us up and lead us to camp.  We drive on a gravel road for about forever (and note the surprisingly small opportunities to get lost which seems strange to have needed an escort..) and wind around the camp and over to Camp C which will be our base camp. 

We arrive and get our stuff out of the car and head down to a registration tent and stand and wait for about forever.  John finally emerges from the registration tent and tells us that a few of us need to go in and get oriented.  We go in and wait for about forever as the guy keeps taking phone calls and eventually says “I gave you all that paperwork right?  Enjoy your stay.”  Or something like that.  We head to camp and they scramble into the coveted  tents, and generally since they are all identical and new and not full of spiders, everyone is happy. 

We then go back up the hill to the registration tent to have a tour after which we can get to having some high adventure.  After waiting about forever (and receiving a report that it wasn’t particularly helpful) we determine to do our own tour.  So we gather up who we can and head out.  We cross past the fishing pond and walk up the hill past the summit center and past the sustainability house and work our way over to the action center, which, as you might imagine, is where all the action is.  It is sort of like a carnival for bigger kids and so folks are free to do what they want as long as they stay with a buddy.

We are assigned to the BMX so we head there first.  We enter the tent and he tells us to grab a helmet and some pads.  So I grab a helmet and he hands me some pads.  They are two kneepads and two elbow pads. And, they are WET.  Not like damp from humidity, but like really wet.  And if they were just wet, it would be pretty gross, but the odor emanating from these pads is beyond my feeble ability to describe.  It is a combination of mold, a teenage boy’s sweat socks, and the set of gym clothes my son brought home from middle school about once a semester.  And once they were on, it didn’t go away.  And it’s staying power is something every perfume manufacturer would covet.  Remember, we are out of doors (thankfully because if we weren’t, I’m pretty sure we would all have been passed out from the smell long ago) and it is still so pungent my eyes are watering.

They start us with two beginner hills.  The key, they tell us, is to keep the pedals level.  It actually works pretty well.  After some practice we head over to the big course.  It is a blast.  It is also very surprisingly strenuous -  you end up not pedaling that much but you end up totally out of breath at the end of each lap.  Jeremy has his go pro on and nearly bites it but saves it with just a little ankle tweak.  We have a few other guys dump it and Michael who can’t seem to master one of the curves.  But by and large we are unblemished or maimed and have a great time.  They are getting ready to shut down at 4:30 for dinner (yeah, sort of early right?) So we had over and sit in the cafeteria area and wait for dinner.

We note the favorable comparison to the Goshen food and concur it is much better.  We have salad and spaghetti and garlic bread with Watermelon for dessert (or desert is we read the sign).  After dinner we head over and shoot arrows.  We then chuck tomahawks at logs.  I finished the evening with a few of us on the challenge course.  It’s a pretty good time.  We are looking forward to some of the other activities tomorrow.  Should be a great time.  I’m tired, so I’m going to bed.  Hopefully more tomorrow!