Camping survival

Jennie and I lived about six miles outside a very small village in Western North Carolina near the Smokey Mountains. Calling it a village was generous as it had about 75 residents, a gas station and a convenience store. This village was as far away from everything as you can get. The roads stop here because of the mountains. Our place had 97 acres of mostly forest. We had a small house with a small barn for our two horses. We rode horses as much as time permitted. We weren’t limited to riding on our acreage because the state owned the rest of the mountain behind us.

Everyone here kept to themselves pretty much and weren’t really very friendly. That was fine by me as long as they didn’t cause me any trouble. In the six years we lived here we had no trouble out of anyone. They all seemed to respect everyone’s privacy

Our vacation plan this year was to go horseback into the mountains for a few of weeks of rough camping. We had been coming to the same spot for 5 years. It was a beautiful isolated high meadow we had seen from a small plane years ago. It took a few tries to find a path to it but we eventually did make it. The first time there, we made camp and fucked all day long, high on the mountain. We ran around naked as we pleased for a week or two. Now we go back every year to do the same.

Jennie and I took our horses Lightning and Minney and our supplies and headed out early in the morning. We took our good old time making it up to our destination. It was 4 days of back country riding to get high into the mountain to our secret camping spot. There were no trails to follow and whatever tracks we left the year before were long gone.

I guess we had been rather lucky with the weather until this year. The third night camping it blew up a storm that was a doozy. It tore our tent loose and blew it and us across the field and nearly blew us both off the meadow. If it wasn’t for an old stump we would have had a bad ride in the tent down a hillside. As it was, we got bruised up from the tumble we took.

We rode out the storm where we were against the stump in our collapsed tent for fear of getting in worse trouble. I reached out only enough to secure the tent to the stump with a tent rope. I never felt wind that strong before in my life. Our horses ran off somewhere during the storm.

By morning the storm was long gone. We woke up sore as hell from our tumble, the uncomfortable sleeping positions and being wet all night. We both had sprained ankles and could hardly get around. We went out to check the damage and found everything gone. Our supplies were blown away like we almost were. We limped around looking for things to salvage but didn’t find much. We called for the horses but they didn’t come.
Looking over the mountain side it was pretty clear that a tornado had gone very close to us. Jennie started crying about not being able to get back and that no one would come looking for us. I told her we were alive and we would survive.

I made some makeshift crutches to help us keep off our bad ankles and then went on a longer search for any of our supplies that blew away. It was really rough getting around but I did find some of our food, little of our clothes but came back with Lightning. He was limping so bad I thought he wouldn’t make it back to camp. He was real skittish from the storm so it took a while before I could calm him down. There was no sign of Minney.

Jennie was real happy to see I found Lightning until she saw how he was struggling to walk. She was hoping we would be able to ride him out together but now knew better. We put the tent back up and tried to get ourselves settled. We talked about our options which weren’t much. What little food I found wouldn’t last a week unless we found a way to supplement it with wild plants and possibly animals. Lightning had plenty of grass to eat so that wasn’t a problem and we had lots of clean mountain water. We just had to find more food.

We didn’t sleep good that night. Both of us had nightmares about the storm and I dreamed that we had to eat Lightning to survive.

The next morning we got up and started looking for edible plants to eat. Luckily I took a survival course run by a local conspiracy nut so I thought we would have no problems. The problem we had was I couldn’t find very much of those plants. We were going to have to ration our food until we recovered enough to walk home. The good news was I could already feel my ankle was getting better. Lightening was doing better too but it took a lot of calming to keep him from running away every time the wind kicked up.

We decided against sex because it used too much energy. We ate a lot of dandelions and other weeds which weren’t bad. We saved the real food for when we would start our long walk back.