Stopping and camping probably seems like foolishness to a city person. I don’t know who you are or where you hail from, but I know the forest and I will give you some information that will help you better understand where I am coming from.

In the forest, the dark is darker than it is in the city, even in the farmlands. If you have ever been “camping” in the woods, even in the middle of the day, you can find places where the sun doesn’t reach you. And in the middle of the night, in these same places, the moon and stars can’t reach you either. In cities and towns, and even in farm-land, you have something called: “light-pollution.” It’s the effect of man-made light against the night sky. Out near, let’s say, Billings Montana, you have to go almost twenty miles out of town to get back to an “almost natural” state. Even a hundred miles out, there’s sometimes a .0011 effect of light pollution.

Out here, it was a zero. That’s 0.00. No light. And there were no stars. And there was no moon. It was so black that often you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Day-hiking was a perilous adventure if you didn’t know what you were doing. Even people like me, who had done it all their life, and even sometimes twisted their ankle, it’s rough… And that’s when you can see everything.  A one legged man does not travel fast… In the daylight, or at any time. A one legged man is often a dead man.

So when you’re camping, at any time during the year, you need to find a good place to do it. You had to have access to, or bring with you, a good supply of water. If you were going to survive for longer than a day, you needed water.

In survival, always remember the rules of three. To maintain a healthy body, you need oxygen every three minutes, you need water every three hours, you need food every three days, and you need shelter every three days. In the mountains, in the dark, you need hope every three minutes. Raw survival and healthy survival are different. In raw survival, certain things change. Water can be up to three days, food up to three weeks, and shelter (unless you’re wet) can be up to three weeks… But hope… Hope you need every three seconds.

And here we get to the subject of fire. Fire gives you hope. Fire gives you warmth. Fire gives you light. Fire gives you a place to boil your water. Fire gives you a place to cook. Fire scares away wildlife. Fire scares away mosquitoes. Fire gives you a fixed point of navigation. Fire is good… Usually. In this instance, fire would give away my position to them who hunted me… And that would be a bad thing. I had to go without fire.

After gathering some pine branches and building a small lean-to against a straight back wall, a distance away from the lake, I set about cleaning the site. This is a skill that I’ve developed over time. Most city folk tromp through an area and leave traces of themselves everywhere. They never see what they’ve done to nature, but I was alright at it.

It was already dark.

There was nothing left to do but wait.