I went backpacking with some wonderful friends of mine. David Scearce and his family, Roxanne, Charity, Tiffany, and her boyfriend Will. David Grage and I came along for the fun and fellowship.
We had planned this weekend several weeks ago and canceled at the last minute because it was supposed to go down to 12 degrees. So we were ready rain or shine this weekend! We arrived at the trailhead at 12:00 on Saturday Feb 16th, 2008. We knew it was supposed to rain about an inch and were fully prepared (or so we thought!). It started raining when we started hiking and the first item was to cross Falling Water River at the trailhead. So we took our obligatory group shot and got started. Click on the picture for a larger version.
The crossing was maybe a little deeper than I remembered but not bad. We were anxious to get on the trail and make it to our site to make camp a few miles away. We planned to camp at a central location for two nights and dayhike a couple of waterfalls on the middle day. Then hike out Monday morning and get back home by Monday evening.
The rain was steady for the entire hike and even though we had good rain gear on. We were still soaked. We got to camp and set the tents up in the rain which is not a fun thing to do and you can't avoid getting the inside of your tent wet, no matter how fast you are. The main thing to avoid is getting your sleeping bag wet because no matter how miserable things get, the bag is your lifesaver and place of comfort in the wilderness.
After starting a fire with wet wood, and cooking dinner, sitting around the fire and talking about our adventures was not on the agenda. We hit our tents by 7:00 and stayed in them for over 12 hours. It rained and thundered all night long finally letting up at about 3:30 the next morning. I was tired though and slept really well between the periods of thunder and heavy rain. On thing we all noticed however was the increasing loudness of the river we camped near. It turns out it rained about 4-5 inches. I had visions of waking up the next morning and finding the bank of the river lapping up around my tent door.
So, we started to stir and I got up, made some coffee and surveyed the situation. The river was up, way up! And we had to cross it to get back to our truck. You can see in the picture on the left the raging torrent that was just about 100 feet from my tent.
We had to make a decision. Do we stay here and hope that the river goes down enough for us to get out or do we leave that day and give ourselves a whole day to consider our options. We'll we marked a spot for the height of the water and started to watch as the water began to fall. It was falling about an inch or more an hour. But it sure seemed like it had a long way to go. I had estimated that the water was up about two feet. It turns out that it had risen by 4.5 feet in the middle of the night but had dropped back considerably by the time we started measuring.
We decided that the plans for visiting the near by waterfalls were risky so we broke camp and headed back to our crossing. We were hoping to find it crossable by the time we got there. We'll it was not to be. The crossing was deep and wide where it had been shallow and narrow the previous day. After looking for quite a while for feasible plan to get across the river, we finally gave up an decided to make camp no more than 100 yards from our truck but on the other side of a raging torrent. Maybe the river would be down by the next morning.
Now I should say this. We are all praying Christians and we had had group prayer before leaving and that morning and we all were praying individually the whole time. We were not anxious. We had plenty of food and we knew the water would go down eventually. In fact even while making our supplications before God we were thanking him for the rain, trusting that he would care for us. That state of trust and comfort was before we discovered that one of our guy's sleeping bag's had gotten soaked when breaking camp. His tent had filled with water the night before but he had a thick air mattress that had kept him above water. We'll the bag got wet when packing it up. As I said before, a down bag is a wonderful thing to keep you warm in the coldest of weather and it was going down to 24 that night. But when a down bag gets wet, it looses all its insulating capabilities.
We were in a pickle all of a sudden. David Scearce was the only one who knew about this at that point and he prayed right then and asked God to help. Just a few minutes after this prayer, he turned around and saw some kayakers on the river. They had pulled up to the bank and David began talking to them. He mentioned our situation and immediately they offered to help us get across the river. Talk about God's providential answer to prayer!
We broke camp in record time and these guys not only helped us get across but we did not even get wet doing so!
Below you'll see a graph of the water levels in the river. Each vertical line is at midnight. You can see that we started hiking just after noon on Saturday the Feb 16. The river started rising soon after and by the time we got to camp the rain had socked in pretty well. The water continued to rise until about 3:00 the next morning when it stopped raining. The next morning, the water had dropped some but it had a long way to go. You can see that the water level was about 2.2 feet when we made our crossing the day before and by the time we were rescued it was over 2 feet higher, up to our chests. And that is on the tall guys! We had three ladies for whom the water would have been around their necks!
So, had we not made the decision to leave when we did, we would never have seen the kayakers on Monday morning and the water would still have been up about 15 inches. Thank you Lord for providing for us!
