holy hell.
 

so this weekend my gf and I went camping in shenandoah nat'l park (northern part of va) and like all great caming trips we take, storms totally took us over.

very rarely does shit scare me but this did.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...082501457.html

Basically horrendous lightning, thunder, few inches of rain in a thirty minute span.

And we were hiking the appalachian trail.

It's pretty goddam freaky to have a storm like that pass directly overhead while you're in a forest that varies from light to moderate cover. lightning started in front of us, then just to the side of us, and then behind us in a matter of minutes. probably the brunt of it less than a few hundred feet away. and loud enough that it reverberated. hard to explain the sound, but kind of like the pod race in star wars episode I.

so we ran our asses off in this torrential downpour until it let up. we found a service road and took that to cut some time off and watched the lightning streak across the sky in front of us again as we looped back to the trailhead.

eventually the storm let up and we got back to camp where we grilled buffalo steaks and had a few beers. then just as the steaks finished, the next storm came, lighting up the sky and drenching everything we had out. we tossed everything in the car and dove into the tent where we played some gin rummy and eventually fell asleep to the flashes of lightning through our closed eyelids.

last time it was assateague national preserve--same thing--only we were racing back from the campsite in a metal canoe on open water with a thunderstorm chasing us from behind.

fun I tell ya.

Mother nature hates you.
I want to go camping.

You have any desire to come back to California? If you do, some friends of mine are looking for a SW engineer for the KC-10 sim program at Travis AFB. Boring work, occasional night shift and you'd have to work for FlightSafety but the pay has gotten pretty good. Of course, I have no idea what you're making now.

Not exactly on topic but it didn't look safe to PM you. Also, I couldn't remember if you were in SW or not. My apologies if I'm wrong.

dude I love backpacking, its really one of my favorite things to do and i am lucky to also have a girl that likes it as well. Sounds like you really get bad luck though as we haven't even had to deal with rain, although it did sprinkle snow one time on a high altitude camp in july ... that was cool though. I feel for you, stuff like that almost makes you not want to go next time.

Edit, well while we are on the subject of hiking, here are a few of the pictures I took a a week and a half ago in the Hoover Wilderness/NE Yosemite region. Altitude was beween 8700 and 11250 the entire trip which was awesome. Nothing like that to whip you into shape ... good luck 56k :P Oh, and sorry the pictures suck because they were taken by a disposable as my digital is broken.

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see that person on the trail? The pictures do not very well convey the distance we walked.
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heh. not software. mechanical engineering. i had plenty of opportunities in california. sadly had to tell apple's peripheral group guy to stop calling me after i moved. that might have actually been a cool job even though apple allegedly doesn't give huge raises. i still get calls from random lame head hunters that don't know i moved...

as for nature hating me... no way! nature's good. i've been camping countless times (some backpacking, some car camping) and very rarely is it like this.

This is the previous trip to assateague when it wasn't crazy storming:
http://gallery.y8s.com/d/13494-2/DSC01035.jpg

Canada cooperated with us nicely too. only snowed while we were in Banff in a cabin -- which was kinda cool. Hiking in the day-after snow wasn't bad at all. Pretty wild to go from hiking in shorts to hiking in snow over 4 days.

Grinnel Glacier off in the distance...
http://gallery.y8s.com/d/15931-2/DSC02108.jpg

We went right at the end of the season...
http://gallery.y8s.com/d/16405-2/DSC02320.jpg

human snowman.
http://gallery.y8s.com/d/16552-2/DSC02378.jpg

the end.

Assateague was great 35-40 years ago, almost no people, wide open. Then about 25 years ago I went back and civilization had caught up to it.

yeah if you stay in the drive-in areas it gets pretty trashy pretty fast.

I find that the further you go from car-accessible places, the better it gets FAST.

we got in a canoe and canoed several miles from "civilization". I think we saw two people.