A good walk. Some backpacking. That was just what I needed. I was excited about the trip, like a kid before christmas. I packed my pack. I prepared my food. I checked the maps. I was barely able to get through the half day of work on Friday.

My father picked me up around four o’clock and we: dad, my brother, the dog and me, were off towards the trailhead. When we arrived I had my pack on and was bouncing from one foot to the other with pure energy (besides it was a little chilly.) I opted to wear shorts even though the temperature was in the 50’s and dropping. My legs would warm up as we walked.

We hit the trail and started walking. Before we had walked a quarter mile, the skies opened up and it started to rain. We threw down our packs and scrambled to get our pack covers on before the packs got too wet. The rain did not dampen my enthusiasm. I was out-walking my companions, but I didn’t worry about it. We had a climb a head of us, so I pushed forward. After a while, I burned off the extra energy. It looked like I was at the top, so I took a break and drank some water and ate some jerky while I waited for my brother and dad to catch up.

The rain had slowed to a cool mist. We walked and found that there was some more ‘up’ left in this mountain. If you haven’t hiked much, you may believe that climbing a mountain is simply a matter of setting your sites on the top and going. In reality, you can rarely see the top of the hill, ridge or mountain that you are climbing. Since the trail follows the natural contour of the mountain, you may think that you see the top only to have the trail turn, where you discover more ‘up.’ We often joke with each other as we walk. Saying, “I think it is leveling out” or “Look, I found some more ‘up.’”

This particular mountain is known as Dick’s Dome. I assume that it is called a dome because it levels out and has a broad top, as opposed to a peak. We walk across the top of this dome through open fields that might have been beautiful on another day. But on that night, a thick fog had rolled in, limiting our view and robbing the world of it’s color. As we walked through field atop of Dick’s Dome the sky grew darker and a biting breeze blew across blew with no trees to shelter us from it.

As it started to get very dark we found the blue blazed trail that led to Dick’s Dome Shelter. We walked down the trail to the shelter and the it was a black as midnight even though it was only eight o’clock. We reached the shelter. No one was there. I couldn’t get a good look at in the dark but I could see from the inside that it was pentagon shaped. We stood there for a minute trying to figure out how to arrange ourselves inside, but just then it started to pour. We hopped in and decided we would arrange ourselves from within.

Of course there are no rules for backpacking, there is no one to enforce them. But there are a couple of items we could call backpacking etiquette. One bit of etiquette is this:

Do not eat where you sleep.

We peered out into the rain and the darkness at the picnic table out there and decided that sometimes etiquette is overrated. We fired up the campstoves and soon we had hot coffee and dinner in front of us. For some reason I had packed a small candle. I lit it and provided nice lighting inside the little shelter. We joked abouts the virtues ‘not too damp’ versus the quality of ‘mostly dry.’ Trust me, it’s a more interesting conversation when you are sitting inside an odd pentagon shaped structure during a thunderstorm.

My brother gave the dog the dog a rawhide bone and he settled down to chew on it. We climbed into our sleeping bags. I took some notes and soon I was often to sleep. This trip was off to a good start.