Last weekend we were hunkered down in a shelter, blessedly dry, totally unaware that our tent’s rain fly was suffering a quiet, undignified death a mere 20 feet to the left of us. For 10 minutes hail had been hurling itself down from the sky with the enthusiasm of 18 year olds in their first mosh pit without parental supervision, and we were cheering and patting ourselves on the back regarding our brilliant timing. Dumptruck, Toasty, A and I had arrived at Spiltoir Shelter, about halfway along NH’s Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway, about 20 minutes before the sky turned green and lightning flashed threateningly in near distance. We had just enough time to set up our tents, agonize over whether we should move them due to perilous nearby widowmakers (dead trees), move the tents afterall, and then sprint into the shelter before the sky opened up.

A (who does not yet have a trail name, so I will just refer to her to by the first letter of her name for now), had been able to get the weekend off from her EMT job to come with Dumptruck, Toasty and I for a shakedown hike. Her partner, my brother, was unable to join as he too is an EMT and was on shift for the weekend. A shakedown hike is another name for a short trip in which you test out gear and decide what will or won’t make the final cut before starting a longer hike. Lucky for us, the weekend we chose had offered us a delightful smörgåsbord of weather: a humid 90 degree day, thunderstorms, a night in the 40’s, and a gently raining day in the 50’s. We were going to be able to test out just about all of our gear except for our snow spikes and mental health management of the inevitable ennui that can arise from months of hiking.

I’ll do a full gear post at some point before we leave, but not today for 2 reasons: 1, I don’t have everything yet, and 2, there’s a sleeping cat on my lap so I’m stuck here for the forseeable future and couldn’t possibly get up to drag all of my gear out to photograph it. You know how it is.

A had said that she’d set her smart watch to give storm alerts, but as we sat in the shelter, watching the wind start to whip saplings around and all the mosquitos and black flies vanish, A’s watch remained ominously silent. Then the hail came. Just a few pieces at first, pinging with halfhearted tink-tink-tinks off the metal roof of the shelter. But then the pieces grew steadily larger, lima-bean sized chunks of ice smashing against the rocks in front of us, ricochetting back into the shelter itself, sending us scrabbling to the back of the structure to get out of the ouchie-wowow splash zone.

The 4 of us fell into the kind of rapt silence that comes from witnessing Mother Earth being particularly violent. We also couldn’t speak because the hail on the metal roof was making such a profound racket that I considered pulling out my ear plugs to test their hardiness. After about 20 minutes, with the finality of a conductor cutting off an orchestra, all of it stopped. The silence, deafening in its suddenness, was accompanied by the sun’s shy but determined re-emergence. Before anyone could speak, a cheerful 3-note midi played from A’s watch.

“Oh hey,” she deadpanned, “a storm warning.”

Dumptruck got up to go check on our (brand new, top of the line, never been used, had-to-save-for-months-to-afford) tents, and I heard him say with defeat, “There’s a giant hole in our rain fly.”

My initial impulse was to sidestep the upsetting information and lean as hard as possible into pretending that he was joking. If I can ignore something hard enough it will just magically transform into something less unpleasant, right? This, as you can imagine, did not work. This never works. Not with a hole in your rain fly, not with the fact that someone took the last popsicle and left the box empty in the freezer, and not with climate change. Would that it could, dear reader, but alas, the hail had indeed given our ultralight rainfly a swift death. A giant T-shaped hole flopped dispiritedly open at the top of the fly, and the interior of our mesh-topped tent looked like the world’s saddest splash pad.

We tried, with limited (read: no) success, to cover the hole with a backpack rainfly tied down with paracord. It had the effect of making our tent look like it was wearing a jaunty sort of wet chef’s hat. With the looming threat of a night of more rain, accompanied by the even more dastardly threat of being made a meal of by 10 billion black flies should we try to sleep open-air, we did the only logical thing: we ripped the rain fly off the top of our tent, and then moved the tent into the shelter.

Now listen: this is bad trail etiquette. A shelter should be able to hold at least 6 people, and if you set up your tent inside of it, you’re colonizing a community space. However, there were no other hikers – we hadn’t seen any all day and the weekend was set to have nasty weather. Also, we absolutely were prepared to move it back out should other folks arrive (they didn’t). Given the prominence of dead trees, some of which had sent spears of broken limbs hurtling into the dirt during the hail storm, we thought it safest for A and Toasty to move into the shelter as well. As much as being skewered by a branch would be a way for A to be able to use her EMT skills, it would be kind of a bummer.

So it was that we jammed 2 full tents into the shelter, and each of us had the pleasure of bonking our heads on the low-hanging wooden beams at least once. After the sun went down, the night sky did its best impression of a down-on-his-luck Atlantic City DJ with a dream but no talent, flashing lights and booming thunder bass but forgetting to play any actual music (i.e., it didn’t rain again) until the middle of the night. We all eventually got some sleep, woke up the next day, strapped on our wet shoes and headed out.

The first thing we bought when we got back to civilization was a tent repair kit.

Love,

Thresher