The story of my least well-prepared adventure of 2022...
Have you ever set out to do something then found yourself woefully underprepared too late to change you situation?
I'm talking about that feeling where you're kicking yourself, lamenting over life's lack of a restart button because the situation you found yourself in is SO excruciatingly preventable.
Maybe you do, maybe you don't. But I sure do, and as a professional traveler my story of unpreparedness comes with a particular brand of physical peril that leaving your cheat sheet for a presentation at home doesn't include.
My tale of bad preparations began with one of Guatemala's most beautiful waterfalls, El Salto de Chilasco, cascading 335 meters down a canyon wall in Baja Vera Paz, central Guatemala.
I arrived in town after 7 hours of hitchhiking out of the capitol, in pickups, on motos, and sedans. By late afternoon I had arrived in Chilasco, a fairly well off farming community nestled around 1500 meters elevation. After a bit to eat in town and purchasing of a machete, I started off into the wild.
The hike was easy enough, taking only a couple hours to traverse muddy cattle trails over rolling hills flanked by corn fields.
What you must realize as a reader, however, is that this expedition was my first overnight-solo adventure. I'd been camping all over remote areas of Guatemala with company in my low-quality (and cost) Walmart tent, and was feeling confident. I had a pot to cook dinner over the fire, a sleeping bag, and boldness on my side. After sleeping with the coyotes and panthers on Ixtepeque, home to one of the largest deposits of obsidian in the Americas, nothing felt too daunting. Even the looming rain clouds announcing the rainy season's arrival didn't sway me, despite their nagging at the back of my mind. I asked the young boy guiding me to the waterfall's trailhead if rain would be a problem, and he nodded yes when I asked if roofs existed near the falls (they didn't).
A fall from grace is rarely anticipated and what I didn't have was well maintained equipment, specifically the punctures in the tent floor.
The view from my camp on day 2:
In one of those moments of self praise out of acting "smartly" I set up camp on a ridge one canyon over from the falls. The air and land were drier, and previous campfires indicated that I was in the best spot. So I decided to relax and eat mangos for dinner because a fire seemed like too much work. I cut bundles of wild grass to make a comfy bed under my tent, and laid back with encroaching darkness to enjoy crickets and the sound of distant thunder.
Only 30 minutes of lounging had elapsed when the thunder got close to me. The air was dry and I secretly looked forward to what could've been a harmless bout of lightening and thunder. But everything changed suddenly and disaster struck.
The wind gathered speed, the stars disappeared and the ridge next to me (but an hour or more hiking) was suddenly hit by lightening, ushering in seconds later a downpour.
I nervously listened to the rain pelt my tent, without a soul for many kilometers in any direction. And that's when the worse possible scenario materialized, just as the dark cemented its grip on my section of earth.
The rain intensified, and within 15 minutes my cotton sleeping bag was soaked. I fruitlessly struggled to find a way to lift myself out of the pools fed by the tent's floor holes. After 15 more minutes of struggling, I realized there were two options: hypothermia in my tent, or find new shelter.
The choice was obvious, and a couple seconds later found me zipping up my rain jacket, putting all electronics into a bag covered by its rainfly, and dawning a foil emergency blanket. Then I left the flooded tent.
The strangest part of life or death scenarios is the calm. Your mind focuses, trying its best to push away the panic, to activate the instincts bred into us by a million generations of surviving ancestors. Something deep inside you activates, a primal energy passed on to us humanity from braving ice ages, crossing the Bering, and scratching and biting to everything necessary to survive.
Survival instincts activate when your thoughts race, processing information at a rate that stretches seconds into minutes, minutes into hours. The slowing of time gives a struggling life form extra moments to calculate a plan of action, essentially like a "slo-mo" option available only in moments of extreme duress.
After exiting the flooded tent, I stood in the densest trees on my ridge, looking for some nonexistent dry spot. Fighting a breakdown, I discounted possibilities: returning to town would require navigating hills of cattle mud, standing in the rain would risk hypothermia, and yelling for help was useless because there was nobody around to help. The only option was different shelter, but where?
The answer to this question compelled me to climb down the canyon trail towards El Salto de Chilasco in pitch black of night, in search of a cave. Avoiding puddles as best as possible, I searched vainly for 45 minutes until finally spotting a pocket of erosion underneath some tree roots. The space was enough to sit and stretch my legs if my back was against the wall. Hesitantly, I entered the "cave," domed myself in with the emergency blanket, and laid down in damp sands to wait out the storm.
The rain eventually eased around 3/4 am, but I never left the cave. I was in survival mode, the rising sun my only thought. I checked my phone a few times throughout the night, always surprised so few hours passed. I did several rounds of breath work to try and warm up, pinched myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming, and adjusted the emergency blanket.
With daybreak, the sense of relief one receives after drawing one of the long straws washed over me. I had survived. And there was still a series of massive waterfalls to photograph!
After a laying everything out to dry and a recuperative nap under the noon sun, I trudged back to town and found a house to sleep in. I told my story to the lady of the house and she took pity.
What's possible to learn from this experience about preparedness?
The most obvious lesson is to not camp with equipment that's dangerously beat up. This could be understood as taking care not to damage, or as maintaining repairs with materials like duct tape, silicon, etc...
That's the obvious lesson.
More learning also comes in a mental aspect of maintaining composure, aka being prepared to deal with anxieties and troublesome situations. Retaining your rational capacities amidst danger can save your life.
Then one last lesson in lifestyle.
An adventurer needs to be prepared for anything, and trust their gut. When I walked into the wild that evening, I buried my apprehensions, deciding that possible inclement weather was no big deal. But I was wrong, and the experience could've been costly. The conclusion I draw, therefore, is to learn better the difference between intuitions and passing fears.
If I had been more attuned to my senses, this whole fiasco could've been averted. But it wasn't. At least a decent blog story came of it though.