A few months ago, over Taylor Swift inspired cocktails, I told a friend I wanted to get into backpacking this summer. As much as I love hiking I’ve never even camped, yet the desire to become a bonafid, chiseled, seasoned backpacker has been a little ember of a dream in the back of my head for years. So I was hyped when my friend said she’d be down to try it too.
Since that sliiiiiightly drunk decision in April, we’ve been gathering supplies, filling a shared Pinterest board with backpacking tips and hacks and lists, and becoming devout REI customers. We looked at a couple of places in Illinois where we could get started, deciding to shoot for a two-day trip in early July, and also deciding before that we should do a trial run to make sure we know we’re doing before we’re out in the middle of nowhere.
June 16, 2023
For our shakedown hike (as the pros call them) we decided to camp at Comlara Park, which is a dozen or so miles north of Bloomington-Normal. My friend arrived in town Friday afternoon, we ran last minute errands, smashed some Jersey Mike’s sandwiches, packed up our bags, and got out to the White Oak primative campgrounds around 5:30 PM.
The campgrounds sit right against Evergreen Lake, so we followed a trail for a while until we found our spot, the second to last campsite which consisted of a small clearing that sloped right against the lake. We passed the firepit to drop our bags on the picnic table, then left to walk around and get our bearings.
There was one more empty campsite past ours, then we circled back to find the outhouse and some place we could filter water that wasn’t as murky and weedy as the lake was in front of our campsite. We had passed a dock when we came in, so we walked there and I laid out on my stomach to scoop water into the filter bag from the edge of the dock. Babes, that was a little workout! Water is heavy!
There was a literally perfect branch above the picnic table to hang the filter from, so perfect that I found myself later trying to figure out how a branch could have grown like that, and after we got the filter set up we started to unload the rest of our gear — our tents, our sleeping pads, our sleeping bags. It took us a couple tries and a few broken matches to figure out how to use the stove, and our attempt at smores wrapped in tin foil ended with at least one charbroiled graham cracker, but we got the hang of it by the time it was time to cook dinner after a round of Go Fish.
Dinner was a recipe I’d found on a few backpacking sites called a “ramen bomb”, a combination of ramen and instant mashed potatoes, which was… something. Not bad necessarily, but we both agreed pretty quickly that future meals would consist of either ramen or instant mashed potatoes, but never again both.
As the sun went down it was starting to get pretty buggy, and we’d already figured out that campsite 15 in the White Oaks campground was the daddy long leg capital of the world, so we crawled into our tents. I was pretty warm so I pulled off my shirt and just lay on top of my sleeping bag in my sports bra for a while, looking up through the trees as the stars came out. We debated with putting the rain covers on over our tents for a better sense of security, but wasn’t this kind of what I wanted this experience for? To be half naked under the stars? To erode the walls between me and nature? To appease my constant grasping for both connection and escape?
It was dark, finally, and the big dipper shined down between a gap in the trees. Voices and barking traveled across the lake from other campgrounds, and, yes, this was what I wanted and the thought of falling asleep vulnerable and exposed in the middle of the woods was laughable. For half an hour, every sound made me jump. I crawled into my sleeping bag, trying to find a comfortable position, learning from the immediate ache in my hips and shoulders that my sleeping bag/sleeping pad/pillow set up wouldn’t be kind to this side sleeper.
All of the sudden, something started crashing through the woods. Crashing loudly and sounding like it was coming straight toward my tent. I sat up and my friend and I shared a couple what the fucks and I called out “who’s there?” even though I knew it was a what and not a who because a who would be using the paths if they were trying to stealthily sneak up and murder us in the dark. But almost as quickly as the crashing came it started to go, followed by the sound of a splash as whatever it was went into the lake.
June 17, 2023
I dozed on and off, stumbling out into the woods at midnight to go to the bathroom, then slept in short bursts the rest of the night. Another pro for the rain cover column is it might have kept the sun from waking us up, but the birds did just fine on their own. Sometime before six we walked down to the outhouse, then came back and divied up granola and trail mix before laying back down.
My friend complained that her stomach was feeling weird, but I kept it to myself that mine was too. Unbeknownst to me, she was googling LifeStraw filters effectiveness and came away with enough peace of mind to fall back asleep while I lay there wondering if I was going to have to run out into the woods to hurl.
She slept, I rolled over to find a dead daddy long leg curled beside me, and we got back up a few hours later.
After getting more water from the dock, we filled up our water bottles and boiled water for oatmeal; we mixed the oatmeal with an almond butter/chocolate hazelnut spread, granola and dried fruit, which was delicious and palette cleansing after the ramen bomb we mutually blamed for our bad stomachs.
We mozied around for a while — I walked down to the unoccupied campsite 16, to what was a 4-star campsite compared to ours. Much more spacious and open and on higher ground. Maybe it was crawling with daddy long legs too, but someone had also left a complimentary roll of toilet paper behind, and I came back saying we should have moved our stuff down there when no one showed up to claim it. Oh well.
After that, we packed up our campground, figuring out the best way to re-pack our bags, and left around 10 AM to drive half a mile down the road to a 2 mile hiking trail. It was mostly uncovered prairie, with unmowed grassy paths to wade through, but with pretty patches of purple crownvetch. We blazed through the trail in just over an hour, much quicker that I thought we would with 25ish extra pounds on our backs.
It was hot and we were exhausted and we were already talking about our July trip, about future hikes, about longer trails, about doing this again and again. I felt worn out but full and proud of us for sticking it out through bugs and night time monsters and very little sleep.
There was a little ember of a dream and now here was oxygen and kindling.
We got back to the car and sat with the doors open, downing filtered lake water with abandon, like it was the best thing we’d ever tasted.
life imitates heart 