Trekking The Quilotoa Loop: Part 3
Unlike kids who grew up in the Midwest and the East Coast, kids who grew up in Southern California didn’t go to summer camp. We had the beach, and maybe some sports day camps or sailing camps. But mostly we just had plain old hanging out with friends, riding your bikes around and playing Nintendo.
The closest thing we had to anything even remotely resembling Wet Hot American Summer was something called Science Camp.
Science Camp was a four-day field trip we took as sixth graders to the mountains of Lake Arrowhead, the day after Halloween. And though it was a mere 96 hours, it was nothing short of legendary, an experience that would burn into all of our collective memories as by far the best thing that ever came out of Lincoln Elementary School.
In reality, the name Science Camp was bit of a misnomer, as there was very little science involved. Nature Camp or perhaps better yet Fart Joke Camp would have been a more appropriate name.
In the mountains of Lake Arrowhead we would go on short hikes, learn about the flora and fauna of the area and cook our own hamburgers on tin can stoves burning pine needles for fuel (still the best hamburger I have ever had to this day).
But mostly Science Camp was about being away from parental supervision. It was about smuggled-in Halloween candy, bunk house pranks and mischief — a giant sleepover party with all your best friends and one poor counselor who had to reign in a cabin full of rowdy sixth grade boys dead set on undermining his authority.
To this day, twenty-two years later, if you find yourself in a cabin perhaps on a ski trip or camping trip with one or more of your former bunkmates, it is a law as certain as the laws of physics that a Science Camp reference will be made.
And this is the very situation we found ourselves in at the Black Sheep Inn. Brittany, Chuck, and I shared a bunkhouse of four beds. Brittany and I had a double bed and Chuck had the bunk across the room.
After a string of sophomoric jokes the night before, Chuck and I were already drifting towards the land of Science Camp. But when Chuck discovered a big brown stain on his sheets in the morning and realized he had spilled chocolate in his bed the night before, the reversion to my sixth grade self came closer to completion as I announced to everyone and no one in particular that Chuck had pooped the bed.
Brittany shot a glance at me as if to say “Really? You do know you are turning 35 in less than a month, right?”
It was official. I declared to my bunkmates,
“Science Camp 2.0!”
The Actual Hike
The actual hike on our third and final day was rather straight forward compared to our first two days where we found ourselves off the trail more often than we found ourselves on it.
We departed Science Camp at 9 AM and took a taxi to the top of the crater. We would hike around one third of the crater rim and then back down to Chugchilan, all in all a six hour hike. We could have gone the harder way, where we would hike up to the crater lake and take a taxi back. But, while that may have been a more rewarding hike with the beautiful lake as our finish line, after two days of six-hour hikes with about thirty pounds of gear on our backs, no one was up for an eight or nine hour uphill trek. We were more than happy to let a 4x4 truck do the heavy lifting.
When we arrived, the lake itself was absolutely stunning.
Despite taking a taxi up for the last stretch, it still felt like a rather magnificent reward for the twelve plus hours and seventeen or so miles we had already put in the previous forty-eight hours.
Except for one area of the trail that had been taken out by a landslide two days before, the hike down was relatively easy. We made no wrong turns, and no longer had our heavy packs to carry.
Chuck taught us all about his new obsession with “dad culture” which apparently primarily revolves around making bad jokes and going to boat shows. We made plenty of our own bad puns over the final six hours, and after each one I would exuberantly yell out “dad joke!” to the chuckles or more often groans of my hiking comrads.
On the last turn before we finally got back to Science Camp we looked back to the crater in the now far off distance.
“Holy shit! We just did that!”
It was no easy feat. There had definitely been some pain during the journey, both physical and emotional, but in the end, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend three days than hiking in nature with people I love.
Science Camp 2.0 I’d now complete. It’s in the books, and like Science Camp 1.0, I have a sneaking suspicion the attending parties will be talking about this one for the next twenty-two years to come.
