Hunting in the rain 1

If you want your teeth to start chattering, listen to a story told to me by a good friend and professional outfitter, Bill Burnett.

Took off on an archery hunt with two guys. We left our base camp. That was five miles away from the horse trailer in the middle of a downpour, which was probably the first sign that we shouldn't be going anywhere. We went from our base camp up to a spike camp that was about seven miles away, going from 5200 feet to 9400 feet in the third week of September. As we started going up this mountain through the rain, the rain gradually started turning to sleet and the sleet gradually started turning to snow until finally we got to the top. At that point, there's no turning back, we’re more than halfway in. And so we decided to spend the night up top. Wait it out and hunt our way out in the morning. And then the weather would turn back and forth all night. We'd go from snow to rain to snow to rain. And so everything was getting soaking wet and then freezing and then getting soaking wet again. We were up there with just a little bivy. It was me and two hunters. And about 1:00 a.m., I hear a grown man just starts shrieking about how he's going hypothermic and I crawl out of my bivy, see what's going on. And the guys just soaked to the bone. Everything he owns, it's drenched. His bivy failed. He had a down sleeping bag that was completely soaked. No extra clothes. So all the clothes he was wearing, base layers, everything soaked to the bone. There's nowhere to go. We're seven miles from base camp in the middle of the night!

Like Bill said, probably shouldn’t have gone off in the middle of a rainstorm.