When I last wrote, I stopped before bed at Yellowstone. Sleeping that night, or rather, not sleeping that night, deserves its own post. It was the worst. I slept for maybe three or four hours over the course of the night, but Amanda had a much worse time. I asked her about it just now, and here is my best attempt at paraphrasing her experience:
“First off, when we first went to bed, and I got into the sleeping bag in our tent, my body temperature had dropped to about 30 degrees, so I was off to a bad start. To combat the temperature, I kept all of my clothes on, including my hood over my head, but nothing was covering my feet, since I can’t sleep in the fuzzy boots I was wearing. Every part of my body was covered by clothing, or at least the sleeping bag, except for my face. Since it was exposed, it was freezing cold. I tried to cover my face in the sleeping bag, but obviously that led to near suffocation. Since I didn’t want to be a dead person, I kept my face out of the sleeping bag and as a result, it was very cold for a very long time.
“Temperature notwithstanding, I wasn’t able to get comfortable physically. Because the material that makes up the outside of the sleeping bag, and the material that makes up the surface of the bedrolls we have are both slippery, it made staying in one position very difficult. Whenever I tried to tuck my legs up, in order to keep a little heat in, my butt muscles would tense up to compensate for the slippery surface. Hours of tense butt muscles leads to a sore bottom.
“Also sore was my neck. It was kind of jacked up.
“Even if I was able to get to a somewhat warm temperature and find a comfortable sleeping position, there were other nuisances that would have kept me awake. For instance, lots and lots of animal noises. As soon as we went to bed, the elk in the area started to moan/yip/screech/mate. They went on like that for the entirety of the night.
“Also making noise were some other forest creatures. They didn’t go on the whole night, but were noisy enough for long stretches. The wolves started howling and screaming at about 3am, and when the sun started to rise, there was a bird flying overhead that sounded more like a monkey than something with wings. I don’t think it counts as a forest creature, but there was a generator somewhere nearby that sounded like a growling bear.
“There were a few other things going on that kept me from sleeping too. Like the fact that I had to pee for awhile, but I didn’t want to leave my freezing sleeping bag and go into the even more freezing night. Even though our tent was about 13 steps from the bathroom, it wasn’t worth it. Oh, and since it was so close to the bathrooms, the light from the outbuilding that had the bathrooms in it shined into our tent constantly.
“I did fall asleep for a little while on my stomach, but because I was so tried, I had a weird lucid/vivid dream that woke me up a little too quickly. It was about Emily (Amanda’s sister) yelling at me about folding the sleeping bag incorrectly. Then I was floating over trees. It was a weird dream.
“When I did wake up, since I was on my stomach with my arm underneath my body, my arm was asleep, so even if I didn’t have a weird dream, I would have woken up soon after that anyways.
“Oh, and also you were in my space a lot”
Editors note: I am lanky.
“The last thing, and the most frightening was the possible intruder and your lack of response. A person, who was probably going to the bathrooms nearby, was walking near the tent and suddenly stopped. Their darkened silhouette, stayed there for a little too long and looked to be staring at/into our tent. You were asleep, so I said you name, hit you and said your name again, but you didn’t respond at all. You were in a really deep sleep and I could have died because of it. Luckily, the person left.
“All in all, I probably slept for 45 minutes or so, and that’s being generous.”
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