AMC Outdoors, November 2001

By Brion O'Connor

When it comes to overnight camping trips, I have a checkered past. In high school, a good friend and I made a bold if bone-headed attempt to camp off of New Hampshire's Kancamagus Highway one winter night. It was so cold that I burned the roof of my mouth with a dinnertime stew we cooked up, yet still had the spoon freeze to my lower lip. We called it quits after Charlie's steel-tipped boots transformed his toes into a block of ice.

Years later, just after college, a backpacking buddy caught me with my hand, literally, in the cookie jar as I tried to swipe an early morning snack because I hadn't brought enough food. The last straw came during an October outing in Colorado, when a roommate's friend took pity on me and offered to substitute his down sleeping bag for my Caldor clearance-sale bag before I headed up to the Rockies.

Duly chastened, I concluded I wasn't cut out for overnighters. My new game plan was to find a great day hike, get back to the condo before nightfall, and fire up the hot tub and blender. I left the big trips to the real outdoorsmen. And I was content, for a while. Slowly, however, I came to envy the compelling stories that more adventurous friends would share about multi-day treks, tales of spectacular star-studded evenings and waking up to a stunning blanket of new-fallen snow. I was missing out, and I knew it.

Plus, I'm a family man now, with two rambunctious daughters and a wife determined to get them outdoors, as her folks had done with her. I needed to learn how to care for them, and myself. No longer could I employ my lack of Boy Scout training as an excuse to avoid overnights. If my preschool kids can't have excuses, what are my chances? So it was with this dual trepidation — a dubious track record and uncertainty about my own abilities — that I signed on for the AMC's Mountain Leadership School. More bang for my buck, I figured. The school is touted as "the AMC's premier outdoor leadership training program, designed to teach the skills needed to lead groups safely in the mountains of the Northeast." Perfect.

Several weeks before the course began, my 120-page student manual and mandatory equipment list arrived from the AMC. I headed to my local outdoors outfitter, and dutifully filled every vacancy on the staggering list, grabbing a waterproof cover for my backpack, a couple of plastic tubes for peanut butter, water bottles, waterproof matches, sunscreen, bug juice, and a compass. The night before, I made a last-minute run to the supermarket to make sure I had more than enough food, and assembled enough gear to clothe a small commando unit. I was ready.

—Brion "Flash" O'Connor is a freelance writer on Boston's North Shore.

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