How I Almost Took a High School Field Trip to the Afterlife: Part Two

When we left off last week, I was standing in a parking lot with a dozen other teens who were exponentially fitter than me, waiting for our teachers to send us racing up a mountainside on skis that I barely knew how to use.

I was in last place from the moment our teachers said “go”.

Well, fuck.

My dreams of staying at least within sight of the group disappeared around the corner as my classmates took off for the cabin like a pack of athletic teenage wolves. I, on the other hand, took to the trail like a three-legged elderly wiener dog.

Pictured: a creature that is better at cross-country skiing than I am.

Going into this trip, I had at least a basic grasp of the essentials of cross-country skiing. I wasn’t a complete beginner at this; I knew how to hold the poles and move the skis so that I would go forward instead of just staying in one spot and digging grooves into the snow. But as I slogged along the mountain trail for minutes that slowly turned into epochs, I realized that there were a number of things that were not working in my favor.

Not counting 2000 years of Dumpy French Peasant genes.

For starters, there was the trail itself. The trail we were on was a groomed trail; there were several rental cabins at the top of the mountain, and there was a steady trickle of incredibly fit tourists going up and down all the time for a mountaintop retreat. But since this was the sort of skiing trail usually reserved for people who are good at this kind of thing, the trails themselves were very well-packed, with large drifts of loose, unpacked snow immediately to either side.

I was about to become very well acquainted with that loose, unpacked snow.

I probably could have ended up with a face full of snow under the best of circumstances, but I hadn’t prepared myself for the realities of dealing with the pack. My backpack, as previously mentioned, was much too heavy and much too large for me. Also, the ghosts of my potato-and-cheese-eating ancestors had seen fit to bless me with the kind of bubble butt that you can serve a full picnic on, and my pack had not been designed with this in mind. Having a booty with its own postal code pushed my pack way too high on my body, and no amount of tightening the straps would make it sit comfortably. The end result was that my pack made me incredibly top heavy, and it swung freely back and forth with every movement I made; the moment I slipped or over-corrected even slightly, my pack would swing to one side and pull me straight down into a snow drift.

Break the internet, overweight high school weirdo.

The first couple of times that I fell into the snow were sort of tolerable. I would get back up, dust off any obvious snow that was clinging to me, clip my boots back into any skis that had fallen off, and carry on my merry way. Over time, though, snow started working its way into my boots, up my pants, down my collar, and up my sleeves. There, it mingled with the heat and copious amounts of sweat from my body, and slowly began the process of soaking my cotton-and-wool clothing from the inside out.

Pictured: skiing.

As the hours ticked by and I started to get tired, I was making more and more errors – which meant more and more impromptu trips into the snowbank. I was getting colder, damper, and more exhausted every time I had to haul myself out of the drifts and get back on my skis. Also, the snow and ice had begun to build up in the clips of both my skis, which meant that jamming my boot back into the ski started to become a challenge of coordination and brute strength. On more than one occasion, I had to pull off my gloves to dig ice out of my ski clips with my fingernails, which did absolutely nothing to help my overall body temperature. Anyone with half a lick of sense could have seen that my situation was going downhill fast, but I pressed on, assuming that I was merely having the kind of character-building experience that good Prince Phillip wanted me to have.

By the time I actually realized I was in trouble, I was already in pretty deep shit.

This is not what “fine” looks like.

There were three staff members on the trip, which was more than enough to supervise a dozen high-achieving nerds, but as I fell further and further behind the rest of my classmates, it became harder for the staff to keep an eye on me. George was up at the front with the true keeners, to make sure that they didn’t get to the cabin first and burn the place down before he could get there. The school secretary was with the middle pack, and my math teacher had been assigned to the stragglers, to make sure that none of us died along the way. As the straggliest straggler in the bunch, I was the hardest to keep track of; my math teacher ended up having to constantly ski back and forth between me and the next two people ahead of me. As the three of us got further and further spaced out, however, this became an increasingly daunting proposition, and the time between staff check-ins got longer and longer. There was absolutely no cellphone reception to be had on this mountain, and the terrain was too rugged for even the teachers’ walkie-talkies to work. If I fell into dire circumstances, I was pretty much fucked until the math teacher could swing back around to find me.

This is not technology you want to bet your life on.

I had slowly been creeping towards the danger zone from the moment we left the bus, but all at once, I hurtled straight past “danger” and started making a beeline for “death by exposure”. I was more or less completely drenched by the time the sun disappeared behind the mountaintops, and as darkness fell, the temperature started dropping and the wind picked up sharply. I was exhausted, bruised, battered, and shivering violently; to make matters worse, my hands were so cold that I no longer had the dexterity or desire to un-clip the water bottle hanging from the back of my pack. I simply went without water for several hours while producing enough sweat to fill a Victorian claw-foot tub, and I was approaching hilarious levels of dehydrated.

And then all of a sudden, I came around a bend and reached a stretch of trail that had been damaged by a recent shift in the snow. Taking children into an avalanche zone is probably illegal, but the area we were in was “avalanche-adjacent” – throughout this ordeal, I could hear avalanches falling off the surrounding peaks and crashing to the ground even harder than I was.

This was going to be a ‘2008 stock market’ joke, but I’m still a little angry that I will never own real estate.

The trails, thankfully, had only been affected by minor snow movement, and were still passable. There were grooves worn in the snow by the classmates who had gone on before me, but the snow was looser than it had been throughout most of the journey, and there was something of a ditch on the side of the trail. I would have struggled to deal with it under ideal circumstances, but being exhausted and teetering on the edge of hypothermia, in the dark, I didn’t stand a chance. I lost my footing almost immediately and tumbled straight down into the ditch.

I tumbled several meters down the embankment, coming to rest a fair distance from either one of my skis. And that time, I felt absolutely no desire to get up. I was starting to feel sluggish and confused, and I suddenly had the motor coordination of an inflatable tube man in a used car lot. Even rolling over and getting my pack back on suddenly felt like a Sisyphean task. So I stayed down on the ground for several minutes like a sad frozen lump, until I managed to convince myself that I had to get up, right now, if I didn’t want to ski straight into the arms of Jesus that night.

I managed to peel myself off the ground, but when I went to clip my skis back on, I encountered a problem. One of my skis clipped back in, but both the boot and clip on the other ski had been so thoroughly jammed with ice that there was no chance of me getting it back on. I no longer had the dexterity to even get my glove off, let alone chip at the ice with my nails. So I did what I had to do.

Which was “trudge along like a primordial creature heaving itself out of the ooze”.

When the math teacher finally came back to check on me, he knew at a glance that I was absolutely Not Fine, and that I was growing rapidly Less Fine by the moment. I was limping my way up the mountain, holding my discarded ski in one hand and trying to glide up the mountain with one foot and one ski like I was riding the world’s saddest Razor Scooter. I was visibly soaked, swaying on my feet, ice-cold to the touch and struggling to make words come out at the proper speed and in the correct order. I looked and sounded like a teenage vampire with a speech impediment, but without the ‘immortality’ bit. My teacher realized that I wasn’t long for this world if I stayed in my sodden clothes, and he promptly pulled out his own set of spare clothes and told me I needed to get changed. Right then and there.

Stripping naked on the side of a mountain with my horrified algebra teacher nearby is not something I would list in the top 10 experiences I’ve had in my life. I’m quite certain that supervising a nude, hypothermic underage girl in the middle of the wilderness doesn’t crack his top 10 career highlights either. But it was an experience that was necessary for me if I was ever going to get to experience anything ever again, and admittedly, when I let my math teacher know that I was dry and it was safe for him to turn around, I could already feel my quick sprint towards the abyss slowing down into a light jog. Maybe I wasn’t going to make my date with Death after all.

Checking on the other students ceased to be a priority, and my math teacher stayed with me as I slowly limp-shuffled my way up the mountain towards warmth and safety. It was tough going, and I had just started to come to terms with the fact that I would probably end up fading into the long dark after all when I heard shouts and laughter coming towards us. A moment later, several of my classmates skied into view; they had already dropped their things at the cabin and started to settle in for the night, when they realized I hadn’t come back yet and decided to set out to look for me. Two of them took my pack and skis for me and went on ahead, while the rest of them hung around to offer moral support as I hiked the last agonizing two kilometers to the cabin, uphill in total darkness.

Or as my father calls it, “my daily commute to school when I was a child. Both ways.”

I may not be much of an outdoors person, but the sight of the cabin in the distance when we rounded the final bend was the sweetest thing I’ve laid eyes on before or since. When I look deep into the eyes of my spouse at my wedding and promise to spend eternity with them, I will feel only a fraction of the joy that I felt at the sight of a dingy wooden cabin that I spent a single night at in the twelfth grade.

The staff got me inside and immediately set me beside the fireplace to defrost like a freezer burned hunk of beef. I can tell you from personal experience that warming up after a brush with hypothermia and frostbite is a lovely, soothing experience, very much akin to slipping into a hot bubble bath filled with angry fire ants. All ten of my fingers and toes slowly came back online, and every single one of them was furious with me.

Ha, I fooled you, thawing out after being a human girlsicle super sucks. 

Since I’d already proven that I was a negligence lawsuit waiting to happen, it was decided that the best way to get me back to the bus in one piece was to have me head out four hours early the next day, while the others were still lingering over breakfast. The secretary kindly agreed to go with me as my own personal babysitter. The route back down the mountain was all downhill, so best case scenario, I could just sort of crouch and glide my way to the bottom with minimal effort. Worst case scenario, I would tumble down the mountain picking up snow, debris and frightened small animals like a human Katamari. It ended up being a little bit of both.

Na na na na na na na na na na.

Having to have one-to-one adult supervision at the age of seventeen was a little bit embarrassing, but the main benefit – other than avoiding a preventable early grave – was that I had my own personal photographer all the way down, with the ski trails all to myself. If anyone out there suspects that I made up this entire ski trip for extremely minimal internet clout, feast your eyes on some images of me that weren’t crudely drawn with a Wacom tablet:

Just look at how confident I was. And look at how fucking off-center that pack is.

As much as I hate to sexually objectify an underage photo of myself wearing snowpants, that is an ass that can move mountains. Or move me straight off the trail to die on a mountain. Either one.

Complete and total failure.

Needless to say, I made it to the bottom of the mountain alive. By the time I collapsed into a human-shaped pile of gelatin on the school bus several hours later, I was sore in muscles that I had not had before the trip. I was so tired that I was struggling to remain three-dimensional, my electrolyte levels could only be described with screaming, and I never wanted to set foot outdoors again for as long as I fucking lived. But as much as it pains me to admit it, I did learn valuable lessons on my adventurous journey. I learned that I could take on a task that was absolutely beyond my capability to complete, and finish it anyway. I learned that refusing to ask for help is an awesome way to end up dying in the wilderness. And I learned that I wasn’t so unpopular in high school that a group of twelve of my peers wouldn’t eventually notice I’d gone missing.

I also learned that you have to actually fill out the Duke of Edinburgh Award program paperwork to get recognized, and I never actually got around to that. So I have a lot of traumatic memories involving hypothermia, and no warm glow of Prince Phillip’s approval to thaw them out.

… yeah, in hindsight, that’s probably for the best.

 

If you somehow made it to the end of this post without reading Part One, you should probably check that out here. 

To read more about my own bad judgement coming back to haunt me, click here to read about the time I accidentally caused $3000 in damages to my college dorm in a single night. 

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