1999 Giant City Campout

The exciting conclusion!

During the night, a couple of tents collapsed from the weight of the sleet/snow mix. The sleet sounded just like rain hitting the tents. Someone said that around 5:00 AM they heard the "weirdest sounding clap of thunder" and then — silence. No more sleet. They looked out and it was snowing. Two hours later there was 7-8" of the stuff on the ground and it was still coming down heavily.

We decided to "bug out", to borrow a phrase from M*A*S*H. No breakfast, just tear everything down, throw it in the trailer and get out of Dodge as fast as possible.

Notice the depth of the snow and the condition of the
tents in the above picture. The white "blobs" in these
pictures are not faults in the picture — they are
snowflakes!

The same tents about an hour later.
Notice the snow depth and tent condition now!

By around 9:00 we had everything loaded and ready to go. The problem was that, by then, there was around a foot of snow on everything and the only vehicles that could move through it were Mr. Davis' and Mr. Elfrink's 4 wheel drive trucks. Mr. Davis drove around a little bit to pack down the snow on the road leading out of the campsite and up the hill to the main road. It still took a lot of pushing and shovelling just to get the vehicles to the packed down tracks. The first vehicle to try going up the hill made it only about 100 feet before losing traction. It had to back down to the bottom. Another vehicle tried with the same result. Things were not looking good for the home team. Fortunately, both 4WD trucks had tow straps in them. Between the two of them they towed all the other vehicles to the top of the hill. Now for the trailer. Our trailer weighs 2800 pounds empty and loaded with all the stuff that was in it the weight was probably over 5000 pounds. We hooked it up to Mr. Davis' truck and he pulled it right on up the hill with no problems. When we finally got everyone and everything out it was 10:30 and there were 14-16 inches of snow on the ground, besting the old Troop 53 campout record of 8 inches.

It was snowing so hard that the camera focused on the
falling snow rather than the tent!

The drive home was uneventful. There were a number of vehicles in ditches but none of them belonged to anyone in Troop 53. By the time we were within 40 miles of Belleville there was no snow on the ground. Belleville was sunny and we got some strange looks from other drivers looking at the foot of snow on top of our vehicles.

We are wondering what the ranger thought when he saw the tracks coming up the unplowed road from the camping area. "Well how about that......."

Editor's notes

1. The story of this campout has become something of a legend in Troop 53. Those who were there will never forget it; every year when winter comes around someone brings it up. To set the record straight (keep snowfall depths realistic, etc.) the story has been re-published as it appeared originally on a previous Troop 53 website. The styling has been changed to match our current site, but the text and pictures are exactly the same.
2. I think John Mackin took the pictures accompanying the story. The reason they are as small as they are is that we were extremely limited on server space on that former website (only 1MB). One way to save space was to cut down on picture size. Additionally, since the pictures were included in the story, the pages load much faster with smaller sizes.
3. The following year (2000) we camped on the same March weekend. Figuring that if we camped somewhere completely different our luck would change, we decided upon Beaver Dam State Park about 150 miles away from Giant City. On Saturday we awoke to howling winds and snow. Final depth was about 3½ inches but we were scared for a little while. We just couldn't win. Now our March campouts are scheduled for later in the month...
4. In September 2007 we camped at Giant City again. While checking in with the ranger this story was mentioned. He said, "I remember you! That was me! I remember telling you not to stay."