Into the Woods

I went camping in Provo Canyon this weekend. It turns out that when you go camping in college with friends and without any "adults" you are left with a lot of important decisions to make. So here is a recap of the ten biggest decisions we made:

1. Before you go camping you can leave it up to chance that all of the poles are in the tent bag OR you can set up your tent once before leaving just to make sure you can.  I think we made the right choice this time.

Although we maybe didn't need to set it up inside an apartment and put two tables, a couch, and fan inside of it.

2. When selecting a campsite you can just pick whatever place pops up first in your google search for campsites OR you can carefully search for and select the very safe sounding campground that hasn't had any bear sightings this season.

It turns out the extra search won't matter because there are bears everywhere in the Utah mountains, specifically one mile north of Hope Campground three hours before our arrival. 

3. When you are driving to your campsite AT NIGHT along a winding, wooded, mountain road and you see a dark man walking in the shadows along the side you can either keep driving and avoid any chances of being murdered by a hitch hiker OR you could offer him a ride, find out he is a UVU student named George who is camping with a bunch of his friends a few sites away, and get invited to chill with them around their fire later in the evening.

4. You can have the boring traditional s'mores for you dessert OR you could go all out and toast marshmallows for s'mores, roast starbursts, and bake chocolate cakes inside oranges (here's how)!! You bet your bottom we went with the second option!

5. When roasting those marshmallows you can either wait patiently and toast them to a warm and fluffy golden brown "perfection" or you can stick them right up by the fire so they'll burst into flames and within a few second the inside will turn into a molten glob of heaven.

6. When in the woods you can act civilized and sit at the picnic table playing cards and staring at the scenery OR you can embrace your inner wild woman and climb a really skinny tree. I did both because the scenery is sooo worth staring at:

7. In the morning you can enjoy fluffy chocolate chip pancakes over the fire OR you can totally fail at making pancakes and substitute leftover hot dogs and s'mores for breakfast. (ok, technically we didn't make this decision ourselves...)

8. You can have warm sleeping bags and pillows for every camper OR you can have three sleeping bags for six people and pile on a ton of blankets to make up the difference. The blankets worked surprisingly well.

9. And while we are talking about the whole sleeping situation I have a legit camping secret to share. Now, you can be like 99.9% of the whole camping world and lay a tarp down beneath your tent to battle the dew but fail because the water gets between the tent floor and tarp anyways OR you can put the tarp down INSIDE, covering the tent floor, and actually be protected from the dew. Seriously, the dew soaks through the tent floor no matter what, but it won't soak through the tarp on the inside of the tent!

10. finally, you can bring your film major friend to record the whole camping process to turn it into a short documentary OR you can not bring your film major friend to record the whole camping process to turn it into a short documentary.  I'm sure it would be fun either way. :)

Bonus: what is the very best thing about camping with friends?
nobody gets to tell you what time to wake up in the morning.  Sleeping in until 10:00 a.m. is perfectly acceptable!

*A special thanks to my friend Katrina, half of these pictures are her's.