I went on a trip to New Mexico in 2021, a trip I still remember very well to this day. I went to a place called Philmont, a summer camp run by the BSA (Boy Scouts of America). There were thirteen of us total including me, now I’m not going to talk about the entire 10 day trek we took through those mountains, just the second day, the worst day, not because the hike was hard, or the heat, of course those are factors but the worst part was the weather.

It had been a nice sunny day up until were almost to the camp we were staying at that night,  then without a word it started drizzling. Now, I’m not one to believe in jinxing yourself or anything like that, but that day may have been the thing to change that. We were coming up on our camp when it began to drizzle a little bit, nothing too bad and certainly nothing we couldn’t handle, we put our rain-gear on and continued on our way. It stayed drizzling for a while and so I decided it would be a good idea to say, “well, it can’t get much worse than this, right?”, and not five seconds later we heard the booming crackle of thunder, it almost sounded like a laugh, as if it was mocking us. Then the rain started to come down harder, and harder, and then, the hail came.

It started hailing! Pelted with balls of ice in the middle of the New Mexico mountains was not something I had ever thought would happen to me, but here we are. Soaked, cold, and carrying 40 pounds on my back, we hiked on, what other choice did we have, all thirteen of us were wishing at that moment that we could go home. After getting lost for about a mile because of a mistake who we called our “Navi-guesser” made on getting us to our next camp, called Crater Lake, we had finally arrived. Shivering and wanting to get into a nice warm sleeping bag, we unpacked. Now I don’t know if you know this, but unpacking camping gear in the rain is not very fun, especially setting up a tent, so we came up with a solution, we called it the unstoppable unit method, we all focused on one tent at a time, setting them up all together as a unit. This system didn’t keep everything from getting wet, but it did well enough, we then got our group shelter set up and had a very mediocre but welcome dinner.

That night, even being in my tent, was absolute hell. It was freezing, even in my sleeping bag my toes felt like they might fall off, eventually though, I couldn’t stay awake any longer, and I drifted off into sleep . The next morning was a little better than the night before, just by a smidgeon, it at least wasn’t hailing anymore, but the rain carried on. I actually learned after we got back home that one of our boys got a minor case of hypothermia and doesn’t remember anything from that night. We used the same system we did taking down our tents as we did setting them up, everyone taking a single tent down, one by one. While the weather would make you think we would still be miserable, somehow, we weren’t, spirits were actually up, morale was high, it was unbelievable. And hey, maybe we were all just delirious from the cold but anything was better than being miserable, wet and cold, now we could be happy, wet, and cold. 

After eating another tasteless, mediocre breakfast, and getting everything back on our backs, we trekked on through the pouring rain. At about lunch time the rain started to let up, I hadn’t noticed at first because I was too busy thinking about how wet I was. But the rain stopped, we could finally take off our rain jackets, though it was still cloudy so we kept our jackets in an easily accessible place. But when we had reached our half-way point, a bit of blue sky started peaking down at us through the clouds, a very welcome sight. And being as crazed as we were from the night before, we started yelling about how “I SEE BLUE!” and appropriately started singing Mr. Blue Sky. 

It never rained a day after that, we had endured at least 3 days worth of rain in one day, and I think that was a very fair trade. We got to enjoy the sights of New Mexico without a single other drop of rain, you could say we made a deal with the clouds that night when it was raining and pouring, and there was an old man snoring right in the tent next to me.