Emma stood at the edge of the bluff and took a deep inhale of the forest air. Man it felt great to be in the mountains, and what a view!
She turned away and continued on her hike, shifting the shoulder straps on her backpack as she thinks over the past few months. In the last 4 months, she bought her first home (at 24 thank you very much!), got promoted at work and finally caught the eye of the cute maintenance guy who works in her building. This was a massive shift from when she thought she was skating a razor edge at work, she had to move back home because she couldn't afford rent and she couldn't even make eye contact with a man because she was extremely self-conscious about her weight. This backpacking trip was her way of celebrating her new confidence. It's a shame her mortgage and insurance payments forced her celebratory trip to occur in the national park near her home, but Emma didn't mind. She knew the parks like the back of her hand since she had spent a summer out there working for the parks.
A fact she had to remind her mom when she voiced her concern over Emma camping overnight in the backwoods all by herself. "What if you run into a bear?" her mother asked worriedly. "I will season it with bear spray before I roast it over an open fire" apparently wasn't the answer she was looking for.
"What if you fall down a cliff and can't walk out?"
"That's why you have to inform the rangers where you're going and when you expect to be back, even when you travel in a group. Geez mom you let me go to Nepal by myself, I'm just driving 2 hours out of town."
"Well I don't like that you go on all these trips by yourself. Why don't you invite one of your friends out, or your cousins?"
"My cousins? Now would that be the cousin that has 2 kids under the age of 5 or the one who thinks roughing it is a 3 star resort in the Bahamas?"
"Fine what about your friends? I'm sure one of them would go."
"They aren't interested. They like hiking but the idea of backpacking is a foreign concept to them."
"You need new friends."
"Thanks mom."
Emma sighed as she recalled that conversation. Luckily her mom eased off after she agreed to get a sat phone, big heavy clunker that it was. She lightly touched the bear spray attached to her hip belt and quickly reviewed the procedure when encountering a bear. While this wasn't bear country, wildlife has a nasty habit of ignoring "migration patterns" and going wherever they want, when they want.
She arrived at the campsite about an hour before the sun set. None of the other sites were in use due to it being so late in the season so she quickly set up her campsite and set off to look for a source of water where she could wash up a bit before starting dinner. She wasn't overly excited about her dinner. Somehow, chili is not the same after it's been dehydrated but she accepted it as part of the backpacking experience.
The rest of the evening was an uneventful affair. She prepared and ate dinner, cleaning her dishes in the nearby stream then she hung out and star gazed for a bit until her fatigue got the best of her and she crawled into her tent to get some well-deserved rest.
She woke up to the sound of something sniffing at her tent. "Oh shit, Oh Crap, Oh Shit, Oh Crap" She thought as she mentally reviewed her campsite set up. Did she hang up her food? Yep. Was it in air-tight, bear-proof containers? Yep. Did she wash all her dishes, cutlery included? Yep. Then what the hell attracted the bear to her campsite?
She quietly picked up her bear spray and flashlight and debated the pro's and con's of staying in her tent and waiting until the bear moves on, risking the bear collapsing the tent and trapping her inside or getting out of the tent to scare off the bear with the heavy duty pepper spray and risk being attacked by the bear. "But surely the bear must be able to smell me so if he/she was going to attack, they would have already. Yes, it's just curious. I should stay here and leave it alone and it will go away and tomorrow I will double bag everything." She thought confidently.
After waiting 5 minutes for the bear sounds to disappear, which they didn't, Emma tensed again as she heard another animal approach from the other side of the campsite, growling. "Son of a..." She thought. "Now there's going to be some crazy territory fight between the 2 animals and I'm going to be killed! Dammit!" Emma may have acted confident in her skills as an outdoors enthusiast but the truth was she was chicken shit when it came to outdoor survival situations. She quite enjoyed her nights back in the city curled up with a good book. She would have given anything at that moment to be home reading about some poor idiot who had gone hiking by themselves and was trapped in the wilderness with wild animals sniffing at their tent.
"Why don't you come out here Princess? We just want to talk." She heard a man call.
