Chapter 14

In the confined space of the cave, Alice’s distressed cry reverberated off the walls so loudly my ears hurt. I scrambled to be at her side. She sat in a fetal position with her arms wrapped around her knees: her whole body trembling like a leaf in the wind. Fear distorted her face, and her eyes closed so tightly her eyebrows twitched with the effort.

A tiny voice uttered from her lips, repeating the same word again and again: snakes. Kneeling next to Alice, I put my arm around her shoulder and held her tight until her trembling lessened to not much more than a shiver.

“Where are the snakes?” I kept my voice calm and measured.

“Uhh, everywhere,” she said.

“Where is everywhere? Can you point them out?” I said as I gently pressed her for details.

“Over there,” she answered as she pointed to the right-hand side of the rocky cavern, “and over there,” she said gesturing to her left.

The blue-white beam of my tactical LED flashlight lit up the last place Alice indicated. I almost let out a scream of my own. Against the rock wall, at least seventy-five fat, sleeping rattlesnakes knotted and piled together like a braided rug. Several dozens more snakes clumped and piled together against the opposite wall. She was right; hibernating snakes were all around us.

When an old-timer first told me every dry cave in the mountains contained a snake den, I laughed at him. All around us, I surveyed the living proof of his words. The old man made his living as an environmental scientist, and he was obsessed with snakes, specifically, Rocky Mountain rattlesnakes. Racking my brain, I tried to recall what else he had told me about our legless friends.

Venomous snakes, such as rattlers, hibernate when the average daytime temperatures fall below sixty degrees Fahrenheit. In the high mountains, their favorite winter quarters are caves and deep crevices. While in hibernation, snakes are lethargic, torpid, and essentially unresponsive zombies as their metabolisms slow down to the minimum necessary to sustain life.

He said not all snakes survive hibernation. A skinny snake will not live through the winter, nor will a snake with food in its stomach or intestines when they cool. The undigested meal will rot and kill them.

Other than a heavy-duty icky factor, the slumbering reptiles posed little danger to us as long as we left them alone. I shuddered to think about it, but our slumbering cavern mates might prove to be a useful source of food.

The first priority was to help Alice regain her composure. I shared and understood her fear of snakes. Fear is useful and can provide the necessary adrenaline to power us through dangerous situations. On the other hand, too much fear has the opposite effect; often paralyzing a person into inactivity. The secret was to find a healthy middle ground between terror and bravado.

While I comforted Alice, I used the beam of my flashlight to explore our shelter. The dry soil of the cavern’s floor could just as well have been talcum powder. The ATV’s survival gear lay scattered about where Alice tossed it when we scrambled to get everything inside the cave.

To survive the blizzard, we needed to organize ourselves. Our situation reminded me of the scene from the movie, The Martian when the stranded astronaut faced the camera and said, “To survive, I’m left with only one option. I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.”

In our case, we needed to use our heads and think the shit out of our predicament. Our biggest threat wasn’t sleeping snakes, it was creeping hypothermia. The chill air drained our bodies of heat, and unless we figured out a way to keep warm in our shelter, the cave would become our tomb.

Turning to Alice, I said, “Let’s collect our stuff and do an inventory. We’re gonna need to come up with a plan of action.”

We gathered our meager stash of supplies and arranged the gear in front of us as we huddled together for warmth. We had salvaged an odd assortment of survival items including:

- two Kimber 84M Mountain Ascent rifles and a twenty round box of ammo

- two winter sleeping bags (rated to fifteen degrees)

- two all-weather mylar space blankets (useful as ground cloths)

- one Marmot Tungsten three-person three-season tent

- folding survival saw

- four packages of Meals Ready to Eat

- First Aid Trauma Kit

- Rayovac LED lantern (one hundred fifty-hour battery life)

- one plastic vial containing twenty-five storm-proof wooden matches

- compact snap-together stainless steel hobo stove

- one gallon stainless steel cooking pot with cover

- two metal water flasks filled with slushy half-frozen drinking water; tin cups attached

- three-ounce bottle of Japanese sesame seed oil

- ready box containing: a mess kit, one bag of ziplock and plastic shopping bags of various sizes, digital thermometer (zero to two hundred and twenty degrees), one deck of cards, twenty-five tea bags with twenty-five sugar packets, three energy bars, a tin of twenty-five beef bouillon cubes, a bar of Lava soap, and a SAS Survival Handbook in Spanish

Huh? Spanish? What the fuck? I shook my head in bewilderment.

I emptied the contents of my pockets and added a KitKat candy bar, a pack and a half of cigarettes, one Bic lighter, a small glass pot pipe, and an Altoids tin containing several buds of potent homegrown weed to our collection.

The branches stuffed in the entrance of the cave rattled as the blizzard’s howling wind intensified and the air temperature dropped. The interior of the cave was too large to heat, and if we wanted to stay warm, we were going to need a smaller confined space. We decided to erect the tent to use as a shelter within our shelter.

Thank goodness the components of our tent were color-coded. Within a few minutes, we had all the pieces assembled. Staking our tent in place was a bit more problematic. The thin layer of dusty soil on the fifteen-by-twenty foot plateau of bedrock was not deep enough to drive a tent peg into the ground. We improvised by filling several plastic bags with dirt and rocks and used them as anchors to keep the shelter in place. The finished product would have been the laugh of the neighborhood if anyone could see it. Our poor tent leaned to one side like a drunken sailor as its top was squashed and misshapen by the uneven ceiling. Oh, well! We weren’t trying to win Tent of the Year in the Better Caves and Snake Dens magazine.

In addition to the practical benefits of an easier to heat space, the finished tent provided a much-needed psychological boost. At least the snakes all around us were outta sight. Once we finished zipping our sleeping bags together, I brought the rest of our gear inside our cozy little ice box.

“I don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck here, but if we don’t want to sit around in the darkness, we’re going to have to conserve our batteries,” I said as I turned off our tactical flashlights and switched on the Rayovac lantern to the lowest setting. The smoky white mist of our breath glowed in the lantern’s light, every time we exhaled as a visual reminder of how God-awful cold our shelter was.

“Pip pip and cheerio, my dear, would you care for a spot of hot tea before we retire for the evening?” I asked Alice as I mangled my attempt to invoke an excessively proper English accent.

“Haha, funny. It ain’t nice to joke about hot tea while I’m freezing my ass off.” Her body trembled and shivered as she replied between chattering teeth.

“Who’s joking? We’ve got a hobo stove, plenty of fuel, a tea bag, water, a customer, and more time than we know what to do with, so why not?” I answered as I dug through the gear Alice salvaged from the ATV.

The hobo stove is the clever invention of some unnamed and forgotten hobo genius of days long gone. The stove’s design is elegant in its simplicity. A resourceful camper could build a fully functional metal stove from scratch in five minutes or less with only a tin can and a church key can opener.

Coffee cans are the ideal raw material, but any thin metal container will do the trick. All that is necessary is to remove can’s top while keeping the bottom in place; then a ring of evenly spaced rectangular holes are punched around the top and base of the can for ventilation. Finally, a series of randomly placed carburetor holes are punched through the sidewall of the can with the church key. Happy days! You have just built a survival stove.

The beauty of the tiny stoves is they are highly efficient, produce a minimum amount of smoke, and use far less wood than a traditional campfire.

In our case, our hobo stove was a bit more refined. Weighing less than sixteen ounces, it was a stainless steel design consisting of five snap together sheet metal plates and a few cross members. I assembled it and sat back to admire my handiwork.

Flashlight in hand, I told Alice, “I’ll be right back” as I crawled toward the cave’s opening in search of fuel.

The heavily falling snow was busy turning the crowns of the young Aspens into an effective windscreen. Between the trunks of the saplings, I found piles of dry, windblown leaves I would use as kindling. I cut several small branches for fuel and shaved off strips of wood and bark from one of the tree trunks with my hunting knife. I lucked out; I also found a book-sized flat stone to use as a base for our stove. The rock would keep the little stove from turning our tent floor into a puddle of melted plastic.

In the center of the tent, next to our combined sleeping bags, I set the assembled stove on the stone and lined the bottom of the can with dry leaves, followed by small twigs and then a layer of larger sticks. The idea was to use the smaller fuel to ignite the larger pieces of wood. The tin can is a natural chimney, and the interior metal surfaces reflected the heat back on the unburned fuel. When I was finished, I set the leaves ablaze with my Bic lighter.