Over Labor Day weekend, my wife and I took a hike up to Bomber Mountain in the Cloud Peak Wilderness. Normally, hiking is a fairly inexpensive endeavor. If you camp in a tent, you’re not spending a lot of money for a hotel room. Freeze-dried meals are a little more expensive than home-cooked entrees, but they’re generally less expensive than dining out. The biggest expense is usually fuel.
But our hike ended up being a bit expensive. It wasn’t the trip itself, but the aftermath of the hike that’s going to wind up costing us a lot of money, if we want to replace the casualties of the excursion.
The first expensive mishap came early. On the first day, about a mile up the trail, we made the only major stream crossing of the trail. When we got to the far side, my wife realized somewhere along the way, she’d lost her Costa sunglasses. I went back to where she had stumbled on the rocks and almost fallen in the water, hoping the sunglasses would be there in the water, but they weren’t. They apparently had washed downstream, never to be found again. That was the first $250 loss of the trip.
The second day, we hiked all the way to the top of Bomber Mountain with no other trouble. I wore my own Costa sunglasses all the way up and most of the way down, but the clouds rolled in as we were headed back to camp, so I put my sunglasses in the cargo pocket on my pants. When we got back to camp, I lay down next to the camp stove to get dinner going, and I felt a crunch on my thigh. That was the second $250 mistake of the trip. Both lenses shattered.
So much for an inexpensive weekend. If we want to replace both pairs of sunglasses, it’s going to cost us about $500. But the experience, and the view from the top of the ridge, was worth every penny.
