The Second Day of My Wicked Radical Trip to Cardigan

On the morning of day 2 I woke up and jumped down from the top bunk. I accidentally awoke my fellow bunkmates but in my defense it was good because it was time to get up anyways. After awaking them, I grabbed my water bottles and refilled them and following me was one of my bunkmates, Josh. Then I came back upstairs and opened the window to cool the room off and use it as a refrigeration device for my water bottles. Following that, I turned the light on which somewhat blinded Brendan and Peyton since they were trying to ignore the fact that they were awake and I made sure I had prepared the right clothing and materials for the big hike up to the summit of Mt. Cardigan and Mt. Firescrew. About 20 minutes later after I waited and talked with my bunkmates it was time to go down for breakfast and hot chocolate. So Brendan, Peyton, Josh and I sped walk through the halls and tumbled down the halls making some noise whether somebody liked it or not and claimed the table that we were going to eat at for breakfast. Then, everybody on the boys and girls floor woke up and had come downstairs and we all got to enjoy some nice warm hot chocolate before breakfast. 5 minutes after we all enjoyed the hot chocolate, the instructors had arrived and one of the groups had to set the tables. Meanwhile, everybody else who was not in one of the instructors groups continued to talk and chat while sitting on the comfy couches inside the cozy room. Once the group had finished setting the table, everybody had sat down and each instructor had sat down as well. After that, the chef came out and discussed some rules about breakfast and following his talk the food came out. Everybody was jumping up in down in their seats because of the sight of bacon but going along with the bacon was some watermelon, sweet corn bread and some scrambled eggs. Each person from each table picked up one bowl of food and put some on their plate and then passed it on almost in unison. Finally after the food was on everybodys plate, everybody started munching down and enjoying the great meal. When all of us were done, the instructors did an ORT check to see if we had succeeded our goal and we all realized we had. Since our goal was reached, we had to come up with a compromise on what our next goal would be. After eating our meal and talking about our goal for ORT we got to go up to the table in the back of the room and pick what we wanted on our sandwich for our bag lunch. Next everybody stormed the stairs and headed back up to their rooms to get changed out of their pajamas and into their hiking gear. When I made it outside I saw my instructor and my group and we started to talk about what our goals would be on finding a rare plant and on identifying what trails we were going on in order to conquer our goal of making it to the top of at least Mt. Cardigan. During our conversation Josh mentioned a couple of things about how we were going to find the rare plant that only was in the region of New England and then when he was done with that, we headed up the trails. By about 11:30 everybody in our group was hungry so we stopped for a break on the side of the rocky trail and enjoyed our apples and our cookies that we chose after breakfast. By about 1:45, we were encountering the top of the mountain and were about 3.5 miles away from the rocky summit. While we were there, we stopped and did a plot study about one general area of plants and while we were doing that we noticed that all of the trees were a lot more bare than at the lodge which had to do with the theme region. The reason being is because at the higher region of the cardigan landscape there is different weather patterns than the trees on the bottom which results in different looks on the trees and plants. Finally after about another hour and a half we made it to the top of Cardigan and we saw the beautiful foliage 360 degrees around us as well as the huge fire tower and Mt. Firescrew. While we enjoyed the beautiful summit and the landscape around us, my group and I started eating lunch. After lunch, we walked closer to the edge of the summit and listened to my instructor Josh tell a story. When he was done with the story we stayed at the top of Mt. Cardigan for a little while longer and then headed down a trail towards Mt. Firescrew. 1 hour after we left Mt. Cardigan we had stepped onto Mt. Firescrew and we could see a similar view compared to the Mt. Cardigan view except for the fact that we were about 200 feet lower in elevation. As we walked along the firescrew summit we played a game involving a clothespin, the point was to secretly put the clothespin onto somebody else's hiking equipment as they were walking and once Josh said stop, everybody would check to see if they had the pin on it and whoever did lost that round. But since Josh had lost on the first round, we could not do anymore rounds. When we left the summit of Firescrew it took about another 2 hours to make it back to the lodge and when we made it back I thought I had twisted my ankle 5 times. Since we were the second group to finish both mountains our group did a fun little game and after that every other group had arrived and it was free time. During free time, I grabbed my pajamas and headed down to the bathroom to take my shower and once I was done I got out and went back to my room to put my stuff back. After that I went downstairs to the cozy room and listened to Mr. Woolner talk about his brothers during story time. By the time he was done I thought everybody wanted to go to sleep and once I made it upstairs immediately hit the pillow and was snoozing.

Cardigan Sketches by Bryce C is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.