When we woke up at Cardigan on Day 2, most people were up and ready to go, but I was pretty reluctant to get out of bed. But when I did, I lethargically walked down the stairs , and we had some delicious Breakfast. We had French toast and eggs and there was also hot chocolate for us! After breakfast my hiking group cleaned up the tables, and then we made lunch for out on our hike. By the time we set out for cardigan it was only about 9:00. At the beginning of the hike we sketched a lot of things in the woods, like trees and their leaves. And soon after we all went off the trail and did some stretching for the hike ahead of us. As we were doing this another group came passing us, so we had to blend in with our surroundings to camouflage.
When we were close to the top, we saw several “summits”. And as we saw these mini hills in the massive mountain, we thought we were looking straight at the peak of cardigan. Several times we thought we were just a few yards away from the summit, but in reality we were far from the top. Once we summited firescrew, we had a small snack, and then took just a small little walk to cardigan from there. At the top of Cardigan we had our packed lunches, and I went into the fire tower, where Amelia and Reese were, talking. We chatted for a minute or two until Amelia looked out at the mountain and…
“My water bottle!!!!” I looked over and there was her water, barreling down the mountain at top speed. Luckily one of the AMC workers went down and found it, where it had luckily landed in front of a tree, blocking it from falling. After that fiasco we saw a man and a couple dogs coming up the mountain, and we all ran over to pet them.
There were lots of examples of Human Environment Interactions at cardigan. There were cairns and trail markers everywhere! These are both two of the many ways that humans change the environment. There was also a big fire tower at the summit, made by humans. And one of the biggest ways that humans have changed the environment at cardigan is that a long time ago, there were said to be wolves that dwelled at the top of cardigan, posing a threat to humans, and so people burned down all of the trees on the peak of cardigan, and got rid of the wolves. This also, however, left the summit to be complete rock, with no trees. Now cardigan has a bare rock summit, with trees all down the sides. The environment also changed humans there, as it was very cold most days and even raining on one, causing the people to change how they dressed.
On our way back down Cardigan we used the rock stacks and our map to navigate to where we needed to go. We saw one of the AMC employee’s cabin where he stayed to work at the mountain.Then we got out of the rock area and into the woods. There we stopped for a few minutes and played camouflage. The goal is to hide in the woods around you, while one person looks around to find people. After the short break we trudged through the woods for about a mile until we crossed a bridge over a stream, and found ourselves back in the clearing where the AMC lodge was at.
Back at the lodge we had about an hour of break, and then we had dinner. We ate tacos and really good coconut ice cream. After dinner they got us outside and we sat by a campfire. The workers told us stories and sang songs and we learned some animal calls. After that we all got inside, listened to some stories, and then went back to our bunk rooms, to drift off to sleep.
