Over There! Over There!

I am not sure where these little old ladies get their energy from. (I am not being mean - they've all shared how very proud they are that they've been Girl Scouts for 50 years - you do the math.)

We are hiking up hills and over rocks and climbing something affectionately known as Heart Attack Hill. I am sucking down bottles of water both out of thirst and to offload the weight of them.

We are having serious discussions about real hiking gear vs. fashion hiking gear (guess which I like better?)

We are learning how to read a blazed trail.

A blaze is a big red dot painted on a tree at about eye-level. (I am not sure why the nature lovers don't call this graffiti and consider it defacing nature. It would not surprise me at all if they did.) But in any event, someone blazes a trail by marking trees along a preferred path way so that you can follow it by going toward on blaze and easily spotting the next - which calls you to go toward it - and so on and so on until you have completed your hike.

Interesting facts:

1 - a tree with two blazes indicates a turn. You should be looking more to the left and right for the next blaze.

2 - Girl Scouts get very annoyed if you habitually forget the word "blaze" and call them "red dots."

We get to Lookout Rock and the girls are encouraged to help each other climb up to the top. From there you should be able to "see" four states. (if it weren't for all the damn trees.) It is a beautiful spot for a group picture of all the girls together looking healthy and active.

And being Girl Scouts, since they are assembled and confined to the flat surface of a rock, we must teach a song about how lovely the hills are. Really.

We hear it.
We repeat it.
We sing it.
We sing it in rounds three times.

We climb to the summit and pick up jaw bones and vertebrae of dead unidentifiable varmints along the way. All picked clean except for a random whisker or hair. Eeewww. (But the girls know that Tree will just love their treasures! She will pull them out and marvel at them and identify them on the spot - this is a muskrat skull - that is a skunk pelvis. Again, eeewww.)

We are tromping through some green leafy curly-cued plants. Another counselor is suddenly very excited. She knows what they are and thinks she should scoop up a bunch in her bag (hopefully not the one with the pieces of carcass in it) to bring back for Pluto (Disney fan? Former planet sympathizer?) to saute in some butter in the mess hall kitchen. Says they are delicious.

"Delicious?" I ask. "Delicious in a general sense or delicious as compared with other things you might scrape off the forest floor and fry?"

No answer.

It is hard to know what will offend whom our here. But unless I plan to blaze my trail home on my own, I think I'd better be kind to our guide and try to fit in.