Raccoon Creek State Park, PA Backpacking - Appendix A

In my two previous posts about my overnight hike at Raccoon Creek State Park (Part One Here & Part Two Here) I mentioned that once we had arrived at the backpacking shelters our evening was fairly uneventful. Well, that was untrue, but the events of that evening had not much to do with my review of RCSP so I felt it only proper to leave them unmentioned until later. Now I'll iterate my misadventures of that evening.

I want to come back in the summer. This looks like a beautiful park!

After we had finally sorted out sleeping arrangements and gotten ourselves unpacked we set about to collect firewood. Not far from the firepit was a very conveniently downed tree. I grabbed my backpacking axe (it is a Gerber Camp Axe which I had bought from Smokey Mountain Knife Works while on my Honeymoon) and set to work chopping some limbs for our fire.

Two things to note: One, I keep that ax sharp. Extremely sharp. It is a light weight axe and as such it needs a sharp edge so that it bites into the wood. Two, it is a light axe; it will bounce off once in a while no matter how sharp you make it.

As I was chopping, the head bounced. It skipped off the log and I felt it hit my pinky finger on my left hand, then bump my left thigh. I looked, finger didn't hurt, pants were not cut, everything is good. I went back to chopping.

A few minutes later W came walking by with some wood he found. He looked at me and said "Dude, you do know you are bleeding right?" I looked down and sure enough, I had blood streaming out of the second knuckle of my left pinky finger where the axe had "brushed" it. It was bleeding pretty good. Really good in fact. The amount was almost shocking, especially since it didn't hurt and I didn't know I'd even cut myself.

Holding my offending digit away from myself, lest I get blood on my backpacking clothing (I'm not sure how I managed to NOT get any blood on my clothing) I walked across camp to find my first aid kit. Apparently in doing so I left a blood trail from the tree to my backpack. Later on, my caring companions gleefully pointed out every drop of blood I had left behind. Once I got to my pack I dug my first aid kit out, then I realized something: my first aid kit which was tightly packed in a seal-able sandwich bag was totally inaccessible with just one hand. I struggled against the baggy trying to dislodge the hard-sided kit.

Eventually I did get it out and opened my first-aid kit, only to find that it was woefully inadequate for dealing with real injuries. Oh sure, I had a couple of band-aids, some moleskin, a couple of alcohol wipes and a small bit of gauze, but I had a real bleeder going. I called out to my companions and luckily my future Brother-in-law had a more substantial kit than I.

Oops! There was at least this much blood back at the injury site.

As you can see, I made a bit of a mess. I cleaned the wound with alcohol and used a couple of gauze pads plus direct pressure to stop the bleeding. After that it was another bit of gauze and some tape and I was all better.

Mostly.

When I got home I revamped my first aid kit. I still need to go through and tweak it. Right now it is bulkier and heavier than I'd like. Of course getting rid of the snake bite kit and the hard-sided first-aid container would help. The snake bite kit I'm prepared to leave behind, but the hard sided first-aid container is a nice little waterproof container that I keep nail clippers, ChapStick® and some zip-ties in among other things.

Besides injury, the other problem we had was dinner. I tried a recipe that I had found on Trailcooking.com called Pizza Pan Biscuits. (As of the writing of this article, the recipe seems to be 404 on Trailcooking's web server. I still linked to the recipe in case the link gets fixed sometime in the future.)

I was really looking forward to this tasty little dish, I mean, what is not to like? Biscuits? Good! Pizza Sauce? Good! Pepperoni? Good! Cheese? GOOD! Unfortunately I did not do a trial run of this treat before I tried it. Like the recipe suggested I added the chunks of mozzarella string cheese to the dough before frying it. This was an unfortunate mistake. Not only did it end up being too much dough to fry in my little pan over a backpack stove, but the cheese added way too much moisture and the biscuits never did firm up properly.

Not exactly a successful attempt.

Oh, they were damn tasty, but really really messy. Next time I make them I'm just cooking the biscuits then shredding the string cheese on top of the warm biscuits with the pepperoni. This will call for dunking in sauce, but that's OK. I really need to play with this one at home before trying it out again.

Ok, well that's all I have. My full report on Raccoon Creek State Park is now complete. I hope you enjoyed it. Please keep an eye out for more posts in the future and have a good day!

Occasional Hyker