DONNER, PARTY OF FIVE

Don't ask me why, but every year we have us a winter campout out here in the high wild mountains of Montana, way up where the billy goats screw the eagles. This year, we better than doubled last year's attendance, soaring from 2 to 5 individuals, all slogging around in the snow and making manly grunting noises and shooting guns. Which, I'm sure, some liberal somewhere wishes he/she/it could outlaw altogether.

I rented a small log cabin with a wood-burning stove as our "basecamp". The original intention was to build snow shelters and do all that cool winter survival type stuff, only using the cabin as a safe retreat if our toes started to turn blue and break off.

Unfortunately, winter did not cooperate with the winter campout. We've been having unseasonably warm and sunny weather for about two weeks now, and most of our snow is gone. In the open, there was still enough white stuff to make walking without skis or snowshoes exhausting, but in the dark timber the combination of the green trees and the sun had melted everything down to bare pine duff. For those of you on the East Coast, who are arrogant experts on all things Rocky Mountain even though you've never had your feet off pavement in your life, it's hard to dig a snow cave in pine duff. So we just stayed in the cabin.

We made do. We did do quite a bit of cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. In between the stands of timber, you would posthole into the snow down to your crotch with every step without such aids. I showed the proper method of using the wrong ski wax, and the resulting crash & burn method of locomotion that results from it. I was going to demonstrate flashing through the the woods on skis, mowing down Russians with a Suomi and blowing up their tanks with Molotovs, but we were short on Russians, tanks, Suomis, and Molotovs. And good skiers, too, as far as that goes.

The temps were still getting down around zero at night, so we even found an ice crust we could cross the creek upon. Which was good, as I was not going to practice my stream fording technique in such temperatures, unless perhaps I was being pursued by Janet Reno with lust in her eyes. I did practice my Dutch oven cooking, which is getting pretty good, so we all ended up as fat as ticks.

Just to celebrate the few remaining months of freedom, and to irritate any nearby liberals (I don't think there were any closer than the People's Republik of Missoula, a two-hour drive away) we played with our guns, too. AR's and AK's and M1A's and an Enfield, oh my. We shot the Appleseed and hung up a steel gong that we could "ring" with the rifles, at least until it fell ouf of the tree it was hanging in. Lucky for the forest creatures, no hunting seasons were open, or we would have added them to the Dutch oven fare.

Most amazing to me was one of our political discussions. I mean, here's this gathering of red-blooded Heartland males clinging bitterly to their guns and God, and there is unversal agreement that we would rather have Hillary than Obama...or McCain...in the Whitehouse.

Well, we all know Obama is a dangerous idiotic socialist demogouge, but even so the comments in support of a President Hillary were interesting, although not exactly in the cheerleader range of endorsement. "She has more balls than McCain." "Better to be stabbed in the front than in the back." "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't."

At any rate, here is a short video I took of our mountainous winter adventures.

I sure hope everyone present had a great time this winter. By this time next year, we may get bombed by the Obama Royal Air Force if we try to have another such a get-together.