I'm sorry to be so long in getting the next installment done. Work has been heavier than usual, and time has been hard to find. But to continue...
Barry came home, and the hike was on! I watched the SPOT signals and could see the slow progress, and the terrain map showed me the steep climbing they were doing. It was rainy, gray, and cold at our house, and I knew it had to be colder and maybe even snowing up at 10,000 feet where they were.
On Memorial Day, I watched those little orange bubbles on the satellite map. Would Trent come home with the other two, or would those little signals continue past the coordinates for the end of the trail where the truck had been left?? Barry was watching, too, because he still was not sure the truck was in the right place. And if they got to the end of the trail and did not find it, what would they do? They would have no idea where the truck was! And they would be in the middle of nowhere with miles and miles to even get to phone service. To make matters worse, we discovered in the trail book that there are two different trail heads at the end of Segment 4/beginning of Segment 5. Now we were pretty sure the truck was at the wrong one! The orange bubbles came to an end in a small clearing in the forest that we could see vaguely on the satellite map. We waited. No more signals.
Several hours later, Mike's truck went by my office window. All three hikers were home safe and sound. And this is the story they had to tell us!
About 5 miles before our hikers reached the empty parking lot (yes, the dads had left the truck in the wrong place), they met four other hikers on the trail. They were actually two separate groups of hikers who had already met each other.
One was a man and his wife who were experienced hikers and in great shape but had somehow gotten off their original trail and did not know exactly where they were. The other group was two men who were totally lost because their compass was reading 180 degrees off. North looked like South! They had started out on an easy hike and had gone to much higher elevations than planned because they were lost. This was actually serious for them because they were very cold, and one of the men was visiting for the weekend from Ohio. Even though he was in excellent shape for hiking, his lungs were very unhappy with the elevation he had taken them to, and they were not working well at all.
The night before, the two men had taken stock and prayed for five specific things. God answered all five of their requests, but I only know two of them -- that they would stay dry that night, and that they would find someone who could help them. That night, it did not rain and they were dry. And the next day they met the other couple and then our hikers.
The seven of them continued down the trail and got to the cleared "parking" area where our hikers thought the truck would be, but it was not there! So there were three groups of hikers -- our group who had no idea where the truck was, the man and his wife who did not know quite where they were, and the two men who were lost and cold and having some altitude problems.
When all of them reached the empty parking lot, the couple realized that it was Mike's truck that they had passed earlier about 5 miles further down the road. So Mike and the man set off at a pretty fast pace to get it and bring it back for the others. Trent looked around to see if he could build a fire because he could see how very cold the two men were, but there was no dry wood to be found, so there was nothing to do but wait. The two got back with the truck sooner than expected because another vehicle happened along the road they were on and gave them a lift. Mike's truck has an extended cab, so they were able to fit all seven people in, and Mike drove them to the town where they had parked their vehicles which was actually on the way home anyway.
And so our hikers arrived back home safely. And Trent said, "Because of genetics, I knew that two nights out on the trail, cold and wet, were all I should do until I get over this respiratory thing." And he is making a nice recovery and planning for a later hike instead.
What an amazing God we have, and how He showed his loving care on Memorial Day weekend! Two men, lost and in trouble, prayed and asked Him for what they needed. He gave them a dry night, brought across their path two others who had seen the truck earlier in the day, and then joined them up with the owners of the truck who did not know where it was. "It was a God thing," Mike told us, and he is right!
(To be continued... with one more installment to explain why I can't even imagine it!)
Memorial Day is now in the past, but my thoughts about it continue on and are the reason for the title of this series. This year I was thinking about the moms of the young men and women who serve in the military, and I just can't even imagine what they go through.
