The year was 1998, I was in college and Bill, my sister's boyfriend at the time wanted to do a little winter hiking/camping in the white mountains of New Hampshire. By the time Bill had reached my campus to pick me up, it was dark and at least 6 inches of snow had fallen. We debated not going, however, the temptation for a good story was far too great.

After hours in the car battling the snow, we reached the trailhead of a small mountain, put our headlamps on and began the hike. We must have hiked for about an hour and half before we decided to make camp. While Bill was melting snow for warm drink, I was working on setting up the tent. I took out my Sierra Designs Clip Flashlite 2 tent and tried to stake it out. Unfortunately, the ground was too frozen for me to get the stakes in. A small hammer or a rock would have done the job, however, I did not have a hammer and the snow was far too deep to search for any rocks. At that point I gave Bill the bad news. We sipped on some hot chocolate and then decided that we would just sleep in the collapsed tent and it would act as a dry two-person bivy. As we were both in the collapsed tent getting ready to shut our eyes, we made plans to wake up, hit the trail and make the summit early so we could make it back home at a reasonable time.

The next morning we woke up at around 7 AM, and decided that we were both so comfortable that we would just sleep in for a couple extra hours. I'm a pretty light sleeper and apparently Bill isn't because he didn't wake up to some hiker's dogs sniffing around us. It wasn't long before I heard the voices of the owners and looked at my watch, 11:00 AM! One thing you don't do when your camping is sleep in and another thing you don't do is camp right on the trail. When I heard the voices I knew it was too late to wake up Bill and get packed up before they arrived to where we were sleeping. I was so embarrassed that we were sleeping in so late and right on the trail that I kept my head under the collapsed tent. Just then one of the hikers grabbed Bill's ankle, which completely startled him. I can only imagine what was going through his head as moments earlier, he was sound asleep in the middle of nowhere. Bill let out a "whoa, whoa, whoa" and the hiker quickly let go. Bill then stuck his head out and assured them that we weren't two frozen popsicles under a collapsed tent. Bill thanked them for checking on us and then asked the million-dollar question, "do you know where the trail is?" One of the hikers then replied, "yeah, you're on it. See the trail marker?" "Oh yeah, thanks", Bill replied.

The hikers then went on their way and as soon as their voices were a dull roar, I poked my head out of the tent and said, "let's get packed up and go down". Bill agreed and we laughed about it the entire hike down.

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