Yellow Bellied Bastards

Before leaving for my Hawaiian adventure, I stopped in Colorado to visit my friends, Mike and Leah, who had been WWOOFing before. After hanging out with them for a day Mike and I took off for the mountains to do a little backpacking and test out my equipment. 

Leah, Joe and Mike

My nice hike and gear test turned into a survival experience. Simply put, we were attacked by beavers. Well, they weren't actually beavers, they were yellow bellied marmots that hell itself spat out. 

The first attack came on night one and it was a warning. My sock was nibbled through in the heel and part of the elastic was gnawed. Assuming it was just some small creature that somehow confused the smell of my hiking socks for a delicious snack, we continued hiking on the next day. This was a massive mistake. 

We pitched the larger tent at camp two soon after we arrived in case any foul weather came up. Stuffing the majority of our possessions and packs inside, we left a few things under the rainfly and went out on a (successful) fishing expedition. When we returned to camp, I noticed Mike’s hiking poles were not under the rainfly and were instead under a tree across a little ditch from our tent. To our dismay, we discovered that the foam handles had been devoured. However, we had a fish to cook and decided to throw everything into the tent and go eat some fish and pizzas.

While we were finishing cooking, a storm blew up and we had to run back to camp. Before Mike jumped in the tent, he asked me if I had left my jeans outside the tent. The final blow had been dealt. These marmots had eaten through the tent, ate pieces of my jeans and deposited them outside, completely destroyed a pair of socks, nibbled on Mike’s hiking sticks again, and put two insulting bite marks into his leather wallet. We posted a guard at the tent from then on. 

If I lose a pair of socks every weekend, I will run out of socks in a month. On to Hawaii.