We’re passionate writers and we want to use Rhino Den and our forces of good to let everyone know about up and coming talented writers. Arial is our first Featured Aspiring Writer – here’s a little more about her:

Ariel is working on the last year of her graduate degree in Intelligence (Government-sanctioned-deceit) with hopes of someday finding out the secret of Bushes Baked Beans. Upon graduation, she will begrudgingly join the grown-up work force and be subjected to endless DoD/government death-by-power-point presentations, while contemplating how Ziva would neutralize coworkers to escape while inflicting minimal permanent physical damage upon them. 

 

Ariel is a walking, talking, military-loving billboard that respectfully puts her Ranger Buddy above all else. On leave, she can be found with a tank on her back, 60 feet underwater blowing bubbles, swimming laps at the gym, or taking on some facet of the outdoors. 

Now, on to Ariel’s story!

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Hell’s Hostel

By: Ariel

Superstar and I worked together at a gym. She’s one of those overachievers that somehow exceeds a 4.0 GPA, feeds the elderly, gives blood, bakes cookies for the needy, never forgets a birthday, and always looks like a Victoria’s Secret model. What’s worse is she is sincere in her endeavors, not like a fake orgasm (not that I know anything about that). She was born and raised in the Valley of the Sun, which is surrounded by great mountain ranges that we decided to surmount, in somewhat of a ‘girls day out.’ It was gonna be a great day – we were going to bite off a 5 mile trail, and enjoy the muscle tenderness that would surely follow our adventurous day out of the gym. 

Since we were in the Sonoran desert, and it was the last week in July, even Satan needed air conditioning and SPF 80. To mitigate the risk of heat stroke (which I hear is as much fun as chewing on tin foil), we decided that we should step off the minute the trails opened, which on this weekday morning was 0600 hrs. Being the keeners that we are, we made our kit list, and man, we sure had it covered. Superstar was the local and had done these trails with her Dad throughout her life, so she got map duty and had her standby Camelback with an extra bottle of water ready to go. I’d hiked before (almost all of which was in Canada and the Northern U.S.) so I knew that I would need enough water to put out a forest fire if it was going to be 90 degrees by the time we got off the mountains. 

Hydration was the name of the game. For 24 hours prior I swallowed a small kiddie pool. This event was buzzing with such rampant curiosity, that it even called for a new Go-Go-Gadget-Camelback to help bring more water… because what the hell was 1.5 liters going to do for me over the course of 5 miles?! To be even more of a stellar performer, I took a note from my swimming days and cut half water and half Gatorade in my bladder, and added another liter of the blessed mix to the outside of my mini-pack with a D-ring. Normally, an occasion such as this would call for my super-duper-life-in-a-ruck hiking backpack that has enough storage space to ice pack (and inevitably float) a tapped keg. However, since this was just an ‘exercise’ trip, there wasn’t really a need to bring anything additional, such as a woobie for warmth or shade, and, oh I don’t know, desert survival gear?! 

The morning of Operation Dumbass was upon us! It was like the first day of school, and I couldn’t wait to get going. For breakfast, I made a super nutritious piece of toast with some peanut butter, and then left it on the counter because I was far too excited to eat it. Superstar pulled up and was stoked to get going. We did a quick check… 

Water? Check. 

Sun block? Check. 

Chap stick? Check. 

Heart Rate Monitor? Check.

Map? Check. 

Extra Water? Nice and cozy in a cooler on the backseat… Check.

Great attitude? Check

Two fully educated dumbasses? Check. Check.  

At 0550 hrs we stood on the line of departure, brimming with stupidity and completely unaware of what we were getting into. We re-applied some SPF (because at this point, skin cancer in thirty years is our biggest worry), and make sure the car is locked with extra water in the back. We notice that it’s already a little warm for the morning so we might want to pick up the pace a little and step off. 

I ask Superstar if I can take a peek at the map to get my bearings. Looking at the page, our trail heads off to the top right corner of the page… and then reappears in the middle of the top of the page, intersects and joins a few other trails, and then comes back through the ranges (which are about four mountains deep on the returning side). If we were in a horror movie, at this point, we would be the two doe-eyed idiots that energetically went into the woods to see what the noise was, and opted to bring cookies instead an Infantry platoon. 

We made great time, passing mile marker after mile marker. We reached the point where we fell off the map, and there was a sign advising the following part of the trail was rated as ‘expert.’ Did we think twice about it? No. Instead, we skipped our happy asses past the sign like Dorothy frolicking down the yellow brick road, disregarded the barbed wire designed to stop sane people, and glided to a Billy goat trail to start climbing over boulders.

Hmmmm, we’ve been out here for three and a half hours, and it’s now just plain hot, and no matter how fast we go, we don’t seem to be getting anywhere. SHIT, my heart rate has been between 180-186 for almost twenty minutes. We should find a little shade. Oh that’s right… we’re in the fuckin’ desert. Where the hell is that map? 

After a couple minutes downtime to take stock of how hot it was getting, my heart rate was a manageable 170. We did a quick kit check and noted that we were both down to about a liter of water each, but since we were sure we had gone at least 4 miles (thinking that the rock climbing just made it seem much, much longer), we would continue on our current path and finish up the last mile like champs. Away we went, climbing and hiking, climbing and hiking…

During what we thought was the longest last mile in history, we tried to keep our spirits up by making jokes about those idiots on the 6 o’clock news that get themselves lost or stuck hiking, and how we refused to be them, so we kept putting one foot in front of the other. 

“Can you imagine what kind of dumbass you’d have to be in order to get stuck out here, only a few miles from civilization?!” I said confidently, thinking that we were less than a mile out. 

“Seriously!” she exclaimed like a 70-year-old woman who’d just won BINGO.

“… I mean, what kind of lazy ass just gives up, being this close to home?!…” I rant from my soapbox, gesturing to the apparent smog layers hovering above the city on the other side of the mountain.

“Look! There’s the top of the mountain, we’ll be at the car in no time!” Captain Obvious noted in her ever-annoying optimistic tone.

“Niiice…” I replied, taking a big drink of what had now become piss-warm liquid.

Our cocky laughter filled the air until we came over the top of the mountain where it was replaced by the deflating sound of our ego’s. Ahead of us lay at least three more mountains to the other side of the range. 

What. The. Fuck?

As I watched her frantically try to read the poor excuse of a map she had printed, it became painfully clear that Superstar holding a map might look as great as a Bond girl, but was actually about as useful as an Airman brandishing an M4. Utilizing it correctly would be nothing short of sheer dumb luck.  

The last shady spot was the best, and somehow a tree had managed to grow in the middle of this hell, so we both spooned under it and got blown by the breath of God. It’s at this point that I realized my heart rate monitor was going spastic, and even though we were moving at a snail’s pace, the lack of water and heat was encouraging my heart rate to stick at 186 and Superstar’s was teetering at 180. My hiking buddy decided that she wanted to keep walking, though I tried to explain she might want to wait a minute to see if our heart rates would come down to at least 170 before we stepped off.  

She looked ready to cry/scream from exhaustion, and stepped off anyways telling me to stay put. My heart might have been ready to explode, but I felt just fine. There was no way I would let my hiking buddy go on her own, so I watched her stubborn ass stagger off about fifty yards ahead of me, and then I brought up the rear. As I followed behind her, saying the Ranger Creed to myself – as my Ranger Buddy taught me to do – I thought about how I would explain this little adventure to him if things didn’t work out as expected. It was maybe half mile, if that, and there it was… sweet cover and water fountains…

All in all, it took an additional 7 miles to get back to the car, in what turned out to be a TWELVE mile hike. In our excitement to get on the mountain at zero-dark-thirty, we missed the daily heat warning and it had topped 118 by the time we got off the mountain at 1145 hrs. We had been black on water for the last five miles, and on the rare occasion that we could find shade, we would stop for a few minutes to try and get our bodies cooled down.

The absolute best part of the entire ordeal wasn’t the heat exhaustion, the heat cramps, the sunburn, the blisters, the dehydration, the killer headache, the crazy heart rate… it wasn’t even getting to brag about hiking 12 miles in 118 degree weather. No… the BEST part (note the sarcasm) of the whole adventure was telling it to my Ranger Buddy when he called from his Garrison in the European Union. 

My Ranger Buddy, a tabbed out Infantry 1SG, who just got home from 18 months of patrolling mountains along the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that run along the Afghan-Pakistan border, is normally sweet and loving to me. This was no regular blunder, as I came to realize during the phone call. Though I found the story rather comical because I made it home, he was (and still is) somewhat less than amused. This is the first time that my Ranger Buddy became my 1SG, and I have to say… I have a new respect for his paratroopers, because he’s one hell of a bastard when he’s ripping you a new one. He was nothing short of irate when I told him that my hiking buddy had kept walking, and sounded like he was going to jump through the phone and issue her a super *special* ass whooping. He’s also banned me from hiking without him… though that isn’t going to happen. I’ve now got a hate-on for those damn mountains, and fully intend on hiking them again this summer – after doing thorough recon and finding a new Superstar. 

Or becoming my own. 

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