Hannagan's Meadow

The day after Carlsbad Caverns, Paul and I set off to a place called Hannagan's Meadow. It didn't take a scholar to figure out that we were looking for a place with a meadow. I was excited. The terrain since Big Bend had been boring and I was excited to get into the White Mountains of Arizona. This specific place had been recommended by my uncle who had lived in Arizona for the greater majority of his life.

The Garmin starting dinging telling us we were close. We saw a sign! Business area!

Then we saw a lodge! Then we saw another sign! "End of business area. Next services 86 miles".... seriously? That was it?!?! That was Hannagan's Meadow?!? I honestly believe that 100 years ago a dude named Hannagan lived here. He would call up his friends and say "Hey dude's, come up here and visit me! I have a meadow!" He was so insanely popular that people started just simply saying, "Yeah, I'm going to Hannagan's Meadow!" This is the entire meadow, nice but nothing I'd name a "city" after!


About 10 feet past the sign we saw a campground.


So we pulled in to see if this was the place we wanted to stay.

Signs of an adventure:

#1 The sign below.

Seriously? Pay what you want? Sweet!

#2 We were incredibly excited to be somewhere beautiful and to be camping outside of a desert. We grabbed my frisbee and went to explore. Drugs couldn't have gotten us higher than we were at that moment.

#3 We decided to stop and talk to the camp host "Cliff."

Me: "Hey Cliff, my name is Nate and this is Paul."

Cliff: "Don't expect me to remember that...." Alright..... "you guys have tents?" Well.... we are camping.... "Get ready for some weather tonight...." Seems like he knows it's going to rain... "You always expect rain up here. I'm actually freaked out that the weather is so nice right now!" You could actually see the joy sink out of Paul and my face.

Me: "Well we are just excited to be in nature amongst trees. What trees are we in right now?"

Cliff: "I have no idea.... but that one's a ponderosa. So is that one. That one over there.... that's a ponderosa too." Alright Cliff, we get it. You know what a ponderosa is. Time to move on.

#4 Paul and I setting up out tents looking over at each other mentally saying "Dude, if you want to go rent a cabin I'm game." But neither of us has the balls to be the first to break the silence.

Well, instead of frisbee we went and bought 12 beers and a bag of ice. Now Paul doesn't drink any more because he is to busy stroking genitals (errr orgasmically meditating) in San Francisco. So those 12 beers were hypothetically for me.

Cliff hadn't lied. EVERYTHING was wet. And we hadn't brought any fire wood with us. This is a job for .... duh duh duuuuhhhh! Fire MacGyver!

We ended up finding some dry kindling, I chopped apart a tree with my 12 inch hatchet, (Ok, calm down ladies, it's actually a hatchet and it's only 12 inches long...) and we set up a complicated drying to burning system with stones, leverage, and maybe even a pulley.

We had been so nervous about the rain that we started the fire at 4:30. About an hour later Cliff came by and said, "Holy shit! You guys really got that going! Good job. Last week I brought an entire wheel barrow of my fire wood over to this guy and he couldn't get anything going." Wait... we could have gotten an entire FREE wheel barrow of fire wood from you?!? Dammit Cliff!!! No matter, things were looking up. We got a compliment rom the stoic Cliff, if didn't looks like it was going to rain, and we had fire!

Well, if you are a fellow camper (and I use that term loosely because I am including myself amongst us) we had gotten to the point of the fire where we were burning an entire tree. at 11:30 at night the skies suddenly opened up! Armageddon was upon us! We ran into the car to try to wait it out. You may ask why. It was late, we were tired, it was a perfectly good time to call it a night!

To that I respond, "You are obviously a chick." We had a tree burning!!! You don't walk away from those moments!

I personally think a man's instinct consists of three things:
#1 Have as much sex as possible and
#2 BURN SHIT!
and the third thing came shortly after. It was obvious the rain wasn't going to stop. So Paul and I came to the next conclusion. We were going to run out of the car, kick over the logs, and piss all over the fire. Now I can hear you saying "Eww... that's gross." to which I respond "If God didn't want men to piss all over things he wouldn't have given us a fire hose attached to our person! What do you have to say to that?!?!

Needless to say we had given into the rain. But that didn't kill the morning! You see, from the fellow campers that night we had learned that this was mushroom country! And we were determined to hunt!