Bowen Island Scouts

Cub in a Cold, but Cozy, Cave

• By Leslie Blais
• March 29, 2013
• No Comments

At the beginning of Spring Break, one of the Bowen Cubs decided to spend the weekend in a cave –as Wolf Cubs sometimes do (you may have heard this if you’ve ever read a book about wolves and other forest animals, or perhaps you remember it from The Jungle Book story).  So, yes, it’s true, Wolf Cubs do spend some time in caves.  Even in snow caves! Here’s how it happened:  we left Horseshoe Bay on Saturday morning, and it was raining.  However, Horseshoe Bay is at sea level, where it’s usually warmer than up high in the mountains, and we had checked the weather forecast for the mountains, where it was supposed to be colder, so we figured it wouldn’t be raining up in the mountains.  So, we decided to drove up to Mt. Seymour ski resort.  In fact, it wasn’t raining up there:  it was hailing Smartie-sized pieces of ice, and there was loud thunder too!  But it soon stopped, and even snowed a little.  We hiked down a trail through the woods, up and down hills, and stopped near a frozen lake.  There, we found a good and not-too-steep hill to dig a cave in.  Dad started the digging, and after a small cave door was dug out, the Cub wielded a snow saw –a sharp weapon (see the picture below)– to help cut out big hard snow blocks on the inside of the cave.   Before long, they had a cozy, if somewhat cold, cave!  The ceiling was low, and every time the Cub’s father bumped his head on it, snow fell down on everything –but so what!  It was a cozy place for the night. By then, it was early evening and both Cub and Dad were tired and hungry –and getting colder.  As soon as they had stopped digging, guess what?  They started to get cold quickly, since all the effort to build the cave had helped them to stay warm.  So, they unpacked their backpacks, spread out a plastic tarp on the floor of the cave, put down foam mats on top of that, unrolled their sleeping bags, and crawled inside!  That was cozy!  And warm!  While in their warm sleeping bags –still fully dressed in jackets, socks, and hats– they cooked dinner.  Freeze dried food –have you ever heard of that kind of food?  It’s not frozen, but it is dried and comes in a plastic foil bag.  All you need to do to cook it is boil water (we brought a small camping stove with us), pour water in the bag, close it up (keep the ziplocked bag in your sleeping bag for extra warmth!), wait a few minutes (15 minutes for the beef stew we made; it was hard to wait that long since were very hungry!), and then eat!  Presto!  In fact, it was so good, we ended up making two big packages of beef stew and mashed potatoes for dinner.  For desert, we had chocolate. After dinner, we put some candles in little hollows we dug in the walls of the cave.  That made the cave feel pretty cozy (see picture below).  Later, while wearing headlamps and watching our frosty breath in our cave as we breathed, we played a card game until we could barely keep our eyes open any longer.  Then, we settled in for the night, a little bit chilly, but mostly warm.  We were actually sleeping on ice, making frosty breaths as we breathed!  Our faces were pretty cold all night, but it wasn’t bad at all.  In fact, we got used to it pretty quickly, since our bodies were basically warm in our sleeping bags (and we had jackets, hats and socks on!)  It wasn’t the best sleep we ever had, but it was pretty good.  In fact, the cave was pretty cozy –so cozy that we didn’t want to get out of there the next morning when we woke up. Like they say, home sweet cave!  But, we could see that the morning sun was shining bright through our cave hole door, and we could hear birds singing.  So, after cooking breakfast in our sleeping bags (freeze dried food again, apple crumble and hot chocolate), we went outside in the sun, played in the snow, then packed our bags and hiked out to go skiing.  While hiking out, we were thinking to ourselves, “I bet there were probably no other Cubs or Scouts playing card games and sleeping in snow caves anywhere else in Canada that night!  Then again, maybe there were other Cubs out there doing the same thing since, as we know, Wolf Cubs can sometimes be found sheltering in caves…even snow caves… Happy spring, Cubs and Scouts!  Get out there and play!