Your eyes can fool you

One of the funnest things I did as a Boy Scout was a 50 mile hike in the high Sierras of California.  We took six days for the hike.  As I recall we started near a place called Mono Lake and ended at a place called Tuolumne Meadows.  The first day we had to hike up an elevation of several thousand feet.  We had to go over a place called Duck Pass.  I remember a long series of switch backs that took us up the face of a steep mountainside.  Many of us got sick (probably altitude sickness) and were throwing up.  Not to mention the blisters that formed on our feet.  But as we came over the pass we could see down to a beautiful blue lake called Duck Lake.  We had reached our first campsite and were very glad to finally rest.

Our Scout Master was in the Air Force Reserve and had made arrangements for a military airplane to fly over our location on about the fourth day of our hike.   They had plans to drop us some supplies.  They were planning to drop one box attached to a parachute (with the fragile stuff), and several boxes packed for a "free fall" drop (less fragile stuff).  In preparation for the drop, we were deployed around the drop site to make sure that someone would be likely to see all of the dropped boxes and find them all.  When the airplane showed up, our Scout Master lit a purple flare to mark the drop site and when the plane was overhead, out came the parachute.  It floated right down to the area of the flare.  Then we saw the free-fall boxes start to drop out of the side of the plane, one by one.

Here is where my eyes got fooled.  I remember seeing a box drop out of the plane right over top of where I was standing.  It looked to me like it was going to land right on my head.  It scared me.  I remember dashing for cover to protect myself from being hit.  But as I watched the box I noticed that it wasn't really dropping toward me at all.  In reality it ended up landing way up the mountainside, not even close to me.  We had to hike for quite awhile to finally find the box.  I was amazed that I had been so fooled.  I guess without anything else in the sky as a reference it was just hard to tell where the box was heading.  Only when it got lower and we could see it in relation to the mountaintop could we tell where it was was really heading.

That night we had parachuted hot dogs and hamburgers for dinner and even Popsicles for dessert.  We also got mail from our parents.  It was fun to get supplies dropped right in our lap.  Otherwise, we would have had to carry everything for the whole week in our backpacks.  Unfortunately for our Scout Master, he had to put the parachute in his backpack and carry it out for the final three days of the hike.

The hike was hard but very fun.  We spent weeks preparing for it by taking a series of smaller hikes.  It was definitely a learning experience for me.  One thing that I learned is that you can't always trust your eyes.