“Try not to touch the sides of the tent, ok? Are you on your pad?” “One, two, three, four…CRACK”

And so went the conversation in the tent for two nights running. Now, if you´ve ever waited out a lightning storm in a tent at 12,000 feet before, you might know what that feels like.

It´s scary. The first night, we saw the storm getting closer and closer, hoping that maybe dinner would be done before it hit. Instead, hail started coming down, fat hard globs of frozen water, building up and turning our camp into a soupy, muddy mess. We quickly moved the stove, the food, and everything else we could grab into the tent. Problem was, the tent leaks. It´s possible to leakproof it, but not in the middle of a storm. We threw the down bags and jackets into plastic bags (we carry many, many large plastic garbage bags) and hunkered down to wait. Luckily, neither the hail nor the lightning lasted too long. Just long enough to be freaky.

In the morning, we passed by smoking stumps of grass about 5k from our camp site.

The next day, we got smarter. We camped in some dunes, near things that were taller than us. We leakproofed the tent BEFORE the rains hit, and we grounded the tent poles by putting spare inner tubes underneath. Did it help? Well, we didn´t get hit, and we both felt better about it, so there.

The following day we rode 82k to get to a city with a hotel.