chapter 455
12/13/2016
Winter Hazards
freezing colds
It seemed like a good idea for this local (Niskayuna) couple to climb Algonquin Mt [last week's chapter 454] but they are lucky to be alive after posting this selfie to FB. Fog came in so thick couldn't see, lost fell off 100 foot cliff, stayed in freezing cold 2 nights till ENCON and St Police rescued them via helicopter.
My fourth photo overlooking Colden Pond is the cliff they went over. One of our group used to go winter camping in the high peaks, not for me.
I know no one cares but my most harrowing escape from a winter death was Basic Training at Fort Dix during January 1969. I was road guard wearing the orange vest so when we force marched across intersections I had to run ahead to stop traffic, then after the platoon passed run back up to the front again. Got the flu bad, which killed one trainee. Overnight bivouac in tents was called off on account of the cold. M14 training rifles. Photos from my training yearbook sent home to Mom. There was a Hong Kong pandemic in 1968 . The influenza seems to cycle every 11 years going back to the 1918 one that nearly killed Gpa Hayden in WW1.Â
The low crawl under barbed wire was fun.
Volunteered for the night live machine gun fire low crawl with explosions - exciting. Trainees occasionally get killed when the machine gun locking mechanism fails. Was the truck driver in the deuce n half transporting our company and exempt from the exercise but they let me do it at the end of the drill.
Blizzard of 1966 killed 142 with 42 inches of snow in Syracuse. Dad took a doctor to a mother in labor on the Kohne Road on our first snowmobile. He had to get around this Space Hill drift a mile from our house. That was before this rotary plow cleared the path. One of my early slides.
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