Honor Road by Jason Ross (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

Sage hung his hand on his rifle sling and charted a course up the mountain and into the trees.

War’s a young man’s game, the captain had said.

Sage hadn’t signed up for a war. But, he supposed he might’ve signed up for just about anything, that day coming down off the Blue Mountains with frost-nipped toes. War was better than a world of scavengers, psychopaths and cannibals.

Sage reached the back of Wallowa Valley two days later. By his calculations, he covered twenty-five miles, which in snowshoes on virgin trail was no small achievement. He was in the best shape of his life, and it felt good to do battle with the altitude, the cold and the snow. As the sun set on the second day—Friday, he figured—he could see the tiny airstrip from his vantage on the tree line. He backed up half-a-mile into the pines and laid out his low-profile bivouac shelter.

He’d modified his two-man camo tent so it functioned like a bivy sack. He’d never actually camped in a bivy sack, but his dad once showed him one and explained the concept. At this point, Sage probably had more practical knowledge about snow camping than anyone he’d ever met, including his dad.

He scraped out a flat in the snow with his glove, then stomped it down. He laid down a small tarp, then unrolled a fat, rectangle of egg-crate foam in the depression. The trampled snow might as well have been an ice slab, but the layer of foam would slow the sapping of his body heat.

He set the tent on top, but didn’t didn’t raise the full dome. Geometric lines in the forest stood out like a porno billboard. The tent would be harder to detect uneven and lumpy instead of tight and tidy. He repurposed two of the fiberglass rods to go between the stake pockets. The flexible rods would hold a hoop of open air over Sage’s head as he slept. He positioned the zippered door on the up-sloping side, so he could open or close the zipper to allow more airflow into the tent during the night. He knew from experience that he’d alternate between seething-hot and iceberg-cold all night long, and he’d adjust the zipper thirty times throughout the night. There was no other way. That was the nature of winter camping. The deflated tent added tremendous warmth to the rating on his sleeping bag—at least ten degrees with the zipper closed, by bottling up his warm, moist body heat. It also made his sleeping bag damp by degrees; a little more each night.

The bag his grandfather had given him was a zero degree bag, which had seemed like overkill back in October when Sage first used it to survive. Now in early December, he was forced to employ every trick in the book to keep from freezing at night; his tent, ground insulation, and full clothing. Sage didn’t wear his boots to bed, and he preferred to take his rain shell off, but otherwise, he slept with every stitch of clothing he owned. Insulation was insulation, and the more clothes he wore in his sleeping bag, the less often he’d wake up freezing.

There was no silver bullet to sleeping outside in the winter. It was a bitch. The vapor barrier trick would eventually come full circle and bite him in the ass. By the end of four nights, Sage’s warm sleeping bag would be wet with accumulated perspiration, and it would no longer be a “zero degree bag.” Not by a long shot. To make matters worse, the inside of the Franken-tent would be like a sauna—literally dripping with the moisture he exhaled in the night.

It was Night Two and Sage could already feel the slick on the inside of the tent, even before sleep time. By the next morning, it’d be a serious issue. He dug out the chamois rag, and painstakingly wiped down every inch of the tent wall. He wrung out the chamois outside over the snow, and draped it over his pack. It’d be frozen solid in an hour.

Sage looked up through the pine boughs at the stars overhead. He couldn’t see a cloud in the sky. The half-moon would rise in five hours, and there would be a four hour window of working moonlight.

He could either skip sleep and make it a night mission, or he could recon the ranches for snow machines the next morning with binoculars. If the snowmobiles were stored inside barns, which seemed likely, he’d be shit-out-of-luck. With the clear sky came the biting cold, and he figured the ranch dogs would be hiding inside tonight.

Night would be his best play if he wanted to get close to the snow machines. He didn’t want Captain Chambers to rely on his intel only to find out he’d been guessing based on thousand-yard spotting. He preferred to see the machines, and the keys, firsthand.

Sage squirmed all the way inside his bag, reached over and laid two pine branches across the hoop of the tent. He scooted to where the moonlight would strike his face when it rose. That’d wake him for sure—that and the damned cold.

When the moonlight splashed over his eyes, Sage was dozing restlessly. He wasn’t sure troubled sleep counted for much, but his aching leg muscles from the twenty-five mile trek felt a lot better. He was fully dressed already, so he slid out of the tent, popped on his boots and swished some snow around in his mouth to wash out the worst of the morning breath. He figured it was about two a.m..

He stuffed his backpack inside the tent and opened the zipper all the way in an attempt to let the humidity vent a little. In the bitter cold, it’d probably freeze before it evaporated. He remembered that much from high school science: water didn’t both freeze and evaporate. It did one or