Hello, it's me @otherbrandt and I'm back again with another installment in this series of unfortunate events I've been calling Campsite Cleanups.
Recently me and my somewhat unstable yet highly capable enabler of a Subaru, Yolo McFukitol, regained consciousness following a bender of unknown length and severity, and after a couple of hours spent carefully reading between the fine veiny lines scribed in the greenest of leaves teasing in the breeze on the sides of distant mountain peaks and speaking of secret sneezes and undiscovered wheezes with several easygoing nearby trees, we determined that our location had to be somewhere in the vicinity of Wilkerson Pass, Colorado.
As fate would have it, I had in fact been here in this precise location in the past, a couple years before me and YMF met, with a lively spry and intolerably sly little Pontiac Vibe named Truck.
On that occasion I'd been dumbstruck by the unbelievable amount of garbage strewn about the area, and in response the cynic who lives inside me and keeps the madman inside my mind company awoke with a tremendous existential gravelly groan and together we grumpily scraped all that crap into a little miniature mountain of trash and sarcastically christened it Mt. Bang Bang America Fuck Yeah Lots And Lots.
That name should make more sense shortly.
What I'm trying to get at here, is that I'm pretty sure this exact location is the first place where I ever devoted significant time and effort to cleaning up some other hellbound camper's sadly disastrous eternal damnation of a campsite, and as such it can be considered a sort of prologue to this whole Campsite Cleanup nonsense I've decided to curse myself with.
And now as fate would have it, I'm talking about cleaning it up for a second time, with a different vehicle in tow.
So buckle up, and crack a beer or five, and come ride along with me and YMF as I make my inevitable return to Mt. Bang Bang America Fuck Yeah Lots And Lots:
Behold this small innocent patch of unspoiled earth upon which I shall pitch my tent. Let us now quickly check the area for any wayward sticks or rocks or other uncomfortable objects that might be lying there waiting to interrupt our beauty slumber should we attempt to sleep on them. This should only take a couple seconds.
Well. Would you look at that.
There appear to be empty cartridges of several different calibers here, scattered across the ground like so much rotting manna dropped by an absent-minded alcoholic god whose people had long since sobered up and moved along.
Above is what I found after about 10 minutes of picking through the approximately 30 square feet of dirt and grass required to set up my very small one-man tent. Mostly casings, shotgun wads, and a few bullets.
Looks like nothing much has changed since my last visit here with Truck, may his twisted and shattered firescorched chassis forever rest in pieces at the bottom of that lonely godforsaken slot canyon because if for some reason it doesn't then I'm in real big trouble.
Bang Bang.
America Fuck Yeah.
I did the best I could cleaning up this campsite slash outdoor shooting range, but if I'm being honest, I probably barely even scratched the surface here.
I won't bore you with a bunch of pictures of empty shells. They were fucking everywhere, so just use your imagination to imagine them being fucking everywhere, and that's exactly what it was like.
This campsite was so thick with spent cartridges that when I got out my spade to dig a hole so I could take a shit in the woods and bury it like a responsible Colorado Leave No Tracer,
I DUG UP MORE SPENT CARTRIDGES.
I thought me and the cynic who lives inside me did a pretty decent job collecting all that crap the first time we were here.
Surely we didn't really miss such a spectacularly gigantic load of crap?
Maybe Truck waited till I was asleep and then went and dumped out all the trash we'd collected, just to be a dick? because that's totally a thing he would've done, you got exactly what you deserved you little jackass backstabbing Pontiac
Or perhaps Mt. BBAFYLAL erupted and spewed hot flaming globs of volcanic metallic American majesty all over the campsite after we'd left?
I don't know. I guess it's hard to say for sure what happened out there way back then.
But what I do know is that this time, after me and Yolo had spent a couple hours scouring the ground and scooping up dozens of spent shells, I went to tent as the sun set and several hours later in the dead of un-day I woke up screaming terrified and sweating nothing but red bullets right directly out of the most violent vivid nightmare about a mass shooting that anyone could ever use their imagination to imagine.
Other than that it was a pretty normal Campsite Cleanup.
Found a bunch of litter.
Didn't try to kill myself in the process.
Although I suppose if I really wanted to die, this would be a pretty good place to try:
Hey dickwad.
Yeah you with the shotgun, I'm talkin' to you.
I bet you can't shoot this corncob off my head.
While I was making my final sweep for as much of what was fucking everywhere as I could find,
a Ford FuckYeah-150 went shuffling by and then shoved itself into park at the campsite directly next to mine.
A few minutes later all I could hear was the soul-crushing sound of peaceful mountain serenity being shattered by,
BANG BANG.
