About twenty years ago, my brother-in-law, Bob, and I hiked in to the Rockies for a little late spring trout fishin'-campin' adventure.

The rangers we talked to warned us of the chance of an actic cold front coming in, in a few days, but we felt confident in our gear and experience, so we hiked on in to about the 7,500-8,000ft level.

Arriving at a beautiful little lake, about 3:00 in the afternoon, we quickly set up camp and rushed to get in a little fly fishing before dark, as the fish could be seen risin' on the lake.

As the sun started to set, the six little brookies we'd caught started to sizzlin' in the frying pan for dinner. Later as we sat back enjoying a smoke and bit of scotch, we noticed a considerable change in the weather.

What had been a balmy spring day was rapidly turning into a very cold night. Well, we said to one another, the rangers warned us, but we'll be ok.

We had pitched our tarp lean-to so that the open end faced a huge boulder, and had our fire built right next to it so that heat would be reflected back into our sleeping area.

We took turns adding fuel to the fire all night but on toward morning we both finally snuggled into our sleeping bags so far that we forgot about the fire.

Well, you may find this hard to believe, if I hadn't been there I wouldn't. When we woke up it was obvious that we were both colder than either could ever recall having been, I really think it was the excessive shivering that actually caused us to wake up at all! As Bob and I slowly stuck our heads out to take a look around, we were dumbfounded to see the fire, flames about 2ft high looking for all the world like a normal fire should, completely frozen SOLID!

Now boy's that's what I call COLD!