To read part five of day four, click here.

When Katie said that, I realized that it was pretty bad. They were Outward Bound instructors – they would never call unless it was an emergency.

I went back down to where my pack was and sat on it. I didn’t know what this would mean for our crew, but I knew it was not good! The other girls were all talking about how sad it was that Ben was the one who got hurt – that it should have been them. “Poor Ben – he actually wants to be here! I should have been the one to get hurt. I wouldn’t be sad if I was sent home, but he actually wants to be here!”

We sat for another half an hour. Jen came to me and asked if I minded giving Ben the ace bandage. I said he could have it – what was I supposed to say? “No thank you, I’ll keep it for myself when my crew mate obviously needs it more than I do.”

I took off my boot and sock and unwrapped the ace bandage. I handed it to Jen who hurried back to Ben. I put my boot back on, tightening it as much as I could. I would need all the support my boot could offer, since I did not have the extra support from the bandage. It was almost comical how much I was able to tighten my laces, because the bandage had been so thick. 🙂

I sat there, trying not to worry about my ankle. I felt bad worrying about my ankle when I knew that Ben’s hurt so much more, but I couldn’t stop myself.

I stood up to make sure the boot was back on comfortably and walked around a bit. I did not know what to do – we couldn’t go on without Ben, and he was not going to be moving yet! I sat down on my pack to wait some more. There was another hiker coming up the trail, so I called out “Hiker!” and tried to scoot my pack back some more. It was an old man with his dog, and all of the dogs that had come so far had been scared to death of us.

I mean, they would not go past us. They would plunge straight up the hill from further down the trail to avoid the switchback that we were all sitting in. Most of the people tried to get the dogs to come past us, but over half of them decided to go up the hill. 🙂 We all felt so sorry for the dogs and did our best, but something about us and our packs made them too scared to come past.

So I pushed my pack off the trail and stood up. The girls around me were doing the same thing – our plan was to give the dog as much of the trail as possible so that he might actually go past us.

The old man came up and he was apparently in a talkative mood.

“Are you having a good hike?”

We told him that yes, we were having a good hike.

“Well God bless y’all! Are you having a good break?”

We explained that one of our crew had gotten hurt so we were waiting here for instructions.

“Well, Lord have mercy! Is he ok? Do you need help? Does one of you have a cell phone?”

We told him that our instructor had called for help, we were just waiting to hear what we were supposed to do.

One of the girls asked what the dogs name was. “It’s Grits. C’mon Grits, c’mon girl!” The dog came right up to us and let us pet her before heading up the trail. The old man followed, with another God Bless for us. We saw him stop further up the trail to talk to Ben and Katie before turning the corner of the switchback.

The girls were all talking about how sweet that dog was, and how awesome it was that she had passed us. I pulled out my journal and wrote.

“Ben just did something to his ankle. I don’t know what is going to happen right now. “

Just as I finished writing that sentence, we were told that we were going to have to get him down the mountain. We had to split up Ben’s pack – he was not going to be able to carry it, so we were going to have to. We were told to split up Bobby’s and Luke’s too – they were going to help Ben down the mountain.

I started opening my pack, freaking out the whole time. Not only was I not going to have the ace bandage, I was going to have to take extra weight too!

Click here to read the next part of Day Four.

*Everything here is from my own memory and may not be correct. Outward Bound is not responsible for anything I post here.*