Fort Bridger Rendezvous

This weekend (Aug 30 - Sept 1) Jon, mom, Alex, and I went to the mountain man rendezvous in Ft. Bridger Wyoming. Besides the four of us and the Morby family there are probably very few people who actually know what Rendezvous is. On the surface it's a big party for those born a century too late. People get together and celebrate the American culture prior to, and up until the late 1800's. The celebration consists of temporarily forsaking the modern life in favor of a large canvas city, wearing period appropriate clothing, and selling or trading the materials and goods of the time. There are also several contests and demonstrations held to test mountain man prowess and educate tourists in the old ways. Some of the demonstrations we witnessed include tomahawk and knife throwing, Native American dancing and singing, rifle shooting, hide tanning, and cannon shooting - yes, real cannons.

Because the cannon shoot was my favorite I'll take a minute to elaborate. During this shooting competition they had both cannons and mortars. Most cannons shot a 3" ball and the mortars shot 15lb bowling balls. Flour was used to make a large bulls eye on a hillside 1/2 mile away and there were smaller targets out around 200 yards. The competition consisted of 3 practice rounds and 5 competition rounds. Using my digi cam I took a video of a practice round but both the audio and video pale in comparison to what was witnessed. First of all, the cannon repercussion on the video fails to change the rhythm of your heart beat as it did in person. Second, in the video you aren't able to see the mortars shoot the bowling balls so high they could barely be seen by the naked eye. It was AMAZING!

Aside from the canvas tent city of the main encampment, there were thousands of campers scattered in modern tents in the hay fields of the surrounding area. Poor suckers! On Sunday night it rained hard ALL night and was really cold. Alex and I woke up warm and dry having "struggled" throught the night in the back of an enclosed snowmobile trailer in our super warm sleeping bag on a memory foam inflatable matress. I hate roughing it.

Though it's easy to describe what we saw and did there, it's much more difficult to portray what it feels like to witness such a phenomena. In many places of the encampment it felt just like how I would imagine it to feel if I were to go back in time. In other places where there was less cultural cohesiveness, I felt like I was in a Bill and Ted's Excellent adventure movie where real personalities from diffent time periods and walks of life were stolen and brought together for a grand and somewhat comical show and tell. For the sake of all our loyal blog readers I first approcahed the event like an Asian tourist bent on not missing a single picture. As I began learn that this was more than Halloween in August for most of the participants, I dedided to give the camera a rest and simply enjoy the culture(s).