So, instead of that wacky middle-of-nowhere tire-change adventure I was talking about in my Great Basin post, I had a wacky wait-did-I-seriously-just-throw-my-key-away adventure in the middle of Grand Teton National Park.

That’s right. I actually threw my car key in a bear-proof dumpster.

Honestly, there was a few minutes where I was just standing in my van panic-laughing because what kind of numbskull move is that? And then there was some staring at the dumpster in horror, wondering how in the name of all that is good I was supposed to get the wretched thing out.

There was, initially, some disbelief. I climbed back into the van after taking out the trash and looked expectantly at my hand, as if my key would just… be there. And when it wasn’t, I sort of looked around a bit and then checked my hand again, just to be certain that I really wasn’t holding it.

I checked the ignition, several times. I checked my pockets once… twice… four times. I upturned the purse I was using the day before just in case it had magically teleported inside, or in case I’d somehow driven to the visitor center without actually taking my keys out of the bag in the last eighteen hours. I opened up my wallet, in case my brain had just completely given up and decided that was where it belonged. I checked my hands again, untied my ponytail, shook out my shirt.

Just in case, you know, because the alternative was that I’d actually thrown my car key away. Frankly, I was hoping that I’d just had a bout of temporarily insanity and put them somewhere ridiculous (like the fridge, which I hadn’t opened in an hour but checked anyway, or down the sink, which, after checking, I don’t even think is really possible with the strainer in, but you never know).

No dice.

Eventually I had to face the facts: I turned my car off, grabbed the trash, got out, threw it away, got back in my car, and the key was gone. And I have a habit of always holding my key in my hand when I get out because I had a nasty habit of locking myself out of my car in high school. It wasn’t anywhere else. It had to be in the dumpster. The massively heavy, massively un-openable bear-proof dumpster.

Luckily, I was in the visitors center parking lot, so I just made sure the doors were unlocked (that would have been the icing on the cake, locking myself out of the van) and I had all my valuables with me, and went to hunt down the nearest ranger.

Now, to be honest, at that point I figured this would be more embarrassing than problematic. I just sort of assumed that there was a padlock on it or something, I would find someone with a key, they would open it, and I would have to go digging through the trash.

The first ranger I found was at the outdoor desk for the visitor center, and I tried to quickly explain my dilemma (It shocked a laugh out of him, so I suppose I’m at least good for entertainment). He told me to go talk to the ranger sitting by the door, monitoring how many people went in the visitor center.

I went along to the guy by the door. Explained my predicament. He gaped at me a moment and then sent me along inside to talk to the rangers at the information desk.

I was able to go right up to the desk, and explained my mistake once again. The guy blinked at me a bit, processing and thinking it through, and then told me he’d be back, he had to check if anyone was in the back.

If I felt like I was making progress, it only lasted a few minutes. Because then I was awkwardly standing in the way of the info desk, waiting for him to come back, and wondering why it was so difficult to find someone with a key. And I finally realized that this might be a much bigger problem when he returned, not with a key-wielding ranger, but a pen and notepad.

“I need to get some information from you,” he told me, and proceeded to ask for an exact explanation of what happened, a description of my key, where my vehicle was parked, what kind of vehicle I was driving. And then he told me that the maintenance staff, who were in charge of the dumpsters, didn’t work weekends.

And my first thought was, “That’s weird, the parks are usually busier on the weekends, you’d think the trash would fill up way faster and someone would have to empty it.”

My second was, “Hang on…. it’s only Saturday.”

And then he was confirming exactly what had just occurred to me. “We’re trying to get ahold of someone, but we might not be able to get anyone out until Monday.”

Yup. Monday. I took a moment to compliment myself on having the foresight to make sure I didn’t lock myself out, at least, and told the ranger that worst-case scenario, I could just stay in the parking lot until Monday, and he went off to try to contact the maintenance contractor’s headquarters.

At least I got my Grand Teton stamp for my National Parks Passport.

I went back to my van, figuring I could read up on the trails and decide which hikes I wanted to do, have lunch, maybe work on a blog post. I opened up the little newspaper guide to the park, because I’d been perusing it the night before and it had details about all the hiking trails, including how long they were, how strenuous, and what you could expect to see on them. It was very detailed, a three-page spread with map references.

Funny story: when I opened it up, the three-page spread I remembered wasn’t there. I flipped through the thing three times. Checked the page numbers. All the pages were there. No trail list.

Huh, I thought, ok, I’m probably just distracted because of the key issue and I’m missing something. Or maybe I’m just delirious because I need lunch. Maybe it slipped out somewhere. Because, guys, it was there an hour ago. I used it to help me decide what I wanted to do that morning before going into Jackson. I studied it the night before, used it that morning. It would have to be one heck of a hallucination if I’d imagined it.

So, lunch. I could do that. Whatever was going on with the trail list would come to me. I took my leftover pasta out of the fridge and went to pull open the cutlery drawer for a fork.

Suddenly beads are slipping off the handle and I’m trying to catch them and it just really isn’t working, and apparently sometime between making my cereal this morning and throwing out my trash around noon the wire I used to make the handle broke.

And, I mean, I knew it was going to happen. That handle has seemed weak from the beginning, and it gets used more than any of the others, and something about the way that catch is installed works just a little too well, so it requires more force to open. But in that moment, I kind of felt like I was losing my mind.

I turned back on the pamphlet with a vengeance, flipping through it again just to verify that I hadn’t somehow just missed it because the page layout didn’t look how I remembered it or something. I searched the cab for anything else that I might have confused with that pamphlet. Made sure, again, that it had all of its pages. I got distracted checking everywhere I could think of for my key one more time, and then checked the pamphlet again, as if it would have changed in the last five minutes. And finally I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t going to find it, and began to wonder if I’d just spent the last eighteen hours hallucinating.

And then I remembered a few weeks before I left, talking to my parents about whether I was going to bring the spare key with me or not, and I very quickly decided that no, I wouldn’t, because if I forgot to grab my usual key and locked myself out, chances are I wouldn’t have grabbed my spare, either, and at that point, I’d still have to call AAA to unlock it.

Little did I know that two weeks in, I’d have thrown my key away, and having the spare would have been incredibly useful.

And I couldn’t help it at that point, really. I just started doing the hysteria thing where you laugh all breathlessly and kind of out of control.

And what the hey, if I was going to be stuck in the parking lot until Monday, apparently hallucinating trail information, and things literally falling apart around me, I figured I would just pop open a cold one and watch Disney movies.

Disney movies always fix everything, obviously. As proven by the guy who showed up an hour later with a forklift, a pair of plastic gloves, and one of those grabby litter-picker-upper things.

I was able to pick my key out of the trash in under five minutes, and finished watching Lilo and Stitch while munching on a couple Oreos.

A lonely cloud over Grand Teton and the Snake River

Well, okay, I tried to finish watching Lilo and Stitch, but the download glitched out fifteen minutes from the end and refused to play any more. So I gave up and drove to Jackson, where I parked in the library parking lot and proceeded to document the entire ridiculous scenario for you, my dearest blog readers. Honestly, I’ve had worse days. And I’m sure there will be worse days. At least I learned my lesson about holding my keys and my trash in the same hand.

I still don’t know what happened to that trail list, though. I keep checking the pamphlet again, as if thinking that it will magically reappear. Which, as is oft quoted (and generally misattributed to a variety of historical figures, including Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein), doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a sure sign of insanity, so you might not be entirely remiss in worrying about my mental state. Just a little.

Don’t be surprised if, in a blog post six weeks from now, I spontaneously solve the Mystery of the Vanishing Trail List.

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What to Expect If You Throw Your Keys Away in a National Park