Excitement at Brightman Flat 1970

 Brightman Flat is an area along the North Fork of the Stanislaus River before going up the grade on highway 108 over Sonora Pass at over 9000 feet in elevation.    This highway is closed in the winter just above Pinecrest.   A recent wildfire has destroyed most of the campgrounds, the Dardanelle Resort, including most of the cabins and the Brightman Guard Station.   I believe the original lodge at Kennedy Meadows is gone too.

Some of this may have been rebuilt?   It was a very picturesque setting just below the tree line of the high Sierras in California when I worked there in the summer of 1970. 

EXCITEMENT AT BRIGHTMAN FLAT

 

In the summer of 1970 the Forest Service hired a local contractor with a backhoe to dig new holes for the outhouses at the Brightman Flat Campground and cover the remains of the old holes.   Bob and I were seasonal employees working on the recreation maintenance crew on the Summit Ranger District of the Stanislaus National Forest.    Our assignment for this day was to assist the contractor by making sure nobody was using the outhouses as they were moved from their old location to the new holes.   The procedure was simple:  Bob and I would make sure nobody was in the outhouses before we would tip them over onto the bucket of the backhoe tractor and set them up over the new hole and use a shovel to cleanup around each outhouse.   (Today this practice has been replaced with vault toilets and are pumped out when the need arises).

Bob and I seemed to get all the dirty jobs from hauling garbage from the back country campgrounds during the week and maintaining the restrooms at the Pinecrest Campgrounds on weekends.   This day we were in for a break from our usual routine.   In the afternoon while working in the campground we noticed smoke coming from the forest up the hill across highway 108, the Sonora Pass highway.    The fire patrolman, who was stationed at the nearby Brightman Guard Station, drove into the campground and requested we help him suppress the fire.    We followed him in our work truck to a point where we had to walk up hill to the fire.   It was burning through a ground cover of mostly pine needles and duff.    The fire area was less than a quarter of an acre in size.   As we started scraping a fire line we noticed articles of clothing in the center of the burned area.   Some of the clothing had been partially burnt, including a pair of jeans, t-shirts and women’s underwear.  The fire patrolman suspected the people who own the clothing were responsible for the fire and might be making their escape to the parking lot downhill near the Dardanelle Resort.  He instructed us to remain on the fire as he left.   A short time later the fire crew from the Ranger station at Pinecrest arrived and took over mopping up the fire.   Bob and I returned to the campground as we saw the District Fire Management Officer drive by in his truck with red lights flashing.   Later we learned a young couple had been found in the parking lot nude trying to retrieve clothing from their car.    The Fire Management Officer wrote them up a citation as they stood there with only their shoes on.    The story goes that they had been smoking marijuana, fell asleep after engaging in love making to awake to fire and smoke all around them that was probably caused from dropping the joint on the ground.   In a panic and confusion, or maybe just stoned the couple made a run for it.     Bob and I continued cleaning up around the outhouses, wondering why we hadn’t had the good luck to help out in finding them, but somebody has to do the dirty work.