THE DEER ENCOUNTER

 This morning while working on a trail up to the pump house a deer ran by me so fast I did not realize it until it had gone by me.    All I saw was the flash of the deer just a few inches from me.   The deer was being chased by another deer and I believe it did not see me until the last second.    At the speed that deer was going I don't think I would have survived the blow if it had run into me.   It was my lucky day and I still have a hard time thinking about how close it was.

CATASTROPHIC FIRE DAMAGE

 Recently I took a road trip with my daughter and her family down to visit my son in  Meyers, California.  We took the Susanville/Reno route by way of highways 89 to 44 and 395 to highway 50 in Carson City.    It must have been 6 or 7 years ago since we traveled this route and since then there has been many catastrophic wild fires.   All the way starting at Hat Creek along Highway 89 down the eastside of the Sierra Nevada Mountains along Highway 395 to Reno much of the forests have been burned.   There are areas of green timber that were not burned or completely destroyed.   Much of this was burned by the Dixie Fire in 2021, including half of the Lassen National Park and destroyed the town of Greenville.   

While we traveled around South Lake Tahoe and Meyers during our visit we could see the burned forests along the south rim of the Tahoe Basin that was part of the Caldor Fire in 2021.    Presently this area is being logged to prevent a future fire of the standing dead and down trees, in addition to the hazard trees on the slopes above Highway 50 leading to Sacramento.   Most of these logs are being hauled and decked in Carson City waiting for processing in a future mill to be constructed in Gardnerville, Nevada.  

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CAMPING IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE

Recently a friend invited me on a camping trip up to Scott Lake, which is about 15 miles up the old McKenzie Highway over 4000 feet in elevation.    It has been a few years since my last camp out and much of my camping gear is old, like me.  I looked forward to getting back up in the high mountains to enjoy the solitude of nature, a campfire and boiling up a pot of coffee in the morning.    Most campgrounds require reservations and payment in advance online these days.   This campground required no reservations and picking out a campsites was based on first come, first get with a fee of $5 per car.    After picking out two campsites we went back to pay the fees thinking there were envelopes to deposit the money in and take the receipt back to put in the car windows to show that we paid.    To our surprise it required an app on our smart phones to scan the campground code.   Being out of range of a signal to the internet a sign was posted stating it would download the payment once we had a signal again.   We were unable to get any of this to work on our smart phones and figured that nobody would be checking on us this time of year.   There was no campground host and nobody showed up to check for receipts.  I guess we cheated the government out of $10.  

Now about that old camping equipment, especially my old backpacking mummy sleeping bag of 40 plus years that was to keep me warm down to 20 degrees below zero.  It didn't work, I was cold all night, even with flannel pajamas on and a wool hat.  Later I was told the down in those old bags becomes less effective over time.  I guess the time had run out of my old bag.   Then I got thinking back on when Celia and I slept in two full-size sleeping bags zipped together and how warm we were, especially with two warm bodies in the same bag, sometime we got too hot!    One thing for sure is that coffee still taste good in the early morning mountain air and those Canada Jays or camp robbers are still around to pick up any morsel that may fall to the ground.  

2022 WATER YEAR (WY) SUMMARY

For the 2022 WY ending 9/30/22, there was 39.70 inches recorded at my CoCoRaHS station OR-DG-22 at an elevation of 915 feet.  The average is 42 inches.   The lowest rainfall recorded in the 16 years of living here was 32 inches in WY 2014 and the highest was 61 inches on WY 2017.