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.  

THE MENDOCINO NATIONAL FOREST

This is the only national forest in California without a major paved road entering it and no year-around highway crossing over it.   There is Forest Highway 7, a Forest Service gravel road crossing over Mendocino Pass from east to west, but is not open in the winter due to snow.   This road connects state Highway 162 from Willows to Highway 162 in Covelo, a two and half hour drive over 85 miles.   Willows is the Forest Headquarters and known as the Gateway to the Mendocino National Forest.   Hard to believe when Willows is located in the Sacramento Valley with only a view of the Coast Range Mountain to the west some 40 miles away.    One of the most tragic incidents was the loss of 15 firefighters on the Rattlesnake Wildfire in July of 1953 in Grindstone Canyon.  The scar on the landscape from that fire was visible from Willows.   

As a kid I spent many hours looking west at these mountains from our house west of town and wondering what it would be like to see what is over that ridge or up that canyon.   The Willows Ranger District winter office was up stairs in the Willows Post Office, where I got my first  Forest Service map dated 1956.    The District had a summer ranger station at Alder Springs about 45 miles up in the mountains from Willows.    I studied that map until I almost had it memorized.  There were place names on the map that I wanted to explore--Hokey Pokey Ridge, Snow Mountain, Hays Place, Plaskett Meadows, Keller Lake, Jenks Place, Log Springs Guard Station and many more.  

As teenagers a friend and I drove around the Forest in one of my dad's farm pickups exploring different places on that forest map.    We spent 3 or 4 days driving around on forest roads with a 50 gallon barrel of gas with a pump in the pick up bed to keep us going, along with camping gear.   I don't recall seeing many other vehicles, except a Forest Service employee checking camp fires in a campground.   We went as far west as Mendocino Pass and drove more roads than I can remember.    In the summer of 1962 we backpacked four days through the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness Area after my dad dropped us off at a trailhead at a place called Brown's Camp.   From there we hiked to a small lake near South Yolla Bolly Mountain.   The second night was with the fire lookout on Hammerhorn Mountain, and from there down to Elk Lake for a night before hiking out of the wilderness to a Forest Service road where we caught a ride with a Forest Service road engineer to a logging camp where we spent a night.  The next day we caught a ride on a logging truck to Paskenta where one of our parents picked us up.  

Over the last few years most of this Forest has been destroyed from catastrophic wildfires, including summer home tracks, campgrounds, Forest Service guard stations, many road signs and other improvements.  The Willows Ranger District no longer exist and was combined with two other Districts of the five original Districts over the years.   Today there is only three ranger districts and the Forest I once was familiar with is gone, except for the memories.    

CABIN ON WOOLEY CREEK

A co-worker and I came across this cabin while backpacking the Wooley Creek trail into the Marble Mountain Wilderness Area in 1972.   We looked inside the cabin as it was not locked and saw beds with blankets on them and dishes in the kitchen.  It was one big room.   We assumed it was being used by a Forest Service trial crew.    Most Forest Service cabins in wilderness areas are not locked and can be used by the public in the event of foul weather or an emergency.   President Hoover was known to have fished Wooley Creek and may have stayed in this cabin.   With all the fires over the decades since 1972, I'm not sure if this cabin is still there.   Many cabins in the wilderness areas have come to disrepair, vandalism or burned down either by wildfires or the Forest Service due to liability problems or to keep squatters from taking them over.  

MY DOG HERMAN

 This was my dog Herman when I lived in Orleans from 1971-77.    He was part Chow and not sure what else, mostly All-American mutt.   I found him as a puppy walking along Highway 96 near Somes Bar.   Later I was told he my have come from a litter of dogs belonging to an Indian family living in that area.   Herman would go to work with me up until the Forest Service put an end to dogs going to work with employees, maybe in 1973-74.  When Christine and I married in 1975, Herman join the family, along with Christine's two dogs.   Herman went with me on many backpacking trips and always in my pickup on road trips.  He became a bad influence on Christine's dogs at times leading them in to trouble now and then.  

On one of our monthly shopping trips to Eureka we left the dogs in the back of the pickup, which had a camper shell on it with open screen windows.   The store we were shopping at was called Bazar's, a large department store with groceries, clothing, hardware and sporting equipment.   While we were in the center of the store we could hear people laughing and gasping as all three of our dogs were coming toward us in the aisle we were in.   The dogs had ripped open one of the screen windows, got scent of our trail, somehow entered through automatic sliding door into the store and followed our scent to the aisle we were in.   It was Herman leading the way as all three dogs were happy to have found us.    

THE TRINITY ALPS

With all the grim news lately I have resorted to getting lost in some old books I  have on places we backpacked into many years ago.   One place that stands out is the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area in northern California.   A hiking and backpacking guide book titled,  "The Trinity Alps" by Luther Linkhart describes 29 trips in to this wilderness area.   In the beginning of his book he describes the natural history and the human history of the Trinity Alps.  He gives directions from state highways to Forest Service Roads to trial heads, land marks to look for, how trails follow streams, ridges, what lakes are accessible from what trials and where side trails go.   He tells of old mining claims, provides pictures of mining equipment and cabins that remain from the gold mining days going back to the 1850's.    There is a story about George Jorstad, who built a cabin in 1937 on his claim and remained there until 1983 when he was over 80 years of age.   The cabin still remains, along with few other others.   During the 1970's the northwestern portion the wilderness area was under the control of marijuana growers that threaten hikers and Forest Service personnel.   The public was advised to stay out that area as many growers were armed and dangerous.   In the 1980's law enforcement agencies went in to clear out many of the growers.  

It is interesting to retrace my travels to some of these places, some places I remember and others that don't come to mind.    Some of my early trips were on weekends when I lived and worked for the Forest Service in Orleans.    On a Friday night after work I would pack a canteen of water, sleeping bag, a cooking pot, some utensils, trail food in a pack and off we went, me and my dog, Herman.    Herman was a puppy, mostly of the mutt variety when I found him walking along Highway 96 near Somes Bar in 1971.    Herman accompanied me on many hikes both to the Trinity Alps and the Marble Mountains.  In 1993 family members and myself backpacked in from the Coffee Creek Road on the eastside of the Trinity Alps for three days.   

Many of these areas have changed due to wild fires, road closures due to a lack of maintenance and deterioration of trails over the last three decades, but I'm sure glad to have these books to escape into during the harsh reality of what is happening in our world.  

EASTERN OREGON

Eastern Oregon has always intrigued me with its vast open country, insolated mountain ranges, high desert, small communities and less people.    I think back on all the places I was fortunate to see in my travels through eastern Oregon, including the Steens Mountains, Alvord Desert, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Lake Owyhee, the Mahogany Mountains, backpacking in the Strawberry and Eagle Cap Wilderness areas, just to name a few.   Celia and I looked at houses in Joseph, but after giving it serious thought decided not to thinking our children would never come visit us.   We even considered buying 40 acres of high desert land for sale outside of Dayville.   Not sure how that would have turned out, probably best we landed where we did.    

This picture is looking south across the John Day Valley toward the Strawberry Mountains.   

YOSEMITE

This story is condensed and revised from a 6 page story I wrote  in 1995 that had some humor in it that only the family would understand.  

 In September of 1995 two of my sisters and I, along with my son and daughter went on a backpacking trip from Tuolumne Meadows down to Yosemite Valley.   This was about a 28 mile hike.  We were over packed with enough food for a month, not well organized and behind schedule.   By 3 pm we approached the wilderness permit booth at Tuolumne Meadows and  noticed a sign saying, "all trails full for the day".  The ranger on duty took pity on us noticing how unprepared and overloaded we looked.   We were given a permit with the stipulation to be at least four miles from Tuolumne Meadows before setting up camp for the night.  In short, they wanted this motley looking bunch out of sight of the general public ASAP.   We found a place to camp before dark, ate our dinner and hung our six food bags, estimated at 75 pounds in a nearby tree in order to keep the bears away.   The next morning we were up with the sun, taking our time preparing breakfast, drinking much coffee and getting an early start by 11 am.   The plan for the day was to push ourselves another five miles to Emeric Lake.   After hiking up hill over Tuolumne Pass, it was all downhill in the Merced River drainage on trails carved out of the granite.   At our camp near Emeric Lake we dug through our 75 pounds of food, ate dinner, hung the bags up and retired for the night.   During the night some of us were awaken by the howling of coyotes.  The next morning was another early start, maybe 10:30 am. after another big breakfast and much coffee.  Our destination for this day was another 5 miles to Merced Lake.   The elevation drop on this day was 2200 feet, mostly in the last two miles.   We arrived at Merced Lake exhausted.   We were required to stay in a designated camp site and we were one of the last groups into the camp leaving us little choice of picking a secluded site.    Some of our neighbors were interesting to watch and I'm sure we were entertaining to them.  There was a man traveling by himself and had the perfect camp with all his equipment laid out just right compared to our camp with everything scattered all over the place.   After eating  dinner we were too tired to wash dishes, so we placed them in metal bear box provided near our camp along with our food bags.  During the night we were aroused by a bear banging on the metal box, probably our box with the dirty dishes.   The next morning some of our neighbors did not look upon us favorably.   Our hike for this day was short with about a 800 foot drop in elevation.   By 2 pm we asked a passing ranger where the nearest camp site might be.  He pointed to to a clump of trees across the river, which was easy to access by walking across the river on a rock out cropping.   This was the best camp site of the trip with a place to swim and good seclusion.    The next day we had a pleasant hike on mostly level trail into Little Yosemite Valley, which is 5 miles by trail from the main valley.   Here there were many people since it was a fairly easy hike up from the big Yosemite Valley, where the lodge, parking lots, and other park tourist facilities are located.   Here again camping was restricted to designated camp sites with bear boxes.   No camp fires were permitted, except at two community sites.  As night settled in, so did the multitudes of people.   The posted rule in this camp was no noise after 10 pm.   We no sooner settled in our tents and sleep started to take hold when people started banging on their pots and pans yelling BEARS!   I looked out of my tent to see flash lights moving through the trees within the camp.   This went on for most the night and I even saw a cub bear run through our camp site.   It was total madness and there were very few early risers in camp the next morning.    After getting our stuff packed up we made the final descent in to the big valley to my sister's car in a parking lot.   We drove back up to Tuolumne Meadows to retrieve my car.   I think we still had 20 pounds of food we never consumed.

It was a trip we would never forget.  

Wandering Aimlessly

 You ever have the desire to take off with no final destination in mind?    Sometime in the late 1980's when my marriage was on the rocks and feeling depressed with a sense of loss I took off with my backpacking gear and some trail food in the car.    My general destination was the eastside of the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness thinking it was a good place to get away from civilization.   I left Eugene on a Friday evening after work and drove over Santiam Pass then turned north on a forest road leading to the Cabot Lake Trial head on the eastern edge of the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness Area.    It was about a 3 hour drive from Eugene.  It was the early Fall and no rain was in the forecast, so it was a good time to get away from it all before the wet weather set in.    There were only 3 or 4 cars parked at the trail head parking lot.   I loaded up my back and took off with no destination in mind.   It got dark on me about an hour into the hike, so I just got out my sleeping bag and slept on the trail.   Early the next morning I made my way to Cabot Lake and noticed some people on the other side of the lake.    After the lake I made my way toward Mt. Jefferson and ended up on a rim overlooking the Warm Springs Indian Reservation above the tree line.   It was a desolate area where a man could wander and never be found again.   That night I don't remember where I camped, could have been back by the lake on my return hike back to the parking lot, just don't remember.  Don't even remember my drive back to Eugene or wherever I was living at the time, maybe Cottage Grove.   Emotionally I may have never left the wilderness.  

Sure wish I could wander off these days, but the best I can do is wander aimlessly around the grocery store once a week.  

Deer Creek Meadows

 Another camping story from my childhood days.   My dad, younger brother and I, along with a friend of my dad's named Charlie, and his son drove up to Deer Creek Meadows to go fishing for a weekend.    The first stop was a grocery store in Red Bluff where my dad bought some bacon, eggs, a canned ham, beer and not sure what else or don't remember.    We arrived after dark on a Friday night at some buildings enclosed by a fence near the meadows.   It may have been a cattle camp for a summer grazing lease on the Lassen National Forest that was operated by a ranching friend of my dads'.    My dad and Charlie built a campfire, had a few beers and placed the can of ham on the fire.   Soon thereafter the can of ham exploded, since they had not partially opened it.    There were chunks of ham scattered on the ground and we all proceeded to pick up pieces and eat.   We spent the night sleeping in one of the buildings and the next morning everybody was up early to go fishing.   My brother, who may have been 5 or 6 years of age remembers waking up and everybody was gone.    He wandered around the meadow looking for us and ended up back in the camp after getting lost.    The rest of us returned to camp for a breakfast of bacon and eggs served in a more civilized manner.  

Wentworth Springs

 Have any of you folks from California ever been to Wentworth Springs on the El Dorado National Forest?  It was my first camping trip in the 1950's with my dad and another family from Willows.   We drove to Georgetown then followed a single lane dirt road to the end, where there was a building that may have been a store and maybe a hotel.  We camped along a stream, sleeping on old bed springs, no tents, some picnic tables and wooden boxes nailed on trees for storing dishes and food.    We spent a day hiking to Loon Lake where I remember a dam constructed out of blocks of granite with many leaks.   Somebody said it had been built by the Chinese.  The landscape was mostly granite with scattered trees.  I have tried to follow it on Google Earth and don't see what I remember.   Funny what we think about in our old age.  

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.    

Communications

 How many of you remember picking up the phone and hearing the operator ask, “number please?”   Usually this was on a party line and sometimes you could hear the neighbor talking and had to wait for them to hang up before getting your call connected.   If the neighbor tied up the line too long sometimes mom had to interrupt and tell Mabelle down the road to stop hogging the line with her gossiping.    By the late 1950’s they came out with the rotary dial phones on private lines and there was no more dealing with the neighbors.  

My first summer job with the Forest Service in 1969 was at the Hilton Spike Camp Guard Station on the Modoc National Forest.    One of our first duties was maintaining the phone line between the guard station and Manzanita Lookout.  It took a few days to clear the fallen branches and trees from the line and splice it where it had been broken.   This line connected two phones that had to be cranked in order to make it ring at the other end.   The lady on the lookout used it whenever she needed us to bring her a load of water or haul her garbage off.   It was used once to report a lightning fire to us since it was after office hours and she was unable to call the dispatcher from her two-way radio.   The problem with this system was not hearing it ring when nobody was near the phone.  The two-way radio system was more reliable, but everybody could hear you all over the Forest depending on your location.    At nights the lookouts could talk to each other over the radio on a social level.  This reminds me of a story a lookout on Hammerhorn Mountain told us when a friend and I spent a night there in 1962 while backpacking through the Yolla Bolly Wilderness on the Mendocino National Forest.   He told us a recently young married couple were the lookouts on a peak to the south of his location, I think called Black Butte.   He said they had left the base set radio transmitter lever on and during the night many of the other Forest lookouts could hear the heated commotion after the lights went out.  

Sometime in the 1990’s cell phones came into use.   Through my credit union in Springfield I got my first analog cell phone in 1997 for free from Verizon with a monthly cost of $20.   When everything went digital they informed my phone had to be replaced and they sent me a Motorola phone, again for free and still $20 a month.   I believe this was in 1999, not sure, but I still have this phone with the original battery.  Took a while to learn how to use it and never fully understood all the functions available on it.    A few years ago I took the phone into the Verizon shop in Roseburg where the people there had never seen one this old.    They checked it out and got it programed for caller ID, call waiting and showed me it could receive and send text messages.   They tried to sell me a new smart phone where my monthly bill would be increased to pay for it over time.   I declined in fear of never learning all its functions and besides my old Motorola could do all the basic things I needed.    When we had our land line phone disconnected four or five years ago we got a second cell phone for Celia.  It is the flip type phone and more complicated to use than my phone.    Our monthly rate for the two phones is $54 with a limit of 700 hours.   Our old land line phone was about the same amount per month and did not include long distant calls.    Now we never leave home without our cell phones.  

How did we ever survive in our younger days riding our bikes down country roads, getting flat tires, crashing into the ditch and getting bruised knees with no way to call mom?    

Green Jello with Hot Dogs

 During the summers of the early 1970’s there would be potluck dinners at least once a month on the Orleans Ranger Station for the employees, including seasonal employees living in the bunk house.  Everybody was asked to bring something.  The wives of the staff, living in the family houses on the station would provide hot dishes, fried chicken, salads, deserts and other items that single people would dream of.    Seasonal employees usually brought bags of chips, can of olives, beans or a large bottle of pop.   The local market did not provide much in terms of gourmet items or even deli food.  It was pretty basic shopping there with bread, cold cuts, some dairy products, can goods, limited produce, soda and plenty of wine and beer.    Serious grocery shopping was done by most people once a month in Arcata or Eureka, about a two hour drive from Orleans.   Upper management would chip in and have a keg of beer available for all to enjoy.  Since alcohol was not allowed in the barracks, most beer drinking was done at one of three bars in the community or down at the river.   There was one fellow who lived in the bunk house that would always put together a dish of green jello with hot dogs lined up in it.   He would place it on the long row of picnic tables lined up on the lawn in the center of the compound, where all the food was served.   This dish was only popular with the young children of the families living on the station.   The adults always got a few laughs seeing it there on display with all the other dishes.   As the evening wore on and the beer consumption increased, most of the families retreated to their houses leaving the bunk house people to finish off whatever remained.   By the time the keg was empty, and all the food eaten it was well into the night, and the seasonal employees slowly made their way back to the bunk house or stumbled down the highway to wherever home was.  Even the green jello with hot dogs had been devoured.