keely – Page 45 – State of Wilderness

Mono Lake MonoMyth, Episode 2

Supernatural Aid

Ok so finally we reached the Mono Valley and started looking for camping places. We drove down a dirt road to a campground that I thought would be a good choice – the Lundy Lake campground. Google images and reviews showed this to be a very beautiful place. When we got there, though, it was not living up to expectations, although we didn’t go all the way back to the lake. Jason did not feel comfortable with the campground, or maybe just the mix of people we saw about it. They were a little rough. So we went back out to 395, and ended up searching for sites along the beginning of the Tioga Pass. We stopped at one – I think it was the Tioga campground- but it seemed too exposed to the elements. I was starting to feel like Goldilocks and the Three Bears when finally, we found a campground that everyone could live with – Big Bend Campground. It was very beautiful -see below – but if you camp there, be prepared for no amenities. The lack of running water was somewhat disconcerting to me but otherwise it was very relaxing.

The Crossing of the First Threshold

After getting set up, we had to go find dinner. We hadn’t brought any provisions, due to the unknown element of where we were staying night to night, as well as the concern about bears. And, we HAD to experience the Whoa Nellie Deli, or so first hand accounts and reviews would suggest. So we drove back out of the pass to have dinner there. We sat on picnic benches outside and watched droves of hiker types coming out with their food as we looked out over Mono Lake and ate giant hamburgers. It was an experience worth having, although the food might not be as good as the price would indicate.

And then the night started.

The Belly of the Whale

The night here was rough. The youngest child had gotten himself really worked up about bears. And I think the oldest child ate too much at the deli. He complained about a stomach ache, and then came out of the tent and puked on the ground. That was nice.

In the wee hours of the morning, Jason decided that the urge towards photography was greater than the desire to attempt more sleep. He got into the rental vehicle, taking all our possessions with him. I thought I was okay with this, wanting to lay in the silence of the morning light listening to the sounds of nature all around us.

The Road of Trials

Soon, though, the sounds of nature were pierced by a different, more abrasive sound: the sound of my oldest raising his voice in anger, and my youngest crying. Soon they were tumbling out of their tent, and I was tumbling out of mine, bleary eyed and trying to understand what happened.

And what happened was this: during the night, my younger son needed to get up to go to the bathroom. The bathroom at this park, a open latrine, was quite a ways away from our site, especially in the dark. Really, all he needed was to find a tree…but he was too scared to go outside the tent by himself. He tried to wake his brother, but his brother did not want to escort him into the scary dark night…or even contemplate getting out of his warm sleeping bag. And then, the rest is my fault probably, for filling their heads about warnings about bears in this part of the country. All the counseling I had done about not having the smell of food in our car, and even putting our dirty clothes and toiletries in the bear box before bed, had my poor little guy in such a panic about the dangers of the wild animals that he just curled up in his sleeping bag; then during the night, either consciously or unconsciously, relieved himself of his physical need in his sleeping bag. A RENTED sleeping bag, mind you, in a rented tent, that we planned to use the next night in Yosemite before shipping it back.

So now they are up, and he is wet, with urine soaked clothes, and crying. And Jason is not back yet, nor is he answering my call, and I have nothing to clean him off with or change him into. Then I remembered yesterday’s dirty clothes in the bear box, luckily, so we got him changed into that.

When Jason came back, we were all irritated and not in the mood for the campground any more. So we got ready, instead, to turn the SUV back towards Mono Lake and begin the next day’s adventures.

Mono Lake MonoMyth, Episode 1

Departure

After a couple of hours at my former in-laws – visiting, packing up things the kids had forgotten, and repairing the small dent we put in the front bumper of the rental SUV, we were ready to leave for our next adventure.

The Call to Adventure

This one had us traveling south on US-395, all day long. We were in high desert country now. We were also chasing daylight to our next camping spot, so we couldn’t stop at every geocache along the way in the interest of time. We couldn’t resist this one, though (above picture), that almost turned out to be more than we bargained for. The SUV was not four wheel drive and the road weaved up a small mountain before we were forced to stop driving – so the youngest one and I made the hike the rest of the way in the hot high desert sun to find an ammo can on the top of a ridge overlooking the valley – it was actually pretty awesome. We limited ourselves to only five caches in about five hours, though, before we made it to the area we planned to spend the night.

Mono Vista

Refusal of the Call

So, we finally made it down into the Mono Valley and we need to find a place to bed down for the night. I had kept this night free of reservations, partially because I wasn’t sure how far down the road we would make it that night.

Oh…wait…back up…see, this is why I write this stuff down in here- because I forget the details and sometimes, the details ARE important. No, we didn’t actually make it to Mono Valley that night. Camping plans were derailed in favor of a Best Western in Susanville, California. We were too tired to make it all the way – and to tell you the truth, it was really nice to spread our things out and reorganize, to order pizza and watch TV and relax, to take the boys down to the little pool which was a little too chilly still on this mid-summer night for comfortable swimming, but it was fun to shiver together, to play water games, catch up on their stories of the past week, and whisper about the teenage girls on the other side of the pool from us.

And this is the thing about Susanville: I never went there with my ex-husband, even though it was close to where we used to live, and a place we drove through sometimes AND where he spent a year going to college. He only ever pointed out the women’s penitentiary to me. But I kind of liked this town, and I really want to go back now, after spending some time there in the hotel room reading about what Lassen National Park has to offer. Guided horseback rides that offer opportunities for viewing wild horses was most intriguing activity I saw advertised. Maybe someday when I am healed and back to riding horses we can look into that.

Anyways so we finally got out of town the next morning and were NOW headed to Mono County, with a few stops along the way (like an irritating search for DVD player chargers in Reno, Nevada, and a random sampling of meatball panini sandwiches at a pizza place somewhere north of Carson City). So after all that, and not much geocaching, it took us almost to the end of day before we were fiddling around trying to decide on a campsite for the night.

(tune in for Episode 2 later, after we try out our new Blu-Ray system and get some sleep)

Fremont National Forest Fun

Tumalo State Park has a few caches in it, but we left without finding any, mostly because we wasted some time on a bad hint on one and another looked like it was going to be a longer walk than we had time for. We did have time for breakfast at Shari’s Restaurant before leaving town; warm comfort food washed down with hot coffee.
It was slightly misty outside, which suited my mood and memory. The Shari’s is right across the street from the Shiloh Inn that my ex husband and I stayed at a few times. He had always wanted to move to Bend, and we had gone as far as to meet with a realtor and consider houses and jobs in town, but ultimately we stayed in Texas. If we had gone then, we might have stayed together, it is possible. Part of what drove our misery together was his misery over living in Texas, or not living in Oregon, or sacrificing his dream of Bend, although to be fair, he never made any efforts to make it happen. I felt like he wanted me to make it happen for him, although it wasn’t my dream, per se. I did always like Bend, though, and we spent quite a few weekends here both when we lived in Oregon, and when we visited later.
These are the things I remembered as we left town: the store where we bought presents for an impromptu third birthday for our oldest son during a break from deployments, a restaurant, a bar, a hotel we visited during our weekends there, a turn off even for caches we found later on. I was surprised at both how much I remembered, and the details I couldn’t conjure up.

And soon, we were on the road, this time heading down a road familiar to me – to his parent’s house, a few hours drive from here. My kids were there, they had been spending a week with their grandparents in Oregon that they hardly ever get to see. Part of the reason I chose the West for our vacation was to give them a chance to have this visit this summer, since their dad wasn’t able to take them. They had been there a week, since I had handed the kids over to my ex’s aunt in Ashland, Oregon the following Friday. This was the first time I had seen my ex’s parents since the divorce, and indeed it was the summer before that happened that I had last seen them, so three years had gone by now since I had pulled up at their drive. They had also never met Jason, who took the place of their son in my life, so all this has me a little nervous.
I knew the way to their home, still, and remembered some of the landscape, although this day, due to our explorative nature, Jason and I saw parts of the wilderness along the drive that I had never seen before.
We spent quite a bit of time at this rock formation in the above picture. Although we never did find the cache that was our incentive for getting out of the car there (coordinates were like 50-70 ft off and the hint was bad), we had a really good time walking around out there, feeling the cool Oregon air and listening to the wind blow the trees around.

We pulled off several times along the way to drive down forest roads in the Fremont National Forest. These roads appear on the map something like, “200” or “260”, but in reality are just dirt roads with no signs used by loggers or wilderness enthusiasts, hunters maybe. A few times we weren’t sure we were on the right road – in fact we probably wasted half an hour or more than morning on wrong roads – but we did find some cool places.

This is one of those cool places – aptly named “Hole-in-the-Ground”. This is an area known to geologists as a “maar”, formed by a series of eruptions that caused magma to come into contact with ground water, forming a crater in the ground. The road around the rim is 3 miles long, and we made it all the way around, but not without crashing into a rock and causing the bumper of our rental car to get pushed out of place in an area, which Jason fixed when we got to my former in-laws, having to borrow some tools to my ex-stepfather-in–law. It was interesting….but we had a fun adventure tale to tell, which took some awkwardness of the moment away.

When we got to their house, we were literally at the border of Oregon and California. We had stopped at the Burger Queen for lunch before their house (my favorite place to eat in the Lakeview, Oregon area, reminiscent of former visits), and when we left their house, it was mid-afternoon, and time to get a move on to get to the next leg of our journey – Mono Lake, CA, which deserves its own entry.

Bend Bound

It was with sadness that we finally made our way out of this area. After a last morning driving around the southeastern side of Mt Rainier, we took the turn for White Pass, and began heading into Oregon, via Yakima.
Of course, our drive took twice as long as it should have, since we had to stop to geocache and explore every little area. This picture above is of Rimrock Lake, a storage reservoir for the Yakima Project, an irrigation program. Its capacity is controlled by the Tieton Dam on one side and the Clear Creek Dam on the other. This area provides outdoor enthusiasts with opportunities for fishing, camping, boating, and water sports. Trout are in abundance here, and wildlife that share the area include deer, elk, osprey, bald eagles, otter and bear. We didn’t see any of those while we were out there playing, but we did find a few caches.

This spot here holds little action right now, but in the winter is a feeding ground for elk. In 1913, Rocky Mountain elk were brought to this area from Yellowstone National Park. However, these elk tend to range up to 70 miles between the winter and spring feeding grounds, and there eventually became conflict between land owners and ranchers and the elk. The Department of Fish and Wildlife got involved to work out a compromise. In 1939, this agency began to provide hay to the elk at this location to keep them from wandering and damaging property. In the 1940s, they built a hundred miles of eight foot high fences to keep the elk here during the winter. The hay is grown on government property. Elk can eat between 3-10 lbs of hay a day, and at peak feeding times, there is up to 8,000 elk here at a time. That is a lot of hay! I wish we had seen the elk, but they are there November-February, and this was the end of June.

This is a shot of a miniature Stonehenge, which sits near the edge of Washington, hanging just above the Columbia River Gorge, which you can see in the next picture. This replica of the original stands as a monument to heroism and peace. It was Sam Hill who had the idea to erect this monument, after being inspired by seeing the real StoneHenge in England and wanted to build this one as a reminder of the sacrifices made during World War I, and the “incredible folly” of the war. In 1918, it was dedicated to the servicemen of Klickitat County, Washington who died in the service of their country during the Great War. The monument was actually finished in 1929 and re-dedicated. Sam Hill was a very interesting person who was influential in getting roads built in Washington and Oregon. See more about his life here.

Another one of Sam Hill’s contributions was this road pictured above, and in the next two shots: the Maryville Loops. Sam paid for these roads to be constructed out of his own pocket, after being frustrated with the Washington government’s failure to agree to build a highway along the Columbia River Gorge.

Our stop here at this road was purely serendipitous. I thought we could drive down this road and that would be a fun adventure (plus there is a cache along it), but we never saw a turn for it. Instead, we saw a turnoff for an overlook, and stopped to look. As chance would have it, we got there just as buses were pulling up to unload skaters for a practice run for a competition happening that weekend. There were different types of skate competitions, and we watched a few rounds of this, taking pictures and video. It was so completely awesome and unexpected.

After this, we made it over the Gorge, stopping for dinner and one more cache, and realizing we better make some miles if we hoped to make it to Bend tonight.
As you can see, though, it was tough to resist temptations to get out and take photos and explore the surroundings, as they were particularly beautiful.

Finally, we made it to Tumalo State Park, and to our camping reservation. Still with daylight left, too! We had time to pitch our tent and have a dinner of that same salad from Pike Market that we had been carting around before going to sleep, the sound of the creek singing a lullaby to us as we got some well-needed rest.