Tag Archives: camping

31 Years of Memories–Year 5

Posted on January 2, 2014 | Leave a comment

Year 5 from 12/28/1986 – 12/28/1987

Cabin Camping
Dale and I were active adults BC (before children) and we were determined that having children would not alter that behavior, that we would not succumb to the couch, or to Daddy-Dockers to Mommy Jeans to elastic waistbands. Seriously. We ran with Meghan in the pre-jogging stroller, the double wheels vibrating like an old ’50 Chevy that exceeded 50 mph, with her gums (pre-teeth) chattering over every bump in the road. We played intermittent tennis games while Meghan toddled around the adjacent tennis court, certain to stop a rally whenever she stepped on our court every minute or so. We hiked, as long as ever, only not as far. In fact, we learned the incontrovertible rule of the age of the child equal to the total miles a family could hike without serious catastrophe. For example, Meghan was 2 ½ and our hikes were about that in miles (total per day) and all was well. Any farther, things deteriorated inversely to the time it took to get there.
We thought we had this parenting thing down, or at least the car camping part. Since children take to camping like a labrador to sticks, like a cat to cat nip, we headed to Dale’s property in Cascade, Montana, 30 miles from the nearest town of 500 people. A remote place, just on the eastern side of the divide, where the National Park Service drops errant bears, where hunters prowl in search of deer and antelope—this is where Dale’s cabin was and where we stayed.
It took four days to get there, four agonizing days of eight excruciating hours of the Cinderella tape played incessantly (at least 130 times going there), with Meghan screaming “play it again” each time the tape ended (18 minutes 45 seconds) and not a wink of sleep from her car seat. Finally, with the last few bumps and turns of the road, just as we pulled to the site of the cabin, Meghan mastered the art of sleeping in the car; the rhythmic bouncing on the unpaved washboard of the county road rocked her to sleep. All we had to do was find other backcountry roads for the return trip, and maybe, we could make it back in time for the start of the school year. It was late June, plenty of time.
The rustic cabin was one room with exposed insulation on the walls and plywood for floors, a wood burning stove for cooking and heating, yet this possessed more comfort than the tent. Dale built a ram pump, so we enjoyed running water and a stream fed solar shower. A hammock strung between two beautiful aspens provided the perfect napping place for our toddler, for any of us. A creek, barely a trickle in summer, at the bottom of our hill provided hours of amusement for Meghan, where she was safely entertained with mud and rocks and bugs and water. Meghan ran between swinging in the hammock to splashing in the water. It was a glorious vacation, primitive, elemental, fun.

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31 Years of Memories–Year 4

Posted on December 31, 2013 | Leave a comment

Year Four from 12/28/1985 to 12/28/1986

Lightning Strikes

I thought I finished my adventures, not quite. A particularly memorable camping trip occurred when Meghan was 1 ½ years. She was already a seasoned camper, since we sought Yosemite every school break. On this late August afternoon, we pitched our tent in Tuolumne Meadows . She toddled around the campsite, sticks and rocks in both hands, calling after the deer, “Dog, dog, dog.” She was one with surrounding dirt and mud.
As often happens in the Sierra, thunder showers roll in quickly and behave violently. Clouds billowed from all directions, as we watched the sky go from near cloudless to a scattering of pretty, puffy white clouds to large, menacing, ominous ones to completely dark in less than 30 minutes. We grabbed Meghan and darted into the tent just as the rain started. The thunder got louder, near deafening, and closer to the flashes. At first I counted, “one, one thousand, two, one thousand…” The next flash, I could not count even “one.” In one terrific flash and simultaneous thunder, my fingers tingled, the welts on my blue jeans got hot—even burning my skin, my hair stood on end. I thought certain this was our end—electrocution. I whimpered, holding Meghan tight. Dale sat across from me experiencing the tingling fingers, hot welts, hair on end, but he had been in thunderstorms before like this. I continued to hold Meghan in my arms, trying to nurse her throughout (whatever was I thinking), while we sat on insulate pads and sleeping bags. As quickly as the thunderstorm arrived, it passed, and I felt foolish for freaking out. We climbed out to find how horrifically close we were to the strikes.
Lightning had hit all around us. Lightning hit our campsite. It struck our picnic table, bounced along the rivets to the anchor chain, kicking up dirt where it finally grounded. Lightning struck the camper van next to us, blowing off all four of its hub caps. Lightning smacked the clothes line strung between trees, not more than 10 feet away from us, traveled down the synthetic rope, and burned holes in anything that contacted the metal on the clothes pins. Lightning blew off the “bear box” on the tree across from us. And from the same downpour, in which our tent sat smack in the middle of a brand new creek, most likely a great conduit of the lightning strikes, the insulate pads saved us. That same lightning storm killed several people who took shelter in the restrooms. We were the fortunate.
This same year, Nana Eva joined our family when I returned to work. She needed us as much as we needed her. She was the most popular nanny in the Mommy and Me class and many Moms wanted her, but we were the lucky ones. It was a year with mixed blessings and trauma, as a car accident totaled the Honda Accord, but “earned us” money enough for a new Volvo. I miscarried a tough twin pregnancy in June, a few days before my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary. I counted my blessings. We were alive. We had Meghan.

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Astronomy Campout in Yosemite

Posted on November 18, 2013 | Leave a comment

Every summer, my husband and I (both of us being high school teachers) pack tent and camp gear and head to state or national parks. When our children were young (starting as early as 6 weeks), we roamed from park to park, with our favorite sites in Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grover Hot Springs, Hendy Woods, Big Sur, and Big Basin. In fall, we camped most often in Yosemite, when the crowds are gone and the weather is not yet winter. At times, a smoky haze hovered over the pine trees from controlled burns in the valley. Other Novembers, we camped in crisp, clean air, our tents on the light snow covering pine needles. I recently returned from Yosemite, this time with high school students, some of whom had never camped.
At the start, this trip did not bode well as everyone was sick from whatever virus was spreading through the high school. We were a band of barking dogs, hacking all the way to the mountains, but Yosemite was calling. Nothing, no insidious virus, would stand in the way of this trip. Immediately after school on Friday afternoon, my colleague and I packed the school vans for the four-hour trek to Yosemite Valley. Stuffed into a decrepit, public school extended van, with no functioning radio (Imagine this with high school kids–really?), filled with camp food and supplies for two days plus behemoth telescope, as this was the astronomy club trip, we pulled into the campsite by 8:00 p.m. and managed to set up tents within the half hour—truly a challenge in the dark and with unfamiliar tents.
We fired up the Coleman stove for hot chocolate, a necessity before sleep. Everyone was out by 10:00 and truly, I mean asleep. No sounds from adjoining tents I was monitoring, until my cough medicine took over and I began to drift off. However, it was a fretful night as I darn near froze, too cold to find the car key to find my other jacket, so I huddled deep inside the length of the down sleeping bag. Even woolen cap, long underwear, fleece pants, down jacket were insufficient, so I shivered out the night until morning. On the other hand, freezing cold is part of the entire experience. The next morning after breakfast, we hiked the John Muir trail to Vernal-Nevada Falls and returned via the horse trail. The hacking, coughing, wheezing, and sneezing teenagers and chaperons pushed up the steep trail, but not sick enough to enjoy the vibrant colors, Sienna, Indian Reds, Orange Red to Maroon and every shade in between. The colors were practically therapeutic.
Following the day’s hike and dinner by campfire, we held an obligatory stroll to the open meadows at 10:00 p.m. This was an astronomy club outing after all, so we sprawled in the meadow gazing at the celestial heavens, as my colleague pointed out constellations, circumpolar stars, and the faint Andromeda galaxy. Returning to site, everyone finished off the hot chocolate while I swigged my NyQuil, determined to get a better night’s sleep than the evening before. That is, of course, when disaster hit. My colleague with an absolute stricken look on his face confessed that he had misplaced the single school van key. I immediately began to think of possible scenarios—ranging from AAA rescue to a-most-pissed-off administrator-driving-the-four-hours to our site. None of the scenarios was especially pleasant. And, that is how I fell asleep, as the second night of camping is always the soundest in terms of sleep. Something about figuring out the best sleeping position in a bag, or adjusting to the surrounding sounds and dim lights, or relaxing to the campfire smells, but this particular night it was the double dose of cough medicine that did it.
My poor partner, Philip, scoured the campsite, then retraced our steps, and trekked through the meadow disturbing lovers and wild beasts for the small key attached to nothing at all. Whoever hands a single key without even a twist-tie? School districts, apparently. As Philip informed me the next morning, I was “unconscious” by the time he returned to our campsite. True. If a black bear had decided to sample my cough medicine, I never would have known. In fact, if a black bear sampled me, I would not have noticed. Philip found the singular key in the bottom of a jacket, which he never took off after that moment.
The next morning after a heavy night of needed sleep and my cough finally dissipating, I drove back, and the sole sound in the van was snoring from all the students and Philip.

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Researching Yellowstone

Posted on October 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

This trip was unlike any we had as a family. Most summers, we camped in state or national parks, as do many families of teachers—public servants using the public parks.  We visited nearly every California State Park, our particular favorites including Calaveras, Donner, Grover, Big Basin, and Big Sur. We camped in national forests when we could not get the spot we wanted in a national park, e.g. Yosemite or Grand Canyon or Sequoia. We traveled and camped from June through September, when we started back to school.

Our children began their camping adventures when they were merely weeks old. Dale’s down jacket served as a sleeping bag for a 6 week old and nursing was a snap in the middle of the night. No bottles to boil, no formula to mix—made for an easy vacation. By the time our girls were in high school, they could put up a tent in record time, which was often serious family competition. Cooking on the Coleman stove was a creative art, which we mastered. Therefore, this particular summer, while I was studying, testing, and recording, my family was fishing, swimming, and relaxing by the Yellowstone River.

University of Montana offered this field study. As with any graduate level course, required reading was assigned ahead of time. I ordered the requisite texts, and weeks out, began the reading assignments.  At the start of class was a preliminary test, so I plunged into the mandatory reading while we drove to Yellowstone. This geology course covered scientific testing of some of 10,000 hot spots, such as geysers, fumaroles, and mud pots.  By casting a fishing line, attached with a thermometer or water-collecting instruments, into geyser basins, researchers gathered data without endangering lives.  Every season, occasional tourists and random pets fall prey to geysers or fumaroles by straying too far from the boarded walkways and falling into the boiling waters—despite the posted warnings, newspaper accounts, and cautionary words of rangers. Some locals keep mortality rates on visitors searching for that perfect picture, or unleashed, wandering dogs that lose their lives to the hot springs, or bison who pummel them.

For our research, we were nowhere near the boarded walkways or civilization. We collected data in the Norris Basin, the most seismically active area of the park, and therefore the most dangerous. We brought along biological testing kits and medical supplies and a park ranger, who carried his walkie-talkie, our only link to the outside world and help, should we need it. Recording data all day long in the hot summer sun, while dodging flies the size of small bats and mosquitoes the size of small birds, yet this was my idea of an exciting vacation. I love outdoor biology—my true calling—and I felt in my element as I crouched in the dust and dirt, inhaling fumes of sulfur, and batting away at the constant attack by insects.  And, I was ready to pack up and move to Yellowstone permanently.

One particular trek skirted a blackened sulfur pool, a tar-y-blackness that I had seen before, but always in a lab and never in nature. The pool was blacker than the blackest charcoal I ever made in many a science lab, pouring sulfuric acid over sugar, watching as the bubbling mass oozed out of the beaker, while students ooh’d and aah’d and held their noses.  Here, we stopped to run the spectrophotometer and assess the compounds present in nearby streams and fumaroles. We ran tests to measure biologic variations, to assess seismic changes in the basin—to determine the rapid or slow but constant evolution that Yellowstone is famous for. The dramatic variations in color are due to the differences in pH and temperature and we tested nearly every color in the spectrum.

On the last day of our vacation, my exhausted family bedded down at nightfall, while I studied by flashlight for my final exam.  Sammy saw a bear, the one animal she had searched for, and which earned her Yellowstone National Park Junior Ranger patch, while I earned my one-graduate unit that moved me to the farthest column on the pay scale.

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Posted in animals, Childhood Memories, nature

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On the Road to Yellowstone

Posted on October 3, 2013 | Leave a comment

Sometime around the last government shutdown, I transferred school districts and needed a one-unit course to move to the farthest column on the pay scale. Figuring this was an ideal opportunity for travel, (I generally use any excuse for that); I searched for places to take our family. Europe? Africa? Asia? Terrific travel destinations but costly for a family of five’s vacation and one’s education, especially on a teacher’s salary, and even with my new raise.  An exhaustive internet search led me to the precise seminar that met all my requirements in course level, length, price, and destination—at Yellowstone National Park. The University of Montana offered a one-unit graduate level course covering “Geysers, Mud pots, and Hot Springs Research.” Let the family escape begin!

After three days on the road, with stops at Uncle Steve’s in Nevada for horse wrangling, then Uncle Carl’s for fly-fishing, we drove towards our final target of Yellowstone. Our three daughters were camping veterans, who had experienced nearly every summer in state or national parks, since that is what families of teachers often do. The girls knew that the next few weeknights would be sleeping in down bags and under the stars (by my terms, luxurious), bathing in solar-powered showers (translation, just above freezing), dining on camp gruel (edible, by any bear standards), but according to our teenage and tweenage daughters—not so much.  So, to make this a “real family vacation,” I conceded and made a one-night reservation at a local hotel in American Falls, Idaho near enough to our final destination, requesting two rooms with four beds, so adults could have privacy and quiet. “No problem,” the clerk responded and we replied that we would arrive by early evening.

The recently remodeled hotel sat on the corner of the American Falls with balconies over leaning the rushing waters—magnificent and thunderous. I handed the clerk my credit card and explained that I called earlier. He seemed perplexed, and then left to find the manager of the hotel. At this point, we were hungry, tired from travelling, and cranky from family time. “Please don’t tell me there are no rooms,” I was thinking and mentally preparing my next move, when the manager approached. “No problem” (I had heard that before) as he handed me a key. He explained, “We had a slight mix-up with the rooms, but I am certain your family will enjoy this room much better. It is the same price.”

I accepted the key and thanked him. We grabbed our backpacks and headed to room 2106. The elevator doors opened on the twenty-first floor, a smallish floor compared with the others, on the other hand, we were on the top floor. We got out and found 2104 and 2108. No 2106. No odd numbers either, which was strange. The only room between 2104 and 2106 had a sign—“Penthouse.” Ha! Like that would happen. My husband glanced around to see if anyone was watching us, all of us feeling slightly sheepish as though we did not quite belong, but the doors opened. Viola! We were going to experience how 1% of the wealthiest lived!

With wrap-around balconies directly over the deafening falls and spray wafting up all twenty floors, none of us could believe the good fortune this trip had afforded. The beds—all queen or king size–were soft yet firm, with downy comforters over satin sheets; amenities at every elbow, including a walk-in shower and a bathtub large enough for a party, velvety towels galore, and, of course, a fancy bidet, of which my kids were clueless. We savored the moments in that hotel and I doubt if any of us slept that night—too stunned at our windfall. Checkout time was 11:00 the next morning; we returned the key at 10:59—then headed to another miracle of sorts, Yellowstone Valley—but that is another story.

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