Fire Stupidity

      These early autumn days have been lovely in the Applegate – little or no smoke, Delft-blue skies, gentle breezes that carry a hint of autumn. One Sunday, Mike and I set off for a hike to Azalea Lake, in the Red Buttes Wilderness Area. The Fir Glade trailhead is only about thirty minutes from my house and the lake about five and a half miles from the trailhead.

      The trail begins in a deep evergreen forest, dark and cool, then rises to a ridge, overlooking several Siskiyou peaks in the near distance and Phantom Meadow far below, before it tips over the ridge-top and down the other side. That whole side of the mountain had burned in last year's Miller Complex Fire. The trees, which grew sparsely anyway, were now but blackened poles. 

Underneath burned snags, the shrubs and bushes were already greening the ground, but all the way into the valley, down to the lake itself, we could see burned forest, near and far. The lake was rimmed with burned trees except for a small finger of forest the fire had neglected. That, of course, was where we headed.

      Even as we were descending the hill, we heard voices at the lake. As we got closer we could see four men, in camouflage outfits, just packing up to leave.

      Ah, right. I had forgotten that part of the Red Buttes is in California and that California's hunting season starts before Oregon's. These men had shot two bucks the day before and had packed out half the meat. Now they were leaving with the rest of the meat and their camping gear, all packed in what looked like very heavy packs. The men were staggering with the weight. Two of them had tied the heads of the deer, with the antlers, onto the backs of their packs so that to walk behind them would have been to stare into the eyes of the dead deer. To approach them from the front, as Mike and I did, was to fleetingly mistake the man's head, with the antlers sticking up over it, for a deer's head. I thought it was a pretty dangerous way to walk.

      But these men seemed carelessly oblivious of danger. They had built a fire and left it burning. "Oh," they said casually when we pointed it out to them, "we thought it would be all right." 

      I was incensed. How could they leave a fire burning when they had camped among fire-dead trees and hiked for two miles in view of hundreds of acres of the same? How could they walk away from a burning fire when they had been living with smoke in the Rogue Valley for two months? Hadn't they seen the billboards with the picture of a campfire and the words, "Wanted: Dead out"? Didn't they know that the fire in Crater Lake National Park a few years ago, for instance, was started by a campfire? Hadn't they noticed that there was a wind even now? Hadn't they thought about what happens when a wind sneaks into hot ashes and live embers in a fire pit? With only a handful of trees still green at Azalea Lake, how could they not care about the chance they were taking of destroying even those? How could they be so ignorant and so careless and so stupid?
        And illegal. I looked up fire restriction rules when I got hone, and, as I had suspected, campfires are not allowed in Northern California at this time.

      Mike and I had lunch; then I took a swim while Mike made numerous trips filling his water bottle in the lake and pouring the water over the fire until he had put it out. He stacked rocks in the fire pit so no embers that might have escaped the drowning would be whisked out by the wind. We could be sure that this fire was going to do no damage. The hunters who left it burning could have had no such assurance.

Louse Canyon: A Beautiful Hike but a Lousy Trip

      Louse Canyon is up the mountain from the Crabtree Trailhead, in the Emigrant Wilderness Area, just north of Yosemite National Park.

 Bob Cook, with whom I've backpacked annually for the past fifteen years and who was doing this seven-day trip with me, had hired a packer to take our packs to the campsite in Louse Canyon so we could hike the first day carrying minimum weight: lunch and water.

      As the packer, Doug, was loading Ellie, his mule, with our packs, Bob told him,"We'll be going up the Golden Staircase [the name of the route up the granite cliff above Louse Canyon to Rosasco Lake] tomorrow morning. Leave our packs at the campsite at the base of the Golden Staircase." Doug nodded, tightened the cinch, mounted Viola, his horse, and started up the trail.

      Bob and I met Doug a couple of miles up the trail as he was returning. He said, yes, he had left the packs in the campsite at the bottom of the Golden Staircase.

      We stopped at Grouse Lake, where I had a good swim,

and got to the arranged campsite around 2:00. No packs! We searched behind every tree, around every boulder. No packs. Bob walked up the canyon while I rested my feet, but it was a fruitless search. We both walked the other direction, down the canyon to its end, then along the canyon from that end all the way up the canyon where Bob had just walked ("Four eyes are better than two," Bob said) and even farther. We followed hoof prints (but were they Viola's and Ellie's or those of other horses?). We hunted and hunted. For three hours we looked, probably adding two miles to the eight we had already hiked. Finally, the only thing to do was to go back.

      Go back where? It would be a moonless night, so it seemed unwise to hike the full eight miles to the trailhead. Probably, I thought as I hiked, we would stop at Grouse Lake and spend the night there, huddled under a pine tree, trying to keep warm, getting up every so often to stamp our feet and flap our arms.We both had jackets, but I was in shorts. It would be a long, cold night.

     A couple of miles down the trail we met two men with two rambunctious dogs. They greeted us cheerfully: "Hi! How're you doing?" Not so well, we said and explained our predicament. Immediately the first man opened his pack and took out two twenty-pound bags of dog food (!), dug a little further, and came up with two energy bars for us. He filled our water jugs, told us there were some campers at Grouse Lake, and wished us well.

      Encouraged, we hiked another mile to Grouse Lake, where we saw two men (Craig and Franc, we learned later) just setting up their tent. We explained that we were without supplies and did they have anything that might help us, like, for instance, Bob said, something I could put on my legs for the night?

      I said apologetically that I knew that backpackers carry only what we need. I wasn't expecting them to have anything extra.

      They leapt into action. Were we exhausted, they asked, or would we like a flashlight for hiking to the trailhead?

       It had already been a 13-mile day. My feet refused to go another five miles. Besides, it was a pretty rocky trail to do by flashlight. I said I was exhausted.

       Craig gave me a pair of long johns, brand new, he said. Did we need food? Water? And, look, he and Franc had been considering sleeping in the open air, anyway. They would do that, and we could have their tent.

       Images of sleeping huddled under a pine tree vanished with the offer.

       Craig told us there was another couple camped on the lake; we could hit them up, too.

      I winced at the vocabulary, but Bob and I walked to the next camp. Michelle and Anthony were standing by a fire that was cooking a fish, impaled on a stick. We explained our problem, and they, too, went into immediate action. Did we need food? Water? What could they give us to make our night more bearable? Melissa thought of the light polyester cape she carried with her on camping trips. Anthony gave us a sleeping bag liner and a large down jacket. We left their campsite with out hearts as full of gratitude as our arms were full of provisions for the night.

      I had eight cherry tomatoes and four little squares of beef jerky left from lunch. That and the two energy bars the hikers with the dogs had given us would be our dinner. We would save the other two energy bars for the morning. We sat on a log to eat. I thought if Bob could turn our water into wine, we would be doing just fine. He said he didn't know how to do that, and where was that guy when you needed Him?

      Thanks to the kindness of strangers what was merely an uncomfortable night was not a dangerous one. The ground was hard, and a poorly positioned rock under the tent poked Bob's back all night. We were cold (there was ice in the water bottles the next morning), but not as cold as we would have been without the tent. As soon as we saw dawn creeping through the forest, we crawled out. Craig, who was already stirring about camp, said I could continue to wear the long johns and leave them on his car at the trailhead. We took Michelle and Anthony's borrowed items to their campsite, laid them on a log, and headed for the Crabtree Trailhead.

      Five miles later, well before noon, we were at our cars, and I was taking off my boots.

      We were glad to see that Doug was at the pack station and not on the trail somewhere packing someone else's gear into the wilderness. We told him the packs weren't at the arranged place. He smiled a bit and said, yes, they were. We said we had looked for a couple of hours and couldn't find them. Still with that barely perceptible smile, he said he would take Viola and Ellie and go get the packs. He would be back some time between 6:00 and 7:00.

      Bob and I drove a few miles to the Pinecrest Chalet, where we would spend a comfortable, warm night in a lovely little cabin with hot showers and large clean beds with beautiful white down comforters. While we waited for our packs to return, eating sandwiches at Pinecrest Lake and watching the boaters, Bob took another look at the Emigrant Wilderness map. Scouring it closely, he now noticed that there were two depressions in the granite wall above Louse Canyon that led to a spot of blue on the map indicating a lake. The first was above the campsite where we had expected to find our packs. The second led to a spot of blue indicating a lake that was named, on the map, Rosasco Lake. That meant that that route was the Golden Staircase, not the one Bob had thought. The packer had been exactly right. We had been wrong. We should have pointed to a map and said, "Here. Here is where we expect to find our packs."                                

     As a wilderness survival story, this one really isn't very exciting. But as a kindness-of-strangers story, it is superb: the two hikers with the dogs who gave us food and water; Craig and Franc, who gave us food and shelter; Michelle and Anthony, who gave us warm coverings; and Doug, the packer, who didn't hesitate a minute about making an extra six-hour trip into Louse Canyon and, when we offered to pay because the mistake had been ours, only smiled his slight smile and said no.

      (This post is dedicated, in gratitude, to Craig and Franc Volodonsk and to Melissa and Anthony Gillepsie.)

(To find out how the 75 x 75 project is going, check out the latest post on http://thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com.)

   

Seals, Herons, Egrets, and Good Company

            For the Labor Day weekend I wanted to immerse myself in a smoke-free ecology, so I took Mike with me and went to visit my friend Wallace Kaufman, who lives on Poole Slough, on the Oregon coast near Newport. Wallace spends his days observing the wildlife, kayaking the slough, taking photographs, and, in general, immersing himself in the coastal, tidal-river ecology.

      As soon as Mike and I arrived Friday evening, the three of us jumped in Wallace's kayaks and paddled to the bay, where the harbor seals obliged us with their clown routine, popping up behind our boats and gazing at us with their puppy-eyes, their whiskers alert. Then down they would go, only to pop up again in unexpected places.

     The next morning Mike and I took the kayaks upriver. Blue herons flew at the edge of the forest, landing in trees above the slough. 

Sand pipers ran along the muddy shores. A red-tail hawk soared overhead, and a kingfisher made a bee-line up the river then hovered mid-air with his wings awhir before settling on a wire over the river. Mike and I paddled at a leisurely pace, setting athwart our paddles from time to time to train binoculars on the birds. We paddled until the salted river became too shallow to continue.

      It was easy and fun until the return, when we were paddling against the wind. Oh. My. God. I wa sure my kayak was standing still no matter how hard I pulled on the paddle. What would I do if I weren't strong enough to get back to Wallace's dock? I gauged Mike's progress. I figured he would manage to get back to Wallace's, and then he and Wallace could come after me in the two-person kayak. I would be rescued.

      In the event, it wasn't necessary. I managed to get back to the dock, my arms aching.

      Wallace steamed oysters from his catch down at the dock for dinner, and I made a cobbler from the blackberries he had picked. He brought kale and tomatoes from his garden and offered us all sorts of chutneys and blackberry syrups he had canned. Mike had brought both wine and port, and Wallace served his homemade blackberry brandy. In spite of the lively conversation that flowed with the alcohol. I finally gave up and went to bed, both nights, leaving Wallace and Mike to solve the problems of the world.

      Early Monday morning, before Mike and I had to leave for the Rogue Valey, Wallace joined us for a last kayak trip down the slough to the bay. The sun was just coming up through the mist, perfect light for good photographs. 

We watched a flock of seagulls dive-bomb a blue heron who had found a perch in their territory. As we got closer to the pier where the harbor seals aggregate, we saw five snowy egrets on the bank. 

Slowly and silently we paddled closer, until Wallace got quite close to them and took some beautiful photographs.

      On the way back to the house, Wallace decided to take the route through the marsh instead of the river route. The tide was going out, but he thought the water would stay deep enough for us to get back to his dock.

      The muddy banks of the marsh stood tall above the water, and Wallace was soon so far ahead of Mike and me (Mike because of me, as he kept waiting for me to catch up) that we lost him in the twists and turns of the marsh. We valiantly paddled on, following what we thought was the channel, trying to avoid the shallowest places. Finally we came to an ambiguous turn. I tried one way, Mike the other. My kayak got stuck in the mud, and I had to do some fancy maneuvering and strong pushing to get it free again. Mike was having similar trouble. Finally, though we knew the house was now directly across the marsh, we didn't know anything to do but turn around and paddle – fast, to beat the out-flowing tide – back to the river, where we could move more freely. As we rounded the last turn in the river, we heard Wallace blowing a signal to us on his bugle. He and his neighbors were on the dock, watching for us: our three-person rescue crew.

      Wallace had had his own trouble with the outgoing tide and eventually had gotten out of his kayak and walked through the marsh, toting the kayak behind him like something on the Eerie Canal.

      After a quick breakfast, Mike and I gathered our things and repacked the car, then waved goody-by, leaving the exciting salt-water ecology behind and turning back to the familiar but, I'm sorry to say, still smoky mountain ecology of home.