A Return to Camping

It has been almost since my kids were born, around 35 years, since the last time I’ve actually done what I would call camping. I’ve been out and spent the night in a tent or in the car, as you’ve seen in my other posts and pictures, particularly the astrophotography posts. But it’s been decades since I’ve actually gone camping as in the family going up in the hills and spending the weekend in a campground.

That’s what we did this last weekend. And that’s when I discovered just how much I missed it. The really cool thing about it, though, is my wife even said how much she enjoyed it. That gives me even more motivation to get the Vardo done.

So, on to the camping….

We left Friday morning and headed up, planning to go to Warm Lake and stay in one of the campgrounds there called Shoreline. We stopped at the gas station south of Cascade to get some treats and so found out about the Cougar fire in the area. For those unfamiliar with “Cougar fire” and the like, fires in the US NW are usually named after a creek, mountain, or other geographical landmark in the area and this one was named after Cougar Creek. We called the lodge for a status, discussed the situation and decided to go on in to Warm Lake if we could. On the way in we saw some side roads off Warm Lake Road that were blocked off, including one with the sheriff sitting there to keep people out but still keep it open for the firefighters to access the Cougar fire.

The Shoreline campground was full when we got there, which didn’t really surprise me. Around here, during the summer, unless you reserve a campsite in advance, some places a year in advance, it’s hit or miss whether you’ll be able to stay in any particular campground. However, we had noticed a really nice campsite along the road to the campground, and wound up staying there with room for all of us in “one” spot: my daughter’s family (7), my son’s family (4), my sister-in-law and one of her sons (2), and my wife and I. Fifteen of us in one camper and three tents, as you can see in the picture below. No services, just campsites, but it was a few minutes walk to the lake and outhouses and water was available at the lodge just a few minutes away by car so it was really pretty convenient. Happily, the temperatures were cooler there than at home, as well.

Campsite panorama

We set up a canopy over our tables near the firepit and that served as our kitchen for the weekend. The firepit was our communal center. And of course, we had a hammock to relax in, when we could get the kids to quit playing in it.

The kitchen and the hammock.

Naturally, since it is camping after all, both nights had campfires and S’mores. We also cooked a few trout and hot dogs over the fire. One of the funny highlights was when my nephew roasted six marshmallows on his trident and crammed them between full-sized Graham crackers on top of a bar of Hershey’s Chocolate. Boy, was that one huge, messy S’more! I wish I had a picture of that to include here.

The little red trailer rigged for sleeping in.

We even managed to jury-rig a small “camper” out of a utility trailer, some tent poles, and bungie cords. For a cot we had a reclining camp chair. The railing at the back was removed to provide access.

We had a blast! It was a really dusty campsite and also smokey from the Cougar fire two to three miles west of us. Because of the fire, either a sheriff or firefighter would come by each evening to advise us of road conditions. Friday night, the sheriff said we didn’t have to evacuate, but he wasn’t sure that he would personally remain camping in the area. We discussed that and decided that if we had to leave, they’d come by and let us know, so we stayed put. The next evening we learned that the fire had jumped the road and so the road was currently closed. The next morning it was opened up again, so even with the fire related conditions, we actually had a really good time and no problems getting back out Sunday afternoon.

Dutch oven cooking was supper Saturday. My son fixed up a chicken stew around noon and we maintained coals and fire throughout the day.

Dutch oven chicken stew

Chicken stew served up! YUM!

Field assembled tripod with proper lashing at top and a field made hook for the Dutch oven and coffee pot to hang from.

This was the first time in about 50 years that I made a tripod and only the third hook I made. It worked really well and we even used it for coffee in the morning. We did have one problem with the Dutch ovens that we initially blamed on the tripod: the bail on the one hanging from the tripod apparently got pulled out of shape. We couldn’t lay it over and just lift up the lid, we had to slide the lid out the side. Later, when cleaning up we discovered we’d swapped the lids when we prepped and put the food in the Dutch ovens. When we switched the lids, the bails on both ovens worked just fine. Now we know what to check next time.

Playing in the lake, Saturday, I discovered muscles I hadn’t used for decades. For that matter, I only survived three swings on the rope before I was afraid I couldn’t hang on for the next one. Come the next morning, I found I had sore muscle under the sternum and my underarms. It was a good feeling, though, and made even better when I realized I had gained back another notch in my belt by the end of the weekend.

That was NOT where he wanted it to stop!

One of the games we played was introduced by my nephew: Cross Country Bocce. We only played to 5 points per game, and we got a real workout. The rules were simple: start from one point and the person going first throws (yes, throws, not tosses!) the little white target ball anywhere they want. Then he or she throws his Bocce ball (one per person playing) to try to get closest to the white ball he just threw. Then the person that threw the white ball has to go find it and point out to the rest of just where the white ball was. Sometimes we could see it on the ground, but a lot of the time we couldn’t and had to try and guess what was there to deflect our balls into the right spot. Whoever gets closest (and sometimes that’s a couple of feet or more away) gets the point and throws the white ball for the next round. Repeat until someone has 5 points. With all the rocks and trees, there was no guarantee that the white ball or your Bocce ball would go where you aimed. After all, that little white ball fits between trees better, for one thing and bounces off rocks more. So we were up hills, through brush, on the road, and watching our balls roll or carom all over the place as we tried to allow for slope, rocks, trees, bushes, and so on.

One of the very few times most everyone got to the white ball.

The above is one of the few times most of the balls were clustered around the white ball. It is a picture of the type of ground cover we were playing in, too! One of the throws of the white ball was hilarious: It hit a tree, bounced off to hit a tree close by, bounced off that second tree back to the first, rebounded back to the second, once again off that back to the first…I think there were five or six bounces between the two trees before it fell to the ground. Kind of like a Japanese Pachinko game, I think. There were many more hilarious throws, too, but this one was particularly funny.

Thank heavens for duct tape!

We had at least one casualty that required major treatment. Fortunately, there was some duct tape to hand and we were able to properly ensure the continuity of the weekend. As a matter of fact, when we left for home the next afternoon, this shoe was still going strong after playing all over the place in the rocks, hills, sticks, and riding bikes.

Like I said, we all had a blast and we’re looking forward to more camping. I’m eager to get the Vardo done and get out camping with it.

Wickahoney

Continuing my explorations of the weekend of the 4th of July…

Friday night I got home about 12:30 AM after shooting the Treasure Valley panorama. By 8 AM I was up and getting ready to head over to Boise to pick up my friend and head for Wickahoney, Idaho.

I had come across WIckahoney while exploring Owyhee county online. I’d been looking at maps (I’m fascinated with them) and saw some ruins marked with linked pictures that looked awesome. One of the pictures was even a night shot with the interior of the ruins lit up. None, though, brought out the stars that had to be visible from that dark sky site. I immediately wanted to go do some astrophotogaphy there, but first and foremost, I had to figure out how to get there. None of the websites I looked at had any details on how to get there.

Happily, Wickahoney is still on the map and Google is your friend. Surprisingly, even though it’s way out there in the middle of nowhere, it’s actually also in the National Registry of Historical Places. Using several sources, and collaborating with my friend, we worked out the directions and distances for the drive out to Wickahoney and back. Then we made a plan and set a date for a run to the ruins. That date was Saturday, 5 July 2014.

Trust me when I say it’s out in the middle of nowhere. You need a vehicle with clearance to get to it. I’m not nervous or scared to be out there, but I am very respectful of the Qwyhees and try to always err on the side of caution. It’s a wild place, a lonely place, and it can be dangerous, even fatal. I’ve been out there many times now, and have explored only a very small part of the county. I know what I need to bring when I go so that if I am forced to stay out there overnight or a few days waiting for help, I have the necessary supplies to survive. I’m aware of the symptoms of hypothermia and heat stroke and watch for them, both in myself and anyone with me. I almost always take a friend with me so that if something happens to me (for example twisted ankle, heat stroke, snake bite) then I have someone there to provide aid and help get me out. I also leave information with someone about where I’m going, what route I’m taking, and when I expect to be back. Then I stick to that plan. I can’t plan for everything, but I can prepare the best I can, use common sense, and be careful. I don’t go out there for thrills, I go out there to explore and take pictures.

It took us an hour to get to the turn-off to the dirt road, and another hour and half to get to Wickahoney. It was hot all day, as well…99F to 110F, somewhere around there. Your vehicle had best be in good shape and you better know how to read a map.

Typical road on the way to Wickahoney in Owyhee County, Idaho.

Even with our directions worked out, we still had quesions identifying where we were in the field. Both of us were experienced with maps, so we never needed to break out the GPS and the topo maps on my laptop. Some of our measurements found online were wrong, but the visual image of the map tended to help us properly identify each turn we needed to make to ensure we were on the right track.

We saw no other traffic once we left the highway and there’s no cell service out there.

The final drive to the ruins. The “road” peters out when you arrive at the ruins proper and resumes on the other side of the creek.

Finally, the ruins came into view. You could see them from a mile off. The pictures I saw online were nothing compared to the reality. I thought they looked cool when I saw the pictures, but when I actually saw the ruins of this old home, stage stop and post office it was just like seeing the ruins of old cathedrals or castles (sorta) you can find in England. I had expectations of what I would see, but the reality exceeded all such imaginings.

The ruins of the old Wickahoney home, stage stop, and post office.

Plus there’s no shade at all at Wickahoney, other than that from your vehicle or the ruins.

View of the Wickahoney ruins with my Blazer and friend for scale. We’re parked some 40 or 50 feet away from the ruins.

That’s not quite right. There is a creek that runs nearby, and there are some low trees and the remains of an orchard near the creek, but in general you might not want to hang out there too much, given all the cowpies laying around.

A friend overseas asked what I feel in places like this. Obviously I feel the heat but interestingly enough the 100 degree heat out there is more tolerable than the 100 degree heat in Nampa or Boise. It’s a different type of heat. The ruins impressed me both visually and emotionally. It was simply awesome to see them, standing out there alone in the middle of the high desert. There’s a loneliness to the ruins, but it also gives me a lot of respect for the people with the courage to settle there. I’ve read about the life of people in places like this and I like to try to imagine what the building was like and the fun the kids had growing up and the tough, but in its own way good, life the family had. I see the fruit orchard they planted and think of the work watering it from the nearby creek, picking the fruit, making pies and jams, and enjoying them. I think about the work rounding up their cattle for branding, slaughtering one or two for food, driving the rest a hundred or more miles to sell them. I admire the way they tried to care for each other and strangers passing through. For example, one of the sons that inherited the place from his father eventually built a 6 foot tall cairn on top of a ridge some 1,000 yards away from the house just so people on the other side that might be lost or trying to find Wickahoney would see it, recognize it’s not natural, and hopefully know that it’s a cairn with perhaps food and water that they might desperately need. From the cairn a person could see Wickahoney and find their way to safety. The idea that people then would do something like that just because it might maybe help someone…I admire that since it would be a lot of work and they had a lot to do just to keep that place going. I also wonder if perhaps he was creating a landmark in a place of no landmarks for his own family so they could more easily find their way, too. I try to imagine Indians, cowboys, city slickers passing through and how eager the people living there might be for news. I imagine them coming out to greet the stagecoach or approaching riders. I think about how the people died of things that could so easily be treated now and try to imagine what it must have been like for the mother there when she lost her son to a bleeding ulcer on a cattle drive to Elko and then a few months later the husband hung himself because he couldn’t get a loan to buy hay for his cattle at the start of a hard winter, and how that drove her to take rat poison herself because she had nothing else to live for. I think about the agony of losing a baby during childbirth there because the nearest doctor was 100 miles away and the nearest other mother easily 15 or more miles away. I think about the family sitting around in the evening laughing, talking, relaxing from a hard day’s work. I wonder what the Indians thought when they saw the family building the house there. I wonder what it was like before anyone came through there to settle…did the Indians camp by the stream as they passed through? Did they continue to do so after the Dunning family settled there and began raising cattle?

There’s a lot of history and a lot of unknowns. And a lot of respect from me for everyone that lived out there, whether Indian or white man.

The only remaining trace visible of the graves at Wickahoney.

One of the neat photography things about places like this is that you learn where the best photo shots can be found. Looking at my pictures of Wickahoney, it dawned on me that the best images of the ruins I had were all off-center, almost but not quite directly off the corner. It may be me, but I think those images reveal more of the personality of the old building than the pictures that are taken 90 degrees to a wall. Every time I go on one of these adventures, I learn something new.

While we were there, we found the skeleton of a cow. Picked clean and sun-bleached, it was scattered over an area some 20 feet by 50 feet or so. Finds like that are fascinating to me, not so much for what they represent (a dead cow) as the beauty of the bones themselves, the brilliant white against the brown ground, the symmetry of the bones on the ground, the complexity of the spine and ribs…the visual beauty. The pictures I take of such finds are as they are when I find them. I amuse myself trying to find the best image of the bones to present their artistic properties, but I also do not re-arrange them. That makes it fun as well as teaching me to try and see things from various angles. I also enjoy, sometimes, playing forensic detective and trying to determine how the bones got to where they are. I’ll never truly know, of course, but it’s fun trying to imagine what happened. I do understand not eveyone sees bones in the wild that way, and I respect their various perspectives.

Two cow femurs with my hat for scale. The picture doesn’t do justice to how starkly white they were under the overhead sun.

We were sitting there thinking of getting ready to head back when we noticed a herd of wild horses making their way down the steep hillside behind the trees. There were several colts from this year and a surprising number of white horses. Naturally we both grabbed our cameras and started taking pictures.

It amazes some people how many herds of wild horses roam Owyhee County.

Eventually they disappeared behind the trees and we wondered if they were going to make their way down the creek near us. They didn’t. Instead, after a whle they made their way back into view heading up to where they came from. Later on, re-examining the maps and online images I discovered that behind the trees where the herd had gone is a small reservoir, so they had no need to come to the creek proper, just to the spring. The next time I go out there I’m going to have to check that out.

By then it was getting on towards late afternoon so we packed up and headed back.

Already, I have images in mind that I want to create, some landscape astrophotography using the ruins as the foreground object. Due to the location, this won’t be an instance where I head out in the late afternoon and back in the early morning hours. The road is easy enough to travel, and you do have to be careful in some spots, but the long 2.5 hour drive isn’t one I want to make while short on sleep. Any kind of accident or poor driving, for example, could be not only dangerous but also lethal. This will be an overnighter, going out one arfternoon and coming back the next day. It is also a chance to automate the entire night, a chance to try for my first Milky Way time lapse, a chance to experiment with astrophotography landscapes, and above all, a chance to learn.

And a chance to live high on my friend’s Dutch Oven cooking.

Spring Fever

Once again, I have Spring Fever. That’s my excuse for the lack of a blog post last week. With the improving weather I can’t wait to get out and about.

 This weekend was wonderful weather to be out in and I enjoyed the little time I had outside. Sunday I dove into some planning for the year and that got me so wound up that I eventually had to quit.

 It started out simple enough: June 21, 2014. Also known as Summer Solstice.

 I was not able to get out to Swan Falls to photograph the Winter Solstice as originally planned. Even if I had been able to, the overcast skies of last December wouldn’t have let me photograph anything. See this blog post  and you’ll see how I planned to go to Swan Falls to capture the Winter Solstice sunrise. Failing that, I kept thinking about the upcoming Summer Solstice. So, last weekend I sat down and worked it out.

 Earlier I had been looking at Haines, Oregon, in Google Earth and FlashEarth to see if I wanted to do any location photography there in July. From there I moseyed about, looking at pictures people had posted in various areas I wanted to visit. One picture in particular caught my eye, though at the time I didn’t think of the potential for the Summer Solstice.

 Eventually I decided to check on the Summer Solstice possibilities I had in mind, so I fired up The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) and started checking out sites.

 Swan Falls is out, the angles are wrong for what I want. That makes sense, since the Solistices are at opposing ends of the sun’s analemma. If it were the Equinoxes, then both should be possible from the same site the same way. I could use my regular astrophotography site, Sands Basin Overlook, but that is so…mundane. Although if I could set up to capture the sunrise breaking through the solitary tree in that direction, it might be interesting.

 I started thinking of other places that might work. Leslie Gulch? What about up above Blue Lake?

 Then into mind popped that one picture posted as being from down in the canyon at Three Forks. I hadn’t noticed the direction, there wasn’t anything, no shadows or the like, to leverage to tell in which direction the camera was aimed, but I wondered if I could replicate it in the desired direction anyway? The photo was looking down the canyon, in the distance was a curve of one of the rivers. There, the canyon walls came together, as they will when one passes behind the other as the canyon curves. But according to the picture, there was a noticable v-shaped notch where they didn’t quite meet up properly. I wondered…could I?

 I pointed TPE to Three Forks. A little working of the various lines and position markers…it looks possible! I tried a couple other places, but it looks like I’m going to be scouting out the Three Forks site in the April-May time frame. The data is in my field notebook and I’ll report on that when it happens. I’ve already got feelers out to see who might want to go with me then.

 Since I was looking up places to go I decided to send an email to a friend about a place I’d mentioned when we had lunch last week. I couldn’t remember the name of the place then, or now, so I went searching in some of my books. In one book on Owyhee post offices I found it: an old stage stop, post office, and family residence known as Wickahoney. With the name found, I fired up my topographic maps so I could send him the co-ordinates.

 With the maps still up, I decided to see how to get there. Ah! It’s just a little ways off from the highway to Grasmere on a nice dirt road! Easy enough to get to, with a gravel pit by the highway to indicate if I’d gone too far.

 But…

 Where does this road go as it proceeds past the remains of Wickahoney?

 Naturally I started following the road to see if maybe it’d link up with another main road, letting me drive a loop instead of in and back out the same way. As I followed the road past one of several branches I saw a little way up one branch a little square mark for a building and the word “Ruins”. Whoa! I gotta go there and see what’s there! Ok, making note of that and the co-ordinates. Now to continue on….

What’s this? “White Ruins”? An old farmstead or…? Oh, boy! More stuff to check out!

 Further along that road is a notation ‘Petroglyphs’! Oh, man! I defintiely got to do this some weekend! But for now, I absolutely must shut down the map program, this is driving me insane, seeing all these items to go see and photograph and discover. And not being able to go right now.

 Idaho weather, hurry up and stabilize, will ya! Idaho’s calling and my camera and me want to go exploring the back country!