MUP Tour: Bicycling in Michigan's Upper Peninnsula

On my recent bike trip “up north” in the “UP” (this is “Michigan Speak” which translates to: up north in lower Michigan, around or above the 45th parallel or so but below the Strait’s of Mackinac; and UP is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan across the Strait’s of Mackinaw that divides Lake Michigan from Lake Huron. I am sorry for the geography lesson but almost no one in the US outside Michigan knows what the state looks like or even knows where it is located exactly. Michiganders [the official term for a person living in Michigan: Michigander, while the term for people living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is Uper pronounced /U per/] seem to think they are the center of the universe because cars are/were made here and everyone loves cars so much that people pours over maps of this desired location for life as “The Beaver”, Wally, Ward and June lived it in the 50’s and everyone longs to move here. Michiganders assume knowledge of their state that no one seems to have. This idea of life as the Cleavers of course is not true since there is a flood of people leaving here in caravans of anxious unemployed and under employed people who are abandoning their homes and just fleeing. Most people outside Michigan couldn’t even locate the great lakes that surround Michigan on a map let alone know that Michigan is a state divided in two parts)… Trip stopper… That was convoluted as hell.

Anyway… I took some notes on my thoughts about the UP trip, the countryside, the people and things of general and random nature. I will try to accurately and faithfully transcribe these notes and briefly annotate them as needed to be understandable to the non-Michigander. The bicycle ride was the MUP Tour or Michigan Upper Peninsula Tour. This was the ninth tour and maybe the fourth on the route they used for my ride. I don’t know why the two lakes, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, are not just one really long lake that surrounds the lower state of Michigan on three sides, but the five mile wide strait at the top of the state is the dividing point and the defining end/beginning of both lakes. The UP should be part of Wisconsin (or Canada) by all rights since it is contiguous with that state/country, but back in the day when Michigan was going to go to war with Ohio over who owned Toledo, the US government stepped in and said it is better to go to war over the Ohio State/University of Michigan annual football game not some stupid city. To prevent immediate bloodshed the US gave the UP, land across the Straits, to Michigan and Ohio had to take Toledo.

Initially both states lost because Ohio got a port on Lake Erie but an armpit of a city, Toledo. Michigan got the frozen north country of the UP where winter goes into June and the biggest business was selling alcohol to the scant unemployed alcoholic population that are not native American. The Native Americans are also still in the UP and except for the occasional casino worker are also unemployed and alcoholic (not to stereotype too much). Eventually someone spotted the huge thousand pound nuggets of pure copper they had been tripping over right on the surface of the land. Copper in abundance was on or just below the surface in the UP and there for the taking. It took about 40 years before all the copper was mined out and the people went back to their alcohol fueled hockey playing child abusing wife beating trailer living pasty eating way of life. (Not that I have anything against that life style, why some of my best friends…). Maybe it is not quite that bad, but sometimes it does seem to be a bit depressing up there if you had to live in the UP for more than a vacation. I don’t know what people do to turn a buck in the upper peninsula besides tourism, sport fishing in the summer month and snowmobiling in the 11 months of winter (I think you need a snowmobile to get up to the upper peninsula so I don’t know how that “sport” works. I saw more stop signs in the woods and weeds for the snowmobiles than on the regular roads). I guess social services would also be a major employer in the UP since there are so many unemployed, under employed, partially employed, and leeching-on-relative types, that all need to be taken care of by someone in a position of handing out the dole or cleaning up the mess. Ohio still has Toledo, enough said about the trade.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the right wing, radical republican, red-necked, tea party, militia-member, uneducated, narrow-minded ignorant types that populate the UP. Why some of my best friends… They have every right to narrow their minds down to a pin point of Glen Beck rant and Boss Limburger distortions as long as they are way up there. Gun racks in the pickup truck windows; baseball caps with arm forces, oil companies, and fishing logos; American Flags on every surface especially on the sides of the rusty single wide trailer they inhabit for the most part is what is seen of the human habitation. (Old trailers do not die: they are towed “up north” to the UP, dumped in the woods and become new UP subdivisions.) The Upers appreciate my dollars I leave as a tourist. They are polite and accommodating for the most part and for all but three pickup trucks in a week, they did not deliberately try to kill or injure me as I rode my bicycle on their roads. While the only stations on the TV up there are the shopping channel, TBS and Fox NoNews, they do not force me to look at the screens in the restaurants and bars although the TVs are on constantly in both establishments. The landscape is very beautiful at least in the summer month when I have seen it. The food is good, a bit fatty, a bit carbohydrate rich, but served in massive portions. A piece of “home” baked pie fits on a dinner platter, not that I tried more than four or five pieces in different restaurants. (How can it be “home” baked if it is made in the restaurant? The cook sleeps on the floor in the back.)

Sunday was registration day for the ride. There were several local informal rides out of St. Ignace after checking in if one was so inspired after having driven 500 miles from down state. The Sunday deluge of rain that went on basically all day drove many or most of the cyclists off their bikes and into the hockey arena that served as our home base the first and last day. I was able to set up my camp nicely in the hockey stands next to a garbage can that was set on an alcove of a size the length and width of my sleeping bag. No wet tent for me in the morning. With about 125 “old guys” sleeping in free standing tents or on sleeping mats on the floor of the arena (no there was no ice), the night time provided a cacophony of snoring, snorting, and farting with about a 75 decibel, two octave range reverberating off the walls and ceiling of the otherwise quiet hockey building. Until I finally put in my ear plugs I thought I was at the world cup soccer match in South Africa with the fans all blowing their vuvuzelas. The only problem this ride had with the “quiet hour” that begun at 10:00pm was that the snoring was reaching a crescendo about that time since most of the people had been asleep for about an hour or more.

Quiet time extends until 6:30am and we were admonished to not be zipping and unzipping tents and bags and waking up other people before that time. At 6:00am the first morning in the hockey arena someone’s phone alarm began to ring and ring and ring until almost 6:20 when someone went over woke the old guy and had him put his hearing aide back in his ear. I could hear the alarm through the ear plugs I had in and was fully awake and mostly packed up by the time the alarm quit. The poor guy had turned his phone alarm to high so he would be sure to hear it, but alas without the hearing aide he did not wake up because he could not hear it. I took note of his tent and resolved to move the location of my tent if I found myself near him again (even if I was on the same side of the schools we camped in).

At the first meeting I found out the mascot for the trip was Myles the moose. The moose rode a bicycle and actually had several moose friends riding with him. Since my name is Miles and people did not differentiate between me and the moose (I am the one with an “i” in my name) I was well known on the trip. Everyone has their name and town they come from on the back of their bike emblazoned in black marker on a big read fanny flag. That way as you rode along and approached people you could say, “On your left Louis,” “Good morning Bob,” “Great riding today Anne,” “Are you drunk Larry?” “Can you ride any slower Mary?” “How long have you been lost Hal?”… The signs on the back make this a personal ride and it was easy to get to know a few names and not have to identify individuals without calling them “Panasonic”, “Huffy”, “Recumbent” or “sports shirt”, “poka dot jersey”, “the guy who wears high-top Keds”… I liked that my name was the mascot because people seemed to feel like they knew me even if they didn’t differentiate me from the moose.

Breakfast on the trip was to be served 7-8am and almost everyone was ready and lined up politely by 7am. I ate with Hal and his wife who were young, 25 or so and teachers from Florida who were trying to move back to Michigan where they grew up, but they couldn’t find a job. Hal rode a fixed gear track bike and did very well on the ride which gives an idea of the degree of difficulty of the overall tour. By 8:15 the tents were all down from inside and outside the hockey arena, the truck that carries the equipment was almost loaded, and most of the cyclists were on the road. How did they move so fast in packing up? Off I rode to the thriving metropolis of De Tour (“the turn” which is the last turn in the St. Mary’s River that connects Lake Superior with Lake Huron). Riding was easy, fast and beautiful along Lake Huron and up to the St. Mary River that connects Lake Huron and Lake Superior.

As I rode along on the cool cloudy morning, I thought about the GPS in the car that I used to get to the start of the ride from my house down state. Maybe not having looked at the map or not having a map with me and not really knowing where the tour was going was part of my thinking along this line. With the GPS no matter what has or is happening the voice is patient and accepting: “In point one mile turn left, then left,” “Turn left now.” “Recalculating”. Why can’t people be that accepting and patient as the mechanical lady in the box? She never chastises me for missing a turn. She never accuses me of “getting us lost”. She doesn’t complain about having to now read the map in a moving car to find our way back. She doesn’t bring up that we should have stopped back there to ask for directions or listened better to the direction that we did get. She doesn’t make biting observations that we should have turned right back there and not left. She doesn’t give the invective “The other left stupid! The other left!” The voice is always positive about reaching our destination from where ever we are and doesn’t throw in things like, “Yea will get there about the time our grandchildren graduate from college!” The machine always reminds me well in advance of an upcoming turn, how far and which direction to turn. She never chastises, “Slow down we’re turning!”; “You’re in the wrong lane!”; “Turn here!” The little lady in the box never screams, “Turn here, turn here!, right here!” scaring the crap out of me and causing me to swerve off the road thinking a small child has just run in front of the car. Yes the GPS lady is a great driving companion and one that should be imitated by others especially others who ride in the car with me. Not that I have a problem with anyone who co-pilots with me. I’m just saying….

Be cautious of eating any food named after the nipple coverings of the 1930’s strippers who could not appear topless for certain obscenity rules or social norms. There are ads for this food at every restaurant, motel, and convenience store in the UP along with the local favorites smoked fish, beef jerky and fudge. “Pasties”. What are they? Seems like carbohydrates packed inside carbohydrates, baked in an oven and eaten with ketchup or gravy. Potatoes, rutabaga, onions, carrots, ground meat inside a circular pastry shell that is folded in half and baked in an oven. Sort of a hand held vegetable/meat pie which is light on the meat and heavy on the potato and rutabaga. I guess originally the16th century Cornish tin miners could not come to the surface to eat lunch. Their food they carried down in the mine got all covered with dirt, toxic arsenic dust and general filth since they did not have glad bags, saran wrap, brown paper bags or Scooby Doo lunch boxes to sequester their food. The miners could hold the pasty in one hand and eat the stuff inside without consuming the filth that accumulated on the crust. The pastry shell was discarded to appease the “knockers” or spirits of the mine. It seems the pasties have their origins with knockers one way or the other.

I got to eat some “homemade” pasties near the end of the trip. I discovered that “pasties” is pronounced with a short “a” so it rhymes with “nasty” not “tasty” not that it is nasty and not tasty. The pasty I ate may have been the only pasty that was not voted “The Best Pasties of the UP” as all others seemed to be advertized, but these belly bombers were actually tasty. Unlike the tin miners of Cornwall everyone ate the whole pasty, crust and all. There was nothing left for the knockers. Some sauce may have dripped down to the knockers especially if the “pie” was eaten by hand so knockers were still in play here. We were given the option of gravy or ketchup on our pasty. Having never eaten one of these I chose the gravy, but some of the regular consumer of pasties claimed that ketchup was the only way to really enjoy this UP delicacy. I guess ketchup is more portable and is easier to get out of clothing when it falls on your knockers, I mean front of your shirt. The pasties were about the size of a large dinner plate folded in half and weighed in at about two pounds each. Not bad for a person who has ridden 70 or 80 miles that day. I can see that much of a UP pasty would remain behind me if not for the exercise. In fact I could readily detect the regular UPers who regularly consumed pasties from a glance behind them.

At most food serving places (restaurants, party stores, antique shops, art stores, bait shops…)in the UP I saw deep fried potatoes, deep fried onions, deep fried mushrooms, deep fried broccoli, deep fried asparagus, deep fried burgers, deep fried steaks, deep fried fish, deep fried foul… Basically if it is good and good for you: Fry it! Turn that goodness into heart clogging plaque. Maybe the native cuisine is designed to either clog up the digestive track or to lubricate it so tourists are forced to purchase more expensive services such as Ex-lax, Kaopectate, a stomach pumping or a butt plug depending on the nature and severity of the affliction. There were desert options such as pies served hot with ice cream or whipped cream in huge slabs. And of course the ever present fudge which is pretty much chocolate flavored fried sugar as best I could sort out.

I am confused about the Native Americans/Indian/Injuns of the UP. According to the signs, posters, statues, and advertizing, they all build Tee Pees, wore feathers and buckskins, were bear chested and shot arrows with bows. I am thinking that a shirtless savage in a buckskin loin cloth is going to freeze his fried nuggets off about November. The only thing he will be hunting by January is the opening to his Tee Pee after 20 feet of snow has fallen. Perhaps the natives that do live up here in great numbers still have some opinion on the way they are portrayed but they aren’t letting any of it out.

By the end of riding on the second day I can report that there are about 10 to 1 pickups to other vehicles on the UP roads. Often the “other vehicle” is a gravel truck or a tourist in a big RV. People I asked about this phenomenon say that the pickup is needed for the rough winter. Fine, then why are there so few pickup truck, and so many regular cars just across the border further north in Canada? The UP pickup trucks are not generally old beat up rusty hulks, although there are a number of those rattling beasts. The trucks are often the big honkin’ shinny, four wheel drive or duel wheeled brand new vehicles costing more than my house down state. How can these people afford so many new pickup trucks with unemployment even when the economy is great never less than 25%? The only businesses seem to be souvenir shops, gift shops, restaurants, “antique shops” and “art stores”. Occasionally there are vehicle/truck repair places that seem to be what “Joe” does when he puts down his beer, drags his fat ass off the couch and decides to do something outside in the garage, like drink beer outside and fix a car/truck so he can buy another case of beer. Where do the funds for the new truck come from? Seems a lot of people are living in a single wide trailer that is deteriorating around them and except for the satellite dish and the new pickup truck out front a person might assume the place has been abandoned by people and taken over by vermin.

Every restaurant has “fish fry”. Even the pie shops and fudge stores seem to indulge in the weekly fish fry. The community centers all have a Friday fish fry, so does the fire department, the Elks, Moose, and Veterans organization although they might be fish fry Saturday,Thursday, Wednesday, or Tuesday. I guess Sunday and Monday are a day of rest for the hot grease. Don’t these people every poach, bake, broil, sauté, or BBQ the aquarian flesh? Fry it! Get some grease and fry it. Don’t matter what it is, just heat the grease and fry it.

There are lots of “Fish” restaurants in the UP, but there is no sign of a fishing industry up here beyond the sports fishing industry that is also keeping a low profile except for the occasional hand painted sign announcing “sports fishing guides”. The guide, for a fee, points at the lake and says, “Their out there.” Where does the fish for all these restaurants come from? My guess is that it is all flown in from Japanese fish farms. After all the restaurants proudly proclaim “White Fish”. Salmon and tuna are sort of pinkish, but most of the fish I have seen is all white. Is the “White Fish” like the “Ocean Bass” of Costa Rica? Any fish caught in the ocean is called Ocean Bass down there no matter what it is shark, shrimp or halibut. I had some breaded fried white fish up here on this trip. Why bread the fish if the skin is left on? I don’t like fish skin so much and almost gagged when I bit into the nasty breaded fried fish skin. Many in the group said this was pretty good white fish, but I could not tell the difference between this stuff and Long John Silver’s fish & chips except this had skin left on it with scales flaking off on my chin. I asked for tartar sauce and the waitress gave me a bottle of Best Foods Mayonnaise and a little bowl of sweet pickle relish. I am not sure that lemons have made it up that far north and after the tartar sauce I was afraid to ask.

One of the riders, a woman, was walking into the high school bathroom with an electric curling iron. What the fuck?! Who is this woman trying to impress? It’s a bike trip for god’s sake! People are walking around with hat hair from wearing helmets all day, dressed in lycra even if lycra is not the best fabric for their figure, they have grease on their legs, and they pretty much stink of a day’s worth of sweat. I am sure the curling iron will do the trick and raise the social status of the woman to something more respectful. Have to impress the high school volley ball team who is serving tonight’s dinner.

Sault Ste. Marie. What is with that name? First “Sault” has nothing phonetically to do with the pronunciation /sue/ that is said by everyone. When I asked people about it they generally looked puzzled like they had never thought of it and then they say, “Oh that’s a French word.” No it isn’t how that is pronounced in French. Even if it was how it pronounced in French, there are exactly zero French people in Sault Ste. Marie so why the strange collection of letters to come up with /sue/? Then there is the Ste. How can that be “Saint”? There isn’t even an “e” in the word saint! I guess if I ever misspell something I can claim that it is just “French” and get away with it.

The bridge between Sault Ste. Marie and Sault Ste. Marie (American and Canadian cities respectfully or is it Canadian and American cities respectfully?) is a strange looking thing. From the American side there is a run up or “ramp” about three quarters of a mile long steeply leading up to an arch over the main channel. The road/bridge then sways down to a low point and curves back up over about ¾ of a mile to an identical arch over the Canadian channel. The road/bridge finally has a ramp that curves down to the bank and the Canadian customs. The bridge looks like it is sinking into the middle of the river. Fix it! I rode both ways over the bridge on this two lane bridge for a buck and a half each ways making it some of the hilliest and most expensive riding of the trip.

In the town of Paradise the group stayed at the Paradise School: Home of the Rockets. This was THE school, K-12 with a student body of 52 students. Exactly how many “Rockets” could the school muster for any one sport? Hard to field a football team or any team with only 52 K-12 students total unless you do a co-ed thing and fudge the age requirement. Use the little first and second graders as field fader to kick the opposing team in the legs or trip over. Of the two graduating seniors both were going on to college making it a school with a 100% graduate to college bound ratio. Outside the school building where tents were set up there was a sand box surrounded by a foot and a half wall of wood. The sand box was about the size of a small hockey rink. One of the cyclist speculated that this was filled with water and used as a hockey rink in the winter. A little girl who attended the school and was on the swings as she waited for her sister who were helping serve the meal for the group. She told me the sand box had only been filled once with water. That year the ice NEVER melted all year and the school lost a valuable place to play since the ice was so crummy. Now they fill it with sand so it drains and the kids play sand hockey in the box all year. This honest little girl also ratted out the whole community. I mentioned that this was a beautiful place, the school, the town and the whole community. The little girls then said it always look like this when visitors come. She said, “Just wait until tomorrow when we leave.” Someone had gone around to the residents and had them move their garbage to the back yard and mow their grass at least in front. A group came to the school, mowed the lawn, raked the trash out of the front, swept the floor, and stashed all the “junk” from the halls into a room in the back. I asked about living in Paradise and this girls said it was nice, but this was a place where their summers were often winter too.

Ruth was one of the riders on the trip. She is about 75+ with the mental acuity of a 95 year old. She carried a box she made out of plastic corrugated sheets and duct tape. Inside Ruth kept all of her important stuff, like two rolls of duct tape, a screw driver, a sewing kit, a hammer, a ten pound chain, and assorted nuts and bolts plus a bunch of other things either too small or too broken up from the ten pound chain to be accurately identified. I helped Ruth put up her tent, on the last day. She hadn’t really figured out how it went up but was very proud of the tent once it was up. Ruth rode a recumbent giving recumbent a bad name because she not only was slow as a snail but SAGged in five of the seven days of riding (and one of those two days was a rest day). One day she got out of camp so late she sagged from campsite to campsite and was still struggling with her tent when the last riders got there. Ruth was great to talk to because she had a bunch of great stories about and camping all over the U.S, bicycle touring in Europe (with the Kaiser), the crusades, slaying giant mammoths near the ice cliffs of the glaciers ...

The last day of the ride nothing happened except for a 12% up hill. I guess someone got hit by a car or truck but the EMT’s were all over that. We rode on a stretch of road that had just been finished being paved the evening before and was opened just for us. (That new stretch made up for the 20 miles of road that had been ripped up to be repaved on the second day and was a brain beater to ride on.) I would recommend this trip to anyone wanting a “beginning” type bicycle tour since the pace is not savage, the distances are doable, the organization is great, and the number of people is low (154). A good time had by all.

Home Repairs: The Cat Door

No problem, just deal with the cat for the three week vacation. A sliding glass patio cat door panel, that’s the answer. After about two hours online I found out everything about cat door including the door that would work for me at about $200. Just install it in the patio sliding glass door frame close the existing door against to lock the two together. No muss, no fuss, no big learning curve. The cat can come in and out through the small door in the bottom of the cat door panel when a properly installed. “Very easy to install,” or so the advertisement states. “Only a screw driver needed for installation”. The sliding glass patio door will still open and close, dragging the cat door panel with it in the track. I can do that. I know which end of a screwdriver to use.

Trip stops… No one in the area has the sliding glass patio cat door panel in stock. Lowes, with their “30 minute online order preparation guarantee” (“order online and pick up everything in 30 minutes”) has to call and order the panel through their “one day stocking” guarantee service. The guy on the phone assures me that they can have it in the store in five days, one day after calling the “stocking” department. I can pick it up 30 minutes later and it will only cost $456 unless I want it delivered with their “free delivery” which will cost $45 because the cost of my item is under $500. A week or ten days at the most and I can have it at my house with some assembly required. Home Depot has about the same options but were rude on the phone and will not deliver it ever even if I buy the $650 double pane best of show most expensive cat door ever. That’s about how much the sliding glass door itself cost.

Online the sliding glass patio cat door panel place will ship the panel for $45. Now the $45 pays for two day delivery. That is not bad so after considering the options of available doors from $200 to $650. I chose one door in the mid-range and then filled out the purchase form. When the delivery info came up there was a map that showed Michigan is in the 5 day delivery time. So why do I pay the $45 for two day delivery? I called and the guy at the online store and he told me that they would deliver it within 2 days after they get the order which would take at least 5 days. That means that in 7 to 10 days I could expect the thing to arrive with some assembly required.

Then there is the training period the online cat panel door person told me about when I talked to him on the phone. Training the cat can be done in as little as a week, but could take as long as a month. Some animal become traumatized and never really take to the door. I was thinking that after installation the animal would just figure it out. How hard could it be? I only have three days until I leave. Should have considered this last week, or last month.

New plan. Put a regular cat door in the door that provides access to the garage from outside and then just leave the food in the garage. (I thought about just throwing a 15lb bag of food on the floor in the middle of the garage and cutting it open to let the animal feed as it wanted, but I found a self filling bowl that is essentially a plastic version of what I proposed but cost $11.) After calling the pet stores in the area it seemed clear that they all had the thing I needed and had many versions and prices ranges to choose from. The installation seemed simple and required only a screw driver and a saw: “Anyone can do it.”

It took 30 minutes to drive to the pet store through the construction and Saturday traffic. Inside the store there was special event: adoption day for random animals, dogs mostly. The store was full of cages, crates, dogs on leashes, dogs tethered to shelves and dogs running amok. The dogs were barking, whining and fighting in the back of the store. I think there were people taking bets back there on the vicious fights breaking out among the adoption animals. At least from the din of barking and people shouting it sounded that way. After looking through the selection of available cat doors that had been severely picked over by previous cat door buyers, I got some of the “expert” help from one of the 16 year old professional pet associates and choose a door. I exited the isles and migrated to the one checkout stand behind a line of people holding animal food, toys, weasels, rats, cats and dogs, all squirming, wriggling and fighting trying to interact in a natural way with all things near them or escape the din of the store. Only one counter open, why do they have five checkout counters in the store? Why do they put the new person at the checkout? By the time I reached home I had invested about an hour and a half in the cat door project and that doesn’t include the two hours of research and frustrated online shopping.

Once home I looked over the project and the box clearly stated the cat door was for an inside door. My garage door of course is an outside door. I am sure that that information was printed on the front of the box after I left the store because I am sure I read everything on the box before selecting a winner. The cat door I bought would never do in the garage. Back to the store through the traffic and into the phalanx of barking, yapping, crying pets in the store to select a more appropriate product. Add another $45 to the cost of the pet door because the outside door cost more. Now I am up to $70 and by the time I got home I had three hours of driving and buying and two hours of research and no way for the cat to get into the garage yet.

The directions for installation were simple, only a screw driver and a saw required, oh, and a drill and a pry bar to get the door off the hinges, a hammer, a ruler, pencil, scissors and the template cut from the directions... It took me an hour to gather the tools required with the scissors taking the most time to find. After removing the whole garage door from the hinges and laying it down on two chairs, I drilled the pilot holes for the saw. Two problems: the access door is metal front and back and the 1/2” hole is too small for the hand saw I bought and assembled myself, and the saw I bought cannot cut the metal. Back to the store to find a saw that would cut the metal door. Now I have about seven hours of work putting the pet door in the garage door and all I have is the door in the garage lying on two chairs (it won’t go back on the hinges that seem to have been bent when I took it off) and four holes drilled through the metal door. Skit, the cat, can’t get through a 3/8” hole, but it might be able to peek through and see its food. Of course the cat won’t have a problem getting through the doorway because the door is on the chairs and won’t go back on the hinges which are now bent.

This sucks! A whole day spent testifying to my sheer incompetence at home repairs. I can’t drill the holes bigger to fit the new saw blade because my drill has the biggest bit I own and the biggest bit that will fit in the chuck. And speaking of chucks, I lost the chuck tool for the drill and had to mickey mouse the installation and removal of the bits using a 4mm Allen key and a large pair of pliars. I can’t cut the door because I don’t own a blade that will cut the metal of the door or is even small enough to fit in the ½ inch hole. I only have a few primitive hand tools and my ax doesn’t seem to be the right tool for the job although I am close to using it. I was able to prop the door into the doorway and hold it in place using two garbage cans and a two by four. The cat can peek at its food through the holes in the door but can’t get in.

New day and time for a new approach to the problem of the cat door. I borrowed the tool I needed from my father-in-law: Black and Decker jig saw. Now this saw was made sometime in the 50’s so it is a bit on the used side with a cracked power cord and two blades for cutting metal. Of course the blades are about and eighth inch too short to go all the way through the door and cut both sides at once. The first blade lasted about half the way through the short side of the inside face of the door. The next blade did all the other cuts on the inside part of the door. The second side, the outside, had only holes in the corners. The cut I made on the inside face was not entirely perpendicular to the surface of the door, nor were the holes entirely perpendicular, so the cut on the other side was going to be tricky. In fact it was too tricky for me. The second and last blade broke about halfway through the opening on the outside face. I mickey moused the first broken blade into the saw and finished the cut. Naturally the cut rectangular opening on the inside did not quite line up with the rectangular cut on the outside face of the door. I hate it when that happens. Not only that, but the cut rectangular opening was too small for the frame of the cat door on either face.

It took another half an hour and mickey mousing the other broken blade into the saw to get the rectangular openings (actually quadrilateral openings since there were no real parallel sides) to kind of line up and kind of fit the frame of the cat door. Now the holes needed to be drilled for the screws/bolts that connect the outside and inside of the cat door. Without the chuck for the drill I took a 4mm allen key and a pair of pliers to extract the half inch bit that was actually too small for the project but almost too big for the drill. Looking in the work shop I found the box the drill bits had lived in at some point. I found an 1/8 inch bit and a 1/4th bit. I needed a 3/8 inch bit. The 1/4th was the best I could put in the drill being the closest to 3/8th. Next problem… The bit was for wood not metal so they did not really want to penetrate the metal. Given enough time and pressure the four holes were drilled, not perpendicular to the surface but through both sides of the door.

Now I had to ream out the hole as best I could to get the 3/8th hardware to fit in the 1/4th hole. I got six of the eight holes pretty much reamed out to fit and the other two were close, but the bit was finished. The holes were not quite lined up but they went “straight” through, so they did line up each in a different plane. Unfortunately that fine point does not always count for much in the world of home repairs. The two pieces of the frame, inside and outside, were pounded in the rectangular cuts in the door but the hardware and bolts did not make it to mate with each other nicely, or at all. Hammer time!

Idiot! Two of the holes that were not reamed out were on the outside of the door and that was the only place it really mattered. The only four holes that needed to be 3/8th inch were the outside where the female part of the hardware set into the door. Oh, well, muddle on and get a bigger hammer. When the bolt finally met the female part I cranked it down with a worn out Phillips screw driver. Why does the worn out part matter? The screw driver would not give enough force to the bolt before it slipped in the socket. Before the thing was all set, the screw was stripped out. Good enough. Hit it with a hammer and it looked pretty good from outside even if it was loose as a goose. I will caulk it or glue it or something.

I straightened the hinges of the door (remember they were they one of the first casualties of my home repairs) with a hammer and beat the door into place on those twisted hinges. The cat would have nothing to do with the newly installed cat door. The beast yowled for half an hour while I stood outside with the flap held open calling him. He was pissed and finally escaped when I open the door to try to grab him and shove him through opening. After three hour without access to the food bowl, the cat came back for a snack. I scooped up the feral beast and pushed him through the plastic flap in the cat door. Claw marks were left in the metal of the door with his passage. Once the front feet hit the sidewalk outside the animal shot down the driveway, across the street, between houses and disappeared on the next block. Maybe I won’t have to feed him now.

I am left with a thing of beauty in my garage door on the outside. The cat door has an artistic slant making it a rectangle not in line with any other part of the universe. In fact maybe it isn’t even a true rectangle but more of an irregular polygon, a quadrilateral of indistinct description. The gaps at the top left side between the metal of the door’s surface and the cat door frame, should not collect much debris before the snow flies. Caulk it, pack it with newspaper and caulk the space. I will have to paint the door to remove the scratches and paint scrapes from two days of building pains or maybe not. The garage door does not squeak anymore, it groans as effort is put into swinging the door shut. A hammer should be able to straighten out the hinges and tune the noise but I am definitely not in the proper mood for such subtle adjustment. Should have gone with my gut and used an ax to cut the hole, then duct taped the frame in place.

Well, it has been two weeks now and I got a report on the cat. Seems there is no sign of the cat, however there have been raccoons, woodchucks, and possums traipsing in and out of the garage partying hardy. They have dumped over the huge plastic tub of food, scattered it all over the garage and have eaten to the point of vomiting which the ants seem to be taking care of. From the looks of the droppings, the mice have been snacking heavily between parties.

After three weeks away I drove up to the house finding a large woodchuck basking in the sun on the sidewalk near the cat door. Inside the garage the food was gone and the beast has shit in the water bowl. The cat is gone, driven off by competing wild life. There is one animal I will not have to make arrangements to take care of when I leave again.

Winter Hike in the Sierra

The winter hike was the idea of someone in the group, either one of the two Garys or perhaps Peter or Stacy. It wasn’t my idea, I wouldn’t have thought of it. We had all been raised in the valley of California where the winter time temperatures sometimes plummets to below 32 degrees for a few consecutive hours. Yes we had been exposed to sub freezing weather. Once in my life it even snowed at my house and the snow stayed around for almost three days. All five of the intrepid winter hikers had walked to school in freezing temperatures and once I remember it dipped down to 28 so we had all hiked to school in subfreezing weather. Five times in my 14 years of life I had experienced ice on puddles around my house. We were all seasoned cold weather survivors.

As the senior members of the Boy Scout troop we came up with a plan to hike into the Boy Scout summer camp on the far side of Pine Crest Lake in the Sierra of Central California to get things ready for the troop who would hike up the following weekend. We thought that maybe if there was enough snow, we could even “break trail” for the troop so that even the little kids could make it around the lake easily. We could at least hike around the lake and have a roaring good time away from the world and in the snow, if there was any snow.

The paved road ends at Pinecrest Lake in the Sierra Mountains at about 8,000 ft. The lake in the mid 1960’s was partially surrounded by a smattering of summer cabins. These cabins are being removed as the 99 year leases on the National Forest Land expire. In fact the Boy Scout summer camp has now been dismantled and all evidence of it is gone for a couple of decades. Except for the area by the parking lot near the “store” and the bar/restaurant, the whole area was pretty much deserted of humans at this time of year. During the Fall the Pinecrest Lake level is lowered exposing the huge boulders in the bottom, and the stumps of the trees that use to be the forest before the lake was filled sometime in the 1950’s. At this time of year the lake was not only nearly dry, lowered for the winter at the dam, but what was there was frozen over and covered with five feet of snow.

During the summer a “barge” took equipment and supplies across the one point two mile alpine lake to the Boy Scout camp docks directly across from the now nearly deserted parking lot at the end of the road. There would be a plethora of speed boats and fishing boats on the lake and docked around the lake in the summer. All of these boats were gone now leaving the permanent docks running level out to a drop off into the rocky ground hundreds of yards from the frozen surface of what was left of the winter lake. In the warm summer months scouts would heft their back packs and hike the almost two miles along the edge of the lake filled to near the top of the dam and make their way to the campgrounds on a rocky trail that wound among the huge house sized boulders of granite, towering sugar and Jeffery pine trees, past the occasional dock or steps to the dock down by the edge of the summer lake and through the forest surrounding this mountain lake.

A parent, Gary and Stacy’s father I think, had dropped the five of us and our gear at the parking lot about 9am on a Thursday morning. With a total of six people including the driver and all the backpacks we had our excursion, we definately needed a station wagon (mini-vans or even passenger vans were ten years away). Gary’s dad was the only parent who had such a vehicle. There was some sort of a double holiday and a Monday in-service for the teachers so we were clear for a long stay at the camp after our hike in. Gary D. had secured the key to the dining hall and we had instructions of how to turn on the lights and the stove for the dining hall. We had plenty of food in our packs and knew there was wood for the dining hall fire place already split and stacked up there. This was going to be a great trip.

Every year that I could remember my family would trek up to the Sierra once and “go to the snow”. This entailed putting the seven person toboggan on top of the car that my dad had made, throwing on several car tire inner tubes, and a metal saucer or two. My mom would make hot chocolate and put it in a thermos for us to drink after sledding for a few hours. We drove to the point where chains were required and found a hill to sled down. Usually there were hundreds of other people from the valley sledding down the same hill. Now this isn’t your subtle Midwestern little mole hill. I am talking about a full on half mile run down a suicidally steep slope that usually ran out at a flowing stream alongside the highway. Depending on the size of your cajones, each sledder would drag their sliding vector as high up the hill as they dared and then jump on and shoot down the hill. Of course that meant that there were people above you who had larger cajones and so went much faster shooting by you as you walked up or stood getting guts to start your run. There were also weenies below who timidly pushed off on the near flat part of the hill. There was a hill with a hundred people all moving at different velocities on different lines down the hill while an equal number were trudging up the hill with their heads down pulling their sled, tube, toboggan, or saucer behind them. Ambulances made continuous round trips to the hospital in Sonora and back up to the hill transporting people who became victims of cajone size variation or down cast eyes while trudging up the hill. As a kid we would spend a couple of hours trudging up the hill and sliding down, then eat a couple of sandwiches and make a few more runs after lunch. Now this is the Sierra so the temperature was always above freezing during the day, up to 50 degrees sometimes, with a very hot sun shining down making you warm even if the temperature was not very warm. By 3pm most kids were exhausted, freezing cold and soaking wet from sweat and melted snow. The drive back to the valley was spent asleep from exhaustion, wrapped in blankets with the heater on full blast. Sometimes it took two days to warm up. So that was my, and I assume the other four intrepid hikers’ experience with prolonged exposure to the snow. Basically I had learned to look up the hill while walking pulling a sled, say a prayer when a clear line down the hill is found, have a warm dry blanket and a heater available after a few hours in the elements and get out of the snow for a week.

With that base of knowledge off the five of us trucked around the lake, spirits high, not as high as the snow, but laughing and throwing snow at each other none the less. Hiking near the parking lot was a snap. There was a base of snow about two feet deep with another foot or so on top of that which was very crusty and had to be broken through to find footing in the base. Near the parking lot the snow was trampled down by hundreds of kids running and rolling in the snow. Snow men were standing among the trees and sled trails were apparent down to the edge of the now frozen nearly drained lake. Within a half a mile of post holing through the foot or so of crusty snow, we encountered virgin snow that came up to my knee before it compressed enough to support my weight. When the virgin snow was reached each step was real work, pulling a foot out of the knee deep hole with a boot full of snow on top that had fallen in. Swinging my foot clear of the top layer of snow I would then crunch down to knee deep, finding purchase on the harder base snow below. This method of progress took about ten times the energy of just walking. Occasionally the base would break through and my foot would sink down to my crouch which pitched me forward into the snow where I became buried three feet below the surface squirming like a turtle on its back trying to right myself only I was face forward with a backpack pinning me into the frozen substrate. Of course this fall would fill my clothes with snow that melted when it hit the heat and dampness of my inner layers. I had invested in cotton long Johns to keep me warm not realizing that they absorb and retain sweat very well. They also wick heat away from the body when wet. Most of the time my jacket was unzipped because of the heat I generated post holing in the snow. When I fell, which was occasionally, the loose snow would pack inside my shirt and get down to my skin. When a spill happened there was about fifteen minutes of work to take off the back pack, stand while everyone tromp down a platform hard enough to support our weight so I could swing up the back pack. Standing on this tromped platform was the only time the snow was not directly against my pants. After righting a fallen hiker, I was not then only one to fall, we would head off again usually with a new leader.

I wasn’t the only one that was breaking trail into the camp. Each of us took our turn and each of us was challenged by the snow’s depth and the problems that the rocks and boulders would produce. The huge rounded granite rocks and boulders shed some of the snow from their sides so the white frozen bounty built up deeper near these large house sized monoliths than the trail wound around. The rock also holds heat so the snow sometimes melts around the rock making softer snow or deep holes near the rocks. If one was not careful, stepping near a large boulder could send the hiker down into the snow that might be chest deep when they reached the ground or the firm, frozen base beneath. From this hole the group would have to dig a ramp out of the pit to free the fallen hiker. We learned after several problems and avoided any mound of snow that looked like it might be in the snow shed of a giant granite boulder.

Our choice of clothing was not the most well thought out. But maybe it was as well thought out as we could manage; we just did not have the knowledge about cold and snow to make the best decisions. Because we seldom experienced prolonged cold or even prolonged wettness, we did not know much about this new venue. If my clothing got wet at home, I went inside my house and changed clothing. If I got chilled because of the wetness, I took a hot shower or stood on the heater vent inside the house. I think all my clothing on this trip was made of cotton with maybe one wool sweater. I had cotton long johns top and bottom and felt pretty tricked out by those while standing in the parking lot snug and warm. Of course after five minutes of hiking my sweat had soaked my long johns and made them functionally worthless and perhaps even turning them into heat wicks that move my body heat to the layers above and out to the air. The layers above my long johns, blue jeans, a long sleeve cotton shirt and a cotton jacket rapidly became both full of snow and soaking wet from the melting snow. None of us had thought to knock the snow off our bodies before it melted. My cotton socks, two layers, that stuck out the top of my boots and just melted the snow and wicked the water into my boot where it tried to freeze around my toes inside the boots that were always packed in a snow hole. I think I had on a polyester knit cap that did not absorb water but then again it did not retain heat with any efficiency. This was, after all, the early sixties when equipment was not well developed for the common man. And we were valley kids with no experience with the snow or the cold.

I remember my boots. I was proud of them. The guy who sold them to me pointed out the soles and said they were made of very hard vinyl. The soles were guaranteed to last the “life of the boot”. What did that mean? When the soles wore out the boots life was over? These were leather topped boots with woven cotton shoe strings. The soles were so hard they did not give much and so when standing on a rock, log or ice they gave as much traction as ice skates on a frozen pond. The soles never did wear out because they were so hard, somewhere around 9 on the mohs scale, but they nearly killed me many times because they were so slippery. The leather had been treated with Neatsfoot oil water proofing. That stuff was so bad that it only lasted for about ten minutes in the snow and then was all washed out allowing water to soak the leather increasing the already very heavy boot to about double the starting weight. When I pulled out the shoes lace at the dining hall (I don’t know why I did that), the end of the laces had frayed. They would not go back into the eyelets in the boot and it took me about an hour and the awl from my Swiss Army knife to lace my boots.

Normal summer time hike time around the lake with a full pack was about an hour and a half or little more for the whole troop. A group of senior scouts could get around in 45 minutes with full packs. There were reports of a few motivated souls making it to the camp from the parking lot in 30 minutes when all went right and no pack was carried. The winter trek into the camp took us almost six hours getting us there around 3pm. The sun was low in the sky when we spotted the dining hall with about an hour or so until it would be seriously dark. Whipped from the trek we just wanted to lie down and rest for the night. That wasn’t in the cards. We had to run around tuning on the electricity, the gas, find the wood for the fireplace and establishing our camp inside the dining hall before it became really dark (we carried flashlights but they were so sorry that they always had burned out batteries and never seemed to work). By the time dark had full surrounded the dining hall the lights were on, the fire lit and food was cooking on the stove in the kitchen. What an incredible meal we had, nothing ever tasted better and I cannot remember what it was. We had made it around the lake and were set for several days of fun and adventure.

Before going to bed for the night in front of a blazing fire in the fireplace of the dining hall, Peter went outside to answer the call of nature. He yelled for us all to come out. It had started to snow. Although I had seen snow in my life and snow had actually fallen in my town once when I was ten, I had never seen the flakes fall from the sky. When the snow fell in Modesto once, it fell in the dark of the night while everyone slept so I actually didn’t see the snow falling. None of had seen it snow before. This was incredible, huge flakes drifting down in the light from the open doorway. The night was still and quiet outside as this amazing phenomenon of nature happened around us. Well, we all donned our available clothing and ran out into the snowy night to “play” in the new snow. Snow was covering the trees and came off in an avalanche when they were shaken or kicked very hard. New snow filled the holes our feet had pounded on the way in.

The new snow made great snowballs and we threw a lot of them hitting each other, knocking the snow off the limbs of the tall pine trees causing the accumulated snow to slide off. On the roof of the dining hall the warming roof (there is no insulation in the roof or the walls since this was a summer camp) would melt the accumulation and it was coming off is huge avalanches. Later that evening we were exhausted from the hike, the prep of our camp and playing in the snow, so late into the night we retired to the warmth of the dining hall and the fireplace. Now we had two sets of clothing that were soaking wet and hanging on lines in and around the fire place. Down to our tighty-whities we crawled into our sleeping bags for a long winter nap.

Now this is a story from back in the day. I might have heard of a sleeping bag made with goose down, but had never seen one or knew why someone would want one. All of us had good boy scouts cotton sleeping bags. Gary Dull had a cowboy print on the inside of his bag. I never saw the technical data on these sleeping bags, but I assume they were rated down to maybe 68 degrees when they were new and all of these bags were very well used. Since most or all of our clothing was wet and drying there was nothing to help retain our body heat inside the cotton batted bag. We were also sleeping directly on the floor which had no insulation and sucked the heat out of the building and our bags much faster than the fire or the body heat could make new calories of heat. The dining hall was a summer camp so insulation against cold was something that was an option that had no use here. The huge dining hall became about as cold inside as it was outside as the fire burned down a bit. Night time at altitude in the Sierra would dip down to the teens. Someone had to constantly feed the fire through the night, usually the coldest of us. That was one freezing miserable night trying to stay warm, getting up to put wood on the fire, trying to get comfortable and shivering uncontrollably between.

The next morning came early because basically no one slept. One of the Garys built up the fire in the fire place and then went into the kitchen, turned on the burners of the two professional stoves and turned on the four ovens to high and opened their doors. We stood around in our underwear with our jackets on inside our sleeping bags waiting for our clothes to dry in the open oven. On the stove we had a huge pot of instant coco heating before we made our breakfast. After about an hour of baking our clothes in the oven they were dry, a bit singed in places, but warm and dry. With warm clothing on and the kitchen heated to above freezing we fixed our breakfast and ate hungrily replacing all the calories we had burned in the night trying to stay warm. It was time to start the day.

Back at the fire place the blaze we had stoked before going into the kitchen had died down to a controlled inferno and had heated the space in front of the fire place to tolerable temperatures. Unfortunately three of the ten leather boots drying in front of the fireplace had been scorched and burnt making the leather brittle and stiff. The laces in those three boots had also been burn out and were unusable. Bummer. One sleeping bag had the bottom burned exposing the chared cotton batting and the inside lining of cowboys. We fashioned shoe laces from string found in the kitchen braiding it to make it strong. The stiff burnt boots were loosened up with bacon grease rubbed into the scorched leather. The grease also made the boots a bit water proof, something that had been missing before the trip. In fact all of us smeared and massaged bacon grease into our boots to make them water proof. (This proved to be an error when a pair of boots was eaten by a porcupine in the night during a subsequent camping trip and the other boots were pestered and nibbled on by mice until the boots were given to the Salvation Army clothing drive or just dumped in the trash).

Gary C and I were going to hike back a couple of miles to the “Dry Lake Bed” which was a day hike destination for the summer camp program. We were able to get into another of the buildings, the directors cabin, and take down the wooden snow shoes on the wall above the fireplace. There was another pair over the fireplace in the dining hall. These were the long wooden snow shoes, fully four feet long, made with spruce wood and reindeer guts for the netting. There were leather thongs to tie these babies onto your feet. Gary C showed me how to tie them onto my boots and off we trucked to the dry lake bed. This was excellent. The snow shoes kept us on top of the snow and except for learning how to keep from walking on the shoes as we shuffled along, it was pretty easy going sliding along the top of the snow on the trail to “dry lake bed”. We cruised to the “dry lake bed” in just about the same time as it would have taken in the summer. Our steps only sunk down to about the top of the boot so the going was much easier than post holing through the now mid-thigh deep snow. We were even warmer when we got there because our clothing was not soaked from melting snow that was in constant contact with our leg on the hike around the lake.

In the dry lake bed we threw snow balls, followed tracks of animals and had a great time exploring in the snowy ecosystem we knew only in the summer. After a lunch we brought with us we headed back for the dining hall, some two miles away. Immediately upon deciding to return to camp, my pair of snow shoes crumbled into bits. The wooden frames were worm eaten through and through and it was amazing that they lasted as long as they did. Without the snow shoes the snow was up to my mid thigh and there was no way I could make it back to the dining hall before night fall. I joined Gary on his snow shoes and we set a rhythm, “lift left, step, lift right, step, lift left…” as long as I lifted and stepped the same distance as Gary I could ride the back of his snow shoes. We covered the whole dry lake bed before his ornamental snow shoes also fell apart because they were equally worm eaten. Gary didn’t panic and after slapping me around to keep me from freaking out, he said we could just make some snow shoes from the willows that grew all over the lake bed. We gathered switches of willows about as thick as a pencil and four or five feet long. When we had a bunch the willow switches they were bundled loosely and bent around and tied in the back with pieces of the broken ornamental snow shoes moose gut webbing. The willows spread out a bit and allowed for shorter sticks to be woven across the two foot long tear drop shape of bundled willow switches. Then we tied the things to our feet and walked off. While they weren’t as good as the ornamental ones, these sunk in deeper and gathered more snow on top; they allowed us to make very good time on the hike back. We more than made up for the hour or so spent making the snow shoes with the speed we were able to maintain on the trail back to the dining hall. By the time we got back to the dining hall the improvised snow shoes were pretty broken up and we were sinking in deeper and deeper with each step and carrying more and more snow out of the hole, but we made it back to the dining hall well before dark.

Did I mention that it has snowed the night before? There was about 8 inches of new snow on the hand rail in the morning. Well it sort of snowed all day on and off, not heavy but flakes falling all day. In the evening as the temperature dropped it began to snow again very hard, huge flakes falling silently straight down. Again we all went out after dinner and made snow forts, rolled some snow balls the size of Volkswagens, and generally ran amuck. What fun.

In the evening we figured out we needed insulation beneath us to keep from heating the dining hall floor. We actually found some cotton mattresses in the attic of the dining hall over the kitchen. (We also found some gallon cans of pudding and I love pudding). After the morning experiment of using the ovens to dry our clothing, we had perfected the technique of baking our wet clothing without burning them. In a short time before bedding down we had some dry warm clothing to stash into our sleeping bags to put on the next day. The extra dry clothing inside the cotton bags also helped to keep us warm by providing more insulation. Gary C had a great idea of heating up big rocks and put them in our sleeping bag to warm the bags. Gary D., whose bag had been burnt up a bit on at the toe by the fire in the fire place in the morning, had sewed up the end and was the first to throw in a large hot rock. The rock was a bit too hot and started the bag smoldering on the inside. He rolled the rock out onto the floor and it scorched the floor before we moved it to the stone hearth. Eventually we got the temperature right and we all crawled into bags that were heavy with hot rocks but very warm. That night we all got many hours of sleep before the fire went down in the fire place and the stones cooled and water in our canteens started to freeze.

Early the next day we fixed our breakfast and went outside to greet another 8 inches or so of new snow. What fun. We were going to go sledding on the dining room trays. Much of the day was spent sledding down a steep hill into the parade ground and making forts to have snow ball battles. It snow lightly all day.

In the evening we built a sort of shelter in the dining hall to isolate the heat inside a sort of tent we made with blankets, sheets and the dining room tables staked up. The tent inside the dining hall kept the heat very well and became a toasty place to hang out, drink coco, eat pudding, tell stories and eventually sleep soundly and warmly all night. Again it was snowing hard when we went to bed. By the morning of the second day there was another 8 or so inches of new snow on the hand rail when we woke up. All day it continued to snow lightly.

During this third morning we finally noticed that the trail we had broken on our way in to the summer camp was now completely gone, not just the footprints but all evidence of us having walked there. New snow and blowing snow had filled all our foot holes and erased our passing. This seemed to be a problem because the next day we were supposed to hike out. It was still snowing and continued throughout the day. Gary D. suggested we make snow shoes out of dining hall trays. This was a bust. The trays were too wide, sunk into the snow too far and collected tons of snow on top when we tried to walk. Much of the day we tried different things to make some snow shoes. There were no willows or willow like plants here at the dining hall but we experimented with a variety of things. Nothing really worked like the willows. As a step to making the next day a little easier we spent some time breaking a trail to the “trail” around the lake beyond the camp.

The next morning we got up early to see there was another six to eight inches of fresh snow had fallen and filled our broken trail. We packed up, cleaned up the dining hall and ate a huge hot meal. Off we trucked into the snow. Now the snow was up to my stomach. When I broke trail I would dig with my hands, lift my feet as high as I could and kick into the new snow, then step down falling forward crushing a space in front. Then start again by digging down to my knees, stepping and kicking forward and falling forward into the bank of snow. I could do about 50 steps before the next person took over. We rotated breaking trail taking about 20 to 50 steps on a rotation at the front. Now when someone fell down with their backpack the hiker was in over their head before they found a solid perch. Sometime about noon with only about half the distance to the parking lot traversed, I noticed that my boots were untied. I could not bend over to ties them and when I did find a rock or hard place to try to tie them, my fingers were so cold I could not grab the laces. The laces were frozen stiff and didn’t work. My boot was packed with snow which forced the boot open. Fortunately I had put plastic bags on my feet. I had figured out that plastic bags next to my skin, a layer of socks and another layer of plastic bag would keep one pair of socks dry and functional in keeping my feet warm. My feet were cold, but they were dry enough to not be frozen.

The hike was long and hard. We got to the parking lot before dark, but not much before dark. It took us about ten hours to “hike” or dig out. I know I had never been more tired than when we reached the parking lot. All of us were wet from sweat and wet from the snow we had been packed in for the last ten hours. Gary D called his father to come and get us in the station wagon. It was two hours before he arrived and then two more hours before we were home. It took a week to get warm and two weeks to make up for the lack of sleep.

That was one of the best trips of my life. It was maybe a near death experience looking back at the mistakes and looking at it as an adult. So many things could have gone wrong and we were so naïve about the cold. We were naïve about the snow. In fact we were downright ignorant and could easily have been another group of hikers stranded and frozen in the Sierra. Happens every year and happens to hikers much smarter and more prepared than we were. The snow god smiled on us and just made us a little cold. Sometimes I also wonder what were our parents thinking in letting us do such a stupid and dangerous thing? I guess they were as naïve as we were about snow and cold.

Rainforest

If you have ever been to a rain forest, a real tropical rain forest, untouched and undisturbed, you can more easily relate to this piece. For those who haven’t or those who have and want to check my facts look at the picture on my blog to see a typical view. The forest is green, green, green in every shade and texture of green imaginable. Every piece of ground has plants, algae or moss growing on it and every plant has plants growing on them. Almost every plant in a field of view (10 to 30 meters distance in any direction) is a different species. All these green thing take a different forms from tiny sprouting plant to small flowering plant to bush, vine, understory tree, emergent tree, saprophyte, algae, moss, or green insect crawling or flying around. Every plant has a different size and shape leaf, a different stem size, a different shape and texture, a different branching system, various heights, and silhouette. It’s green and leafy in all directions but it is all different. The forest is a living light catching machine with every conceivable kind of organic light trapping organ on display and vying for that uncaught ray of light. Needless to say the forest floor is rather dim, not dark in the daytime, just dim like wearing dark sunglasses on an overcast day and very, very green.

Many plants grow from the ground up like we are use to. Little trees, some decades old sit on the forest floor inches tall waiting for a light gap so they can shoot up and replace the emergent tree that fell in a violent and sudden wind which produced the light gap by crushing all the vegetation in a swath of 20m wide and 120m long. The little trees that don’t get crushed themselves and grow quickly enough will win the race to reach the canopy before the gap fills in. Small forest floor plants that will never rise above the leaves and sticks that surround them, the annuals, perennials, mosses, and algae that gather any filtered light, never seeing the sun directly, growing slowly, content with just having a space to collect nutrients directly from the soil, the rotting leaves, sticks and debris using the low diffuse light found at the floor, take up what available space they can find. Other plant spring up to head high or higher, fan out and snap up stray rays of direct sunlight that come once or twice a day for a few minutes and content themselves with the filtered light for the rest of the day. These bushes, ferns, palms and other undergrowth rip at a persons arms and legs as they try to push through the rainforest off the trail. These small ferns, palms, bushes, and other minor underbrush obscure the tree trunks of the forest giants, and blend into the vines descending from the top of the trees and the lower plants and debris on the forest floor forming an almost solid curtain of green. Understory trees grow up to plug any hole between the canopy trees catching the best of the light that escapes the giants who control the forest sun. These smaller trees grow fast and straight often aided by insect guards that help protect them from vines and predators thus giving them a real edge in rapid growth. The canopy trees, and even taller emergent trees stand with huge trunks attached to the Earth supported by giant buttress that fan out in all directions like the enormous elephant ears, oversized supports, propping up the 130m tree. Vines grow from the top branches of the tall trees hanging down until they find the ground and sometimes link with roots that fuel their growth up and down the tree. Many kinds of vines, lianas, and other plants crawl up the trunk of the large trees covering the green algae covered trunk with strange leaves laying flat or sticking out, the twisted stems clinging tightly to the trunk looking like the green veins in a weight lifter’s arm. Covering any exposed bark green algae or moss takes advantage of the space and chance to steal some nutrients from the space it gets to live on. In the trees a whole other forest of saprophytes, plants that do not grow on the ground, but in the crotches or on the branches of another tree, takes root and accepts the nutrients, water and light this prime location offers. Bromeliads sprout from every crook, crouch, and cranny on the trees.

With all this growing life, there is death too. Plants live and die. Trees blow over in the wind because of shallow roots and despite the huge buttresses that try to support the height that exceeds the limits of support. Trees or parts of trees die because of insects, fungus, or disease. Branches break off trees because of the weight of vines and bromeliads. When huge branches fall they crush the plants below them sending more litter to the forest floor. Leaves fall all year long because there is only one season, grow season. Leaves live out their life cycle, die fall to the forest floor at random times leaving the tree fully green and the floor always with leaf litter. Insects gain an upper hand on some smaller plants and the plants dies, and crumbles to the forest floor, to be replaced by the seedlings waiting on the ground for the light and nutrients given up by the mother plant. Most of the seedlings lose the battle of light collecting and succumb to the lack of light, nutrients, disease, or insect infestation depositing their bodies with the litter on the forest floor to rot releasing their nutrients which are taken up by the winners of the competition for light and life.

This is what the rainforest looks like on first blush before entering and really examining the ecosystem closely. Once into the forest it is clear there are insects of all sizes, shapes, colors, and kinds crawling, slithering, hopping, dangling, or flying on, in, and around every living thing. Ants on the ground, in the leaf litter, on the dead trees and sticks, on the trunks of the live trees, on the leaves of the bushes, on your boot, up your pant leg, scurrying randomly looking for food or marching in lines to and fro retrieving what they have claimed as their food. Caterpillars of all sizes, shapes and colors crawl on the green leaves munching, waiting to turn into one of the many butterflies or moths that are flitting around looking for a flower of the right kind and a member of the opposite sex of the same species. Flies, big black ones that bite, little annoying ones that get behind your glasses, mosquitoes and their kin buzz around the fresh meat entering their kitchen begin to form clouds around you. Crickets, cicada, locus and other insects of unknown species cry out with clicks, riffs, screeches, and shrill chirps hidden from view, but their polyphonic racket fill the soundscape with a philharmonic cacophony. Lilliputian frogs, some brightly colored, some debris colored, camouflaged and indistinct, hop about on the ground, on the bromeliads, on the huge buttresses, on the trunks of the large trees, or on the large leaves chirping, croaking, squeaking, singing, adding to the cacophonous din. Occasionally a small lizard or gecko darts from leaf to leaf or scurries up a trunk of a tree out of reach and sight of some unseen predator. Spiders crawl, dangle and sit in wait on the webs they weave that seem to be everywhere. Predatory wasps from microscopic to the size of a small bird buzz around in search of prey be it animal or vegetable. Birds chirp, twitter, trill, screech and call to each other from all levels of the forest through the understory while they rest hidden from sight or flit about like their world was a giant play ground. Monkeys, squirrels, mice, rats, agouti, anteaters, and other strange mammals in the trees and on the ground make appearances to see what alien has invaded their world. Of course one doesn’t see them often, but snakes lurk about on the forest floor lying next to the fallen logs, curled up in the protection of the buttress, sliding under the leaves and sticks, blending in slithering silently on their way to find a meal.

With this picture of the forest in mind imagine your task is to walk one hundred meters off the trail into the forest, find a pink ribbon tied to a tree and survey a ten square meter plot of forest floor. The first challenge is to walk into the forest, pushing the knee high to head high plants away with the feet, legs, and arms, pulling the vines and hanging branches away from the face with hands when they intrude on your progress. It is not too long before there is either a large tree in the line of travel off the trail to the objective or there is a fallen tree or other impediment to straight line traverse. Going around obstacles changes orientation, moves the line of travel and confuses the direction of travel. Looking back to sight on where the trail was gives little usable data since the forest looks pretty much the same in all directions. With no sun to be seen through many layers of thick foliage from the trees and tall bushes that stand between you and the sun. Often the sun is further obscured by clouds and/or falling rain. Gauging the direction of travel by dead reckoning is difficult to impossible. A compass is needed to keep the direction steady, but the zigs and zags around obstacles mean the line of travel is very much distorted. Fifty meters into the forest is “lost”, every direction the same, no easy way out, nothing recognizable in any direction so just keep following the compass and press on.

What about the snakes lurking on the other sides of the logs, and fallen trees that require crawling over? Better have a stick to poke around before stepping down and pissing off a fer-de-lance or bushmaster and getting bit back here in the bush

And then comes the problem of how to judge 100m into the forest. Pacing off the distance is not possible with all the flips and trips of stepping over and around the forest litter. Looking back to judge the distance is impossible because only about 10m can be seen at any time. Time stands still around 50m off the trail. There is a sense of maybe being lost: check the compass to make sure it works. There is the sense that the creatures of the forest have you in their sights and they are now closing in for the kill. The next 50m is slow and tentative and how is the next 50m measured anyway? Start looking for the pink ribbon on the tree. Right! Wander randomly getting hopelessly lost and confused knowing that if the ribbon is found there is at least a starting point for getting back to the trail is a tense way to spend a couple of hours or so in the forest. At least the snakes on the ground are not foremost in my mind while feeling this lost.

Finally finding the ribbon my heart slows and my breath calms from a pant to a relaxed rhythm. The fear of snakes on the ground comes back to my mind as I more gingerly step around. Eventually I found that the plots I needed to survey, eleven in all, some of them were in a place where there has been a recent tree fall so the vegetation is different. Here in the light gap there are Heliconia, large plants with beautiful large red, and yellow flowers that humming birds love to get a drink from. This is also the home of the eyelash viper that hangs from the vines or the twelve foot high Heliconia themselves waiting for the humming bird to flit by so it can strike it injecting it with deadly poison to stop its violent fight to escape the snake’s grip. Great! More things to worry about: Hanging poisonous vipers ready to bite me in the face. And Bullet ants too, lot of them, an inch or longer insect ready to inject painful poison from a stinger while biting and injecting digestive juices. Oh, Joy!

The fastest I found one of the plots was an hour of searching. One plot I spent four hours out in the weeds before I stopped looking and went back to the trail which took another two hours. I thought I would be stuck in the forest at night. I had to go back to that place and search again for a couple more hours the next day before finding the pink ribbon. Looking for these ribbons was not a cake walk.

At one of the ribbons I gathered my samples and fended off the insects bent on having my blood. When I got the compass out to line up the course back to the trail, I saw that the compass was spinning around and around in the broken case. No direction to the trail. A bag of leaf litter in hand and no way to get back to the trail. Great. After spending an hour or more traipsing about looking for the ribbon on the tree and then a half an hour gathering my samples and documenting the sight, I was so turned around I had no idea which direction was back to the trail. After a period of panic, no screaming that attracts snakes, I was able to figure out a direction to walk. I had gone perpendicular to the course off the trail to look for the ribbon when I walked in. I walked in one direction for a bit, then advanced ten meters and came back in the opposite direction sweeping about a ten meters in a traverse each turn. By taking note of the crushed vegetation I was able to figure out a perpendicular to that line. Flip a coin and I had a 50/50 chance of heading in the right direction. To keep a straight and steady course, I tied streamer of toilet paper to trees and bushes so I could look back and see where I had been. (I figured that the first rain would wash the T.P. into the soil and it would decompose rapidly.) Eventually I emerged from the forest onto the trail and then set about finding the bicycle I rode on the trail and stashed in the bushes. I walked ten minutes in one direction and didn’t find it so I walked 20 minutes in the other direction and didn’t recognize anything nor did I find my bike. So, I walked 30 minutes back in the original direction thinking I recognized things (duhhh I had just walked this part of the trail, some of it twice) and then found the bike where I left it.

A bike in the rainforest? The bike was just a fast way to get ten kilometers out the trail so it didn’t take all day to get there and back. The bikes were rented to researchers by the lab for fifty cents a day. Some of the mountain bikes were in decent shape, but most of them were real junkers. Imagine a bike in a rainforest where it rains basically every day a good part of the year and the bike is out in the rain and humidity all the time either sitting outside or being ridden on dirty muddy trails. My bike shifted the front sprocket ok, but only had three gears on the rear out of the six or seven available because the cables were so rusted and the derailleur was so bent up. The brakes had very rusty cables, levers, and calipers and were not adjusted because everything rusted in place day to day. These brakes would slow me down but not stop me so much. It didn’t much matter because on the trail the speed was not too fast and except for going down a couple of little hills the bike never got going fast enough that I couldn’t just leap off. On the bike I could zip way out into the forest, ten of fifteen k in a half hour and then go on foot on smaller trails or into the forest to find my study plots.

One day coming back on the bike after some harrowing experience trying to keep from getting lost looking for the pink ribbons, I was cruisin’ along at a good clip hoping to get back by lunch time. I crested a small hill shifted the front sprocket into high and cranked on the pedals to get some speed on the down hill. When my speed was at its maximum I saw a pack of peccary on the trail spread out eating stuff on the ground. A peccary is a wild pig that weighs about 30 to 60 lbs stand about two feet at the top of the head and are about three feet long. Usually a person can smell a pack of peccary long before they see them, but they had been at the bottom of a hill. This pack had about 7 or 8 adults and about 10 little piglets. Here I was speeding along at break neck speed (12mph) with useless brakes so I started screaming to get them out of the way. Mama pig was not about to be moved out of her feeding area and was not going to just let this thing swoop down on her babies so she squared off on the path facing me, tipping her head up and down and snorting loudly. Now packs of peccary have been known to kill people then eat them. I did not want to end my life in such a disgusting manner, killed and eaten by pigs, but I had no choice in my speed so I just plowed onward hoping mama pig was bluffing. I braced myself for the impact with this beast, but just at the last minute mama squealed loudly and ran into the bushes beside the trail. The rest of the pack that had frozen on the path to watch the confrontation also squealed and scattered this way and that, narrowly missing my front wheel.

A week or so later on a different trail there was a herd of coati. Coati are like a raccoon where you have grabbed the coon’s nose and tail and stretched it out to a longer, leaner, somewhat lower animal. Coati are related to raccoons, they are cleaver and pesky. These animals go around in groups of four or five female adults and all the babies. When they prowl around the forest their long tail stands straight up so they can see each other at a distance and know it is safe. The adults mostly stay on the ground, but the babies go up trees and bushes looking for insects and fruit. This group of coati saw me coming after I round a curve again coming down a hill. I was on them before they knew I was even in the area. Since I couldn’t stop, I again braced for the thump, thump of hitting one or two of the adults or the slide from slipping on one or more of the babies. The adults let out a little screech, tails went down and the adults dove for cover. At the same time the babies started leaping out of the trees and bushes and running after the adults in blind panic not even noticing the bike baring down trail, not slowing or stopping. There must have been twenty of those little guys, tails up, screeching for help, running hither, thither and yon. That I didn’t hit one or have one jump on me from a tree was something I wondered about for a long time. It seemed like there was fur flying in all directions and somehow the path opened up and my bike slipped through to safety.

On another trek on the bike I encountered a large snake crossing the trail. The snake hadn’t seen me and was in no hurry to get across. It stretched out from side to side on the trail and of course I could not stop. I was afraid that if I slowed too much I would hit the snake and it would turn and fang me a good one in the leg before I could get away, so I sped up. Just as I got to the snake I pulled up on the bike and bunny hopped over hoping mostly to get the front wheel over so if the snake did turn back and bite I would be down the road. I must have made it over the beast with both wheels because the snake was still across the road when I looked back.

Riding the bike had its draw backs, but it got me to parts of the rainforest I could not have walked to and back before dark. Being out after dark, especially without a working light, was a sentence to staying out all night because it is so dark there is no seeing in this kind of dark. Even trying to follow a trail in the dark was a mistake. And the forest I was in had a strange tree, a member of the peanut family, Pentaclethra, which grows 75 to 100 meters tall and was a predominate tree in the forest. As night approached the forest got darker and darker and if you were out you sped up to get back to the light in the lab clearing before the sun set. There was very little twilight, when the sun went down it was dark. These trees had tiny little leaves on them which folded up about 15 minutes before the sun went down. As you speeded up to get back to the lab clearing in the encroaching dark, suddenly it got noticeably lighters as the leaves of 50% of the huge trees folded up and allowed the evening light to flood in. Some people slowed down thinking they still had lots of time before it got dark, but seasoned researchers started to run because they knew they had about 15 minutes until dark.

Some of the trails that left the lab clearing were concrete for a kilometer or so before turning to dirt/mud. The main trails were well maintained so riding was easy and fast, sometimes too fast. By maintained I mean that big limbs and trees that fell on the trails were quickly cleared and the trail was pack hard enough so water tended to drain off to the sides creating mud puddles and streams to the sides of the path. Not all the trails were bikable and so either extra time had to be made or the ride was done to the smaller trail and then I went on foot from there. On the bike I could sometimes go out in the morning and get back by lunch and then go to a different place in the afternoon and get back before dark. The bike allowed me to double up on sample collections so I could take some days off occasionally. The jungle bike really expanded my knowledge, enjoyment and understanding of the forest.

Being way out in the forest on the trails one might think it would be lonely and while that was often the case there were always surprises. Sometimes there were researchers busting through the brush onto the trail with their bags of samples or equipment. Occasionally there might be a bike heading the other way, or a bike in the bushes and the researcher somewhere in the thick of things. What was really mind blowing was when I was back in the bush, and another researcher would walk through and say, “Hi.” What are the chances of finding another human being off the trail pretty much randomly in the forest? There were courageous souls who would take a line through the forest off the beaten track either looking for ants, or frogs, or violets, and the traverse the forest to survey what is going on. I couldn’t believe that some of these people would walk for many kilometers through the forest following a line, or an easier trek, following animal trails and end up where I got on a bike and a short bushwhack randomly off the main trail. I don’t know how many of these researchers actually made it back to the lab clearing before being bit by snakes and eaten by ants, but I saw more than just a couple of these intrepid researchers.

Being in the forest is an excellent experience. Being lost in the forest is terrifying. A person can not really appreciate the beauty of the rainforest unless they leave the trail and enter the world of green. Back in the weeds is where a human is just another organism, nothing special. That feeling is worth having on the edge of being lost, and wondering just what organisms there are to compete with for your own life.