Wilderness Cabins We Have Known

It was one of our normal Canadian wilderness canoe trips. The Dease River in northern B.C. Canada. Our trips had to be at least 200 miles long, few or no roads, and a take-out that permitted me to hitch-hike back to pick up the truck. We were about 75 miles down the river, soft rain falling most of the time, and a heavy narrow chute of white-water, with a log right in the middle, pointed up-stream, just under the water. There is no walking out in this kind of dense country and I was not sure we would miss the spear of this log pointed right up-stream. We took out on the right side, up-stream of the chute and I scouted for a portage trail. There was none to be found. I used an axe to blaze a trail in the dense, wet timber, surprised that there was not a trail. It was hard sweaty work, with 5 carries of our gear to the top of a ten foot cliff where we lowered our canoe and gear down to the river. The bugs were bad. Our bug jackets and head-nets helped but black flies got under my shirt and my back was covered with red welts. The rain continued but much colder now. It was time to camp but cliffs on both sides were not inviting. Shirley and I were both feeling some numbness and were getting colder. Around a big bend and high on the left bank I saw it. A trappers cabin. But how the heck do you get up the cliff? I finally found steps carved in the cliff side and we climbed up to our home for the night. Plenty of split fire wood, a vegetable garden with all kinds of greens. The out house behind the garden and Grizzly tracks everywhere. A hot fire, stripped ourselves to the bone to dry in the warm heat of the cabin, and Shirley's hot beef & vegetable stew. I stood guard with our shotgun while Shirley used the out-house. We slept like babies that night. Warm and dry. A warm morning sun made the world seem right. We will not forget our wilderness cabin on the Dease.   

PHOTOGRAPHING THE SACRAMENTO ZOO

BY Jim & Shirley White

Bread soaked in whipped eggs, toasted and folded into a boat like shape and filled with fresh fruit compote with house made whipped cream. Wow! I love it. It is 0800, Shirley’s birthday and we are on a photo adventure. First we fuel up at the Tower Restaurant which used to be famous for a drugstore that sold records. I can’t help but to look nervously over to my right where 70 years ago were about 6 card tables where a kid by the name of Russ Solomon sold vinyl records in his Dad’s drug store. That is where I bought all my Dinna Shore records. We could buy records from a department store down town, but this was in our neighborhood and sold by one of us. Wow….spooky to remember. Russ’s big gamble really paid off.

We try to get to Russ’s   err… the Tower Restaurant by 0800 have breakfast and drive down Land Park drive to the Zoo and get there by 0900, when the zoo opens. We are after the big cats and they become active about that time. This trip (Sept.5) every cat in the zoo came out, stretched and yawned right in front of us. No packs of school kids to deal with and since it was a Thursday, it was “bone day”. Yep, plan your trip to go on a Thursday and even the very young Snow Leopard will chew and play with his bone right in front of you. Fall and winter are great times to go to the zoo too, since some days you will have it all to yourselves.

Equipment notes: take the fastest zoom you have…hopefully at least up to a 200mm. We shot steady for about two hours and I shot most of my exposures at f2.8. They have planted bamboo everywhere and most of the cages are very dark. I used the pop-up flash many times. It is almost like shooting in a jungle. Pray for your animal to walk around and stop in a sun-beam for you. Even the Orange Panda did it for us. You think it was luck? You bet!!

We left the zoo by 11:00 and went down to Fat City, in old town, for lunch. I recommend Frank Fats on O Street as being the best. I do miss Posey’s and when at Frank Fat’s having Frank stop by our table for a chat. But then I miss Russ Solomon and my Dinna Shore records too. 

The Summer Time Blues.....I can't wait much longer..

When you look out our window in the early morning light, looking down on the Oak covered ridge below, every thing is blue. It almost looks like a blue fog, but it is not. It is a heavy blue-grey smoke from the American and Rim forest fires burning for days now. You dare not take a deep breath outside! Little particulates can and will go into your lungs and may never leave. The down-slope air in the morning pushes the smoke down from the fires and when the valley below warms, maybe along with a Delta breeze, the smoke funnels right back up the canyons and over the Sierra. It strangles everything from Auburn on the west, to Reno on the east. What is a guy to do? Stay inside or plan your day to go where the smoke seems thinner? Couple that with the fact that it is August, and we have a case of the Summer Time Blues.

The grass is brown and crisp, the birds are sparse, the fish are down deep in the Sierra lakes and all the frogs have gone too. Where the frogs have gone, nobody knows. They think they all died from a world-wide fungus that is killing amphibians everywhere. Some of the deer are coming at night into our green pasture to feed, but are gone somewhere when the smoke comes. I want to go with them but don't know where to go?

I like every day I wake up breathing and feeling no pain. But now soon after I wake, I try not to breathe and my pain is a longing for that chill that's a coming, with the rain and the wind. And I long for the snow on that high ridge above. I want to breath that cold searing wind and chill-out my face. You see....we have the Summer Time Blues and I can't wait much longer. 

This has been a summer of Wild Visitors.......to our house. First it was the Killdeers hatching the four chicks in our neighbor's gravel driveway. 22 days we watched from our lawn chairs on our deck for this to happen. The male and female Killdeer taking turns sitting on the eggs.  Then mama and papa  guarded over the 4 chicks for 24 days in our back pasture...mostly under the Weeping Willow tree, where I had created a mud pond. They finally fledged and never came back. We were happy at first, and then sad. Did they not know this was their home?
Then the Red Shouldered hawks moved in. For three weeks the female started screaming at daylight and then continued almost every hour. She sat on the gates, in most of our trees, and the front lawn, for days on end. She pulled huge red worms out of the lawn after it was watered, and sat waiting for the water to shut off so she could feed again. She killed our King Snake that lived in the back garden. She sat in the pasture and ripped it apart, a feast she surely enjoyed.  She allowed me to approach within 20 feet or so. She had found a home I thought! The male would stop by from time to time...but like many males I have know, he was inclined to wander. She did not care it seemed. She had us with our big cameras and lenses clicking away. We deleted almost 300 exposures and still had many left for our use.

What a wonderful summer with our wild, wild, visitors.  The female hawk sat one last time on a low limb of one of our Maple trees in the front yard. Without a sound, she just up and flew away. We are sad for the moment. And then we feel really good. Maybe next July, when the pears ripen in our yard and the lawn is green, and the red worms are crawling about.  We will have the dripping hose under the Weeping Willow, to make that soft and oozy mud.We will be waiting in our lawn chairs with our cameras and glasses. Will the wild ones visit us again?

A SECRET PLACE.......A hidden meadow along a remote back road...at 5300 feet in the Sierra Nevada. Where on the 1st of July each year we can find hundreds of wild Leopard Lilies. But not this year. The normally wet meadow, spring fed, was dry and crisp. Three small lilies hung brown and limp. The victims of our very dry winter. What about the butterflies, bees and birds that make this place their summer home? In all our years of visiting this sacred place we had never seen such a disaster.We looked under the tree root where a Junco always builds a nest. Nothing. We pack all our camera gear back to our car, thru the thick growth of trees which hide this place. We follow down the series of normally wet meadows to where the forest is thick and covers the small almost dry creek. Hiking thru the forest to the creek, with some water now, we find a thick grove of lilies. Some survive! There is hope for the future of our hidden meadow. All we need is rain. Now if we can survive too?

THE SANDHILLS ARE BACK !!!   "What ever happened to Summer"  Shirley asked when the temperature dropped to 35 degrees just north of Truckee yesterday. It was August 2 and we expected it to be in the low '90s later in Auburn where we live. We really thought we had missed a month somewhere when we rolled into Sierra Valley and saw more than 50 Sandhill Cranes feeding and resting in a large brown field along Harriet road. We could not believe our eyes! The Sandhills showed up one month early last year but that was the first part of September. We were really checking on some nesting Cranes in the north end of the valley to see if the parents and perhaps a fledged bird might be seen, like we saw last year about this time. Boy were we off on our timing this year. The marshes were all dry, the Feather River was muddy from cattle and more than a hundred steers were all bunched up in a corral waiting for their last ride to McDonald's. Had we forgotten that there was little water left in the valley after one of the driest winters on record? What about the thunder storm a couple of weeks ago that caused a flood throughout the valley. The water was really gone. We did photograph a pair of Wilson's Snipe, some 1/2 grown Coots, a hawk or two, some just fledged "dicky birds" but the big news was the cranes are back. I wonder if we need new parkas for this winter?

 

THE GRANITE CHIEF WILDERNESS......Whiskey Creek, Big Springs, Diamond Crossing, Mt. Mildred, Needle Peak; we knew them all. By foot, ski and horse over many years we worked, played and loved every foot of this wilderness, and the surrounding area. Now-days we peek in, usually from some high point nearby where we photograph this sacred ground. A thunder-storm this spring brought rain showers to Tinker's Knob. Mt. Anderson on the left is where the Benson Hut was buried so deep in snow, we had to dig to find the smoke-stack many years ago. The winter scene with maybe 30+ feet of snow makes the point.