15 replies to this topic

[PackRat]

Yosemite was different then...just not so many people visiting. I have fond memories of it:

The Rangers were cool, helpful and entertaining.

The nightly call at 9:00pm in the valley "Let the fire fall" and on cue they started pushing the coals off Glacier Point....

We gathered downed firewood up on the road to Tuolumne Meadows with a special eye to the Sequoia bark which burned like anthracite coal ….for free....

Bicycle rentals

An occasional horse ride at the stables

The movie theater

Rafting on the ice-cold Merced

Seeing a satellite go over one time

Watching fearless climbers at El Capitan

Lugging a big chunk of ice from he machine just across the footbridge from Camp 7 for the ice chest

Listening to the bears raid the garbage cans almost every night

Cooking on a propane stove or BBQing in the fire pit

 

The one time a bear got into our ice chest to get the apple sauce my Mom made from the apples we picked from the trees a bit downstream from our camp. I stayed in my pup tent but Mom was rather pissed off and grabbed a bucket of water and threw it on Mr. Bear as he was enjoying the apple sauce. I guess he had enough or that cold water bothered him so he ambled off towards where the two garbage cans in our area were located. Evidently her yelling at the bear woke up a few folks who witnessed the encounter and the word got back to the Rangers. One stopped by the next morning to get the real story and he thought it was hilarious without insulting my Mom at all, but suggested giving up the 'sauce might have been the better part of valor so-to-speak.

 

Ah yes those were the days...I must have been about 9 or 10 and that was one of the coolest things I ever saw my Mom do at that age. I was just awed she would take on a bear like that (so was the Ranger).

 

Years later maybe 2005? my wife and I went back to Yosemite with an Alaskan on my F-150. No campsites available but we could drive around and I could show her the valley and Glacier Point before we went on over the Tioga Pass. I was really shocked at how SMALL the valley really is. When you are 10 years old... its like HUGE. There was a major flood in 1997 and Camp 7 was no longer even there, it being restored to a more forest like environment. We walked right to the big tree next to the bike path and that was a landmark for me to find our old site and sure enough I could show here exactly where I spent some of the best summers of my childhood, me being a SF city boy. We drove around but basically you could not even find a legal place to park hardly and with no site, we had to leave the valley and camp elsewhere. Aside from all the tourists though, it is still a magical place to visit but if you go, try the early part of the season or the late part to avoid  the masses of visitors if possible. You may encounter some rain/cold but hey, you aren't tent camping so who cares?

[JCatt]

Great stories PR thanks for sharing!

[CougarCouple]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and memories. I enjoyed the read.
Russ

[Andy Douglass]

Tents are great, but here are some landmarks in my life that have led me to campers:

 

#1: I must have been around 12, doing a boy scout overnight after a 10 mile hike. I had put a tarp under my tent to keep water out. Boy was I wrong. When the skies opened up that night, all the water that ran down the side of my little dome tent hit that tarp which efficiently collected it right under my sleeping bag, where it seeped through the bottom of the tent. I remember having one of those chemical hand warmer things and huddling around that all night in my sleeping bag, which was now a sleeping sponge. The next day on the hike out, rangers told our troop about a missing hiker. Two of my good friends ended up spotting the poor woman across a ravine and escorting her out, which was about the coolest thing possible for boy scouts. Our whole troop milked that story for all it was worth at summer camp that year. I'm sure by the end of it, everyone at Camp Navarro knew of our technical rescue of a bus load of orphans in Antarctica.

 

#2: As a young adult, I was on a big group camping trip in the Mendocino National Forest, near Hough Springs. I set up my brand new tent in a nook in some scrubby brush, to get out of the sun and wind. One side of my tent was in direct contact with some brush, and the first morning I found that either insects or rodents had used the brush as a sort of scaffold to do overnight demolition work on my tent, which now looked like swiss cheese on that side. Normally I wouldn't sleep through something like that, but I must have been tired from all the 12 ounce lifts I had done the night before.

 

#3: My wife and I were on a camping road trip around NE California. After a nice stay at Blue Lake at the south end of the Warner Mountains, up near Alturas, we decided to change locations to Berney Falls, which my wife had childhood memories of. It was packed, so we mosied down to the Lassen National Forest, just outside of Chester, an area I had camped many times. This was a huge trip in our evolution from tent campers to camper campers because we had decided to get a gigantic tent and use an air mattress with actual bedding. It was great to have that nice new Coleman tent, which you could probably park a Prius in, with a queen size bed. While I was setting it up in Chester, I was pounding stakes in the ground with my razor sharp hatchet. The point of the hatchet just barely kissed the tent. Turns out tent material does poorly against sharpened steel.

 

#4: Every broken or missing tent pole, bent stake, inadequate sleeping pad, mildew spore, Spine Destroyer© brand rock, too-small stuff sack,etc.

 

Tents, we've been through a lot together. But we need some time apart. I'm sure we might run into each other at some point, but we can't continue like this, it's just not healthy.

Edited by Andy Douglass, 12 July 2018 - 12:10 PM.

[PackRat]

Back in the day, camping with the Boy Scouts entailed setting up the tent and then digging a trench around the perimeter so any rain running off the tent would be channeled away from us. The key being to try to find a FLAT place to begin with as a depression would funnel water into the tent so a crowned or slight rise location was preferable. We also dug the famous "Grease Pits" where bacon grease and other food debris was placed and buried, we dug slit trenches for human waste and attempted to master knot tying so as to make a seat over the trench and we even tried not only to fashion a tripod over the fire pit (yes, we dug down after clearing a dead zone around it) as well as an actual table if we were working on our knot tying.

 

Nowadays it is ecologically not cool to do all this damage to an area as it is not usually possible to return a site to its original condition but then again, we were often camping in Golden Gate Park.

 

I think good camping citizens observe what the divemasters told us when we learned to scuba dive..."Take only pictures, leave only bubbles". The wife and I usually managed to fill the pockets of our BCs in many places with an accumulation of trash consisting of the usual crap....plastic bags, plastic beer cups, smashed up beer cans (check for critter habitation), odd pieces of junk. In the Caribbean, most dive operators are happy when divers do a little cleanup while enjoying the reefs. My trash collection Karma rewarded me one time when I was going to pick up a piece of trash that turned out to be a very nice dive knife in a rubber sheath that disguised it while laying on the bottom.

 

These days, there is no reason to leave your trash or the junk others leave half-burned in a fire pit...you can just add some of that to your own trash you will either deposit in a bear-proof waste bin or if one is not available, just take home with you. I know how beautiful it is to pull into a great spot to camp only to find that the beach or the bushes are full of garbage some bozo decided he wanted to toss out. 

[smlobx]

?......
I think good camping citizens observe what the divemasters told us when we learned to scuba dive..."Take only pictures, leave only bubbles". The wife and I usually managed to fill the pockets of our BCs in many places with an accumulation of trash consisting of the usual crap....plastic bags, plastic beer cups, smashed up beer cans (check for critter habitation), odd pieces of junk. In the Caribbean, most dive operators are happy when divers do a little cleanup while enjoying the reefs. My trash collection Karma rewarded me one time when I was going to pick up a piece of trash that turned out to be a very nice dive knife in a rubber sheath that disguised it while laying on the bottom.
 
These days, there is no reason to leave your trash or the junk others leave half-burned in a fire pit...you can just add some of that to your own trash you will either deposit in a bear-proof waste bin or if one is not available, just take home with you. I know how beautiful it is to pull into a great spot to camp only to find that the beach or the bushes are full of garbage some bozo decided he wanted to toss out.

I agree and I think many here do the same.
Back in my earlier days while doing some commercial diving off an oil rig I would routinely pick up junk that had fallen off (or been thrown off) the rig. One day I found an almost new Penn offshore rod with their International 50W reel! I still have that outfit!
We now do a lot of kayaking in my Tarpon 120 on Smith Mt. lake and it's not unusual to have the back hatch filled with plastic bottles etc that will never decompose...