Justin's Birthday Adventure
What's a father to do? My son, Justin, was turning 13 soon & what he really wanted--had wanted all year long--for his birthday was a camping trip in the mountains with DAD! I've been excited for months just thinking about it. But not only did he want to camp with an "Old Fart" like Dad, he wanted to bring some friends along, too. We made a deal. He could bring two friends & I could bring one. I wasn't fool enough to head for the mountains alone with three young boys just bursting into puberty! So, I brought my dear friend & sometime comrade in foolishness, Jim, along with us.
That put five of us, including our camping gear and 17.5 gallons of water into a little Subaru Loyale. For those of you not familiar with the vehicle, it's a tiny station wagon with a water-cooled engine based on the design of the one used in the VW bug. But the genius engineers at Subaru figured out how to make the engine even less powerful while decreasing fuel efficiency at the same time! Our car, Opus, is perfectly content to cruise downhill at a reasonable speed with one or two people riding inside--and maybe a sack lunch and a few library books. We, however, filled every cubic inch of the car and drove it from sea-level to our campsite at 8250 feet on top of a mountain. Opus was trulyl heroic and kept running without overheating the entire way, not even while dragging through LA's Friday afternoon rush hour traffic!.
We managed to arrive at our mountain-top destination about an hour before sunset--and then I remembered that not only had I not bought firewood, I had also neglected to bring BBQ briquettes. Never mind that I'd had no place to put them inside the car. We were 10 miles from the highway which was already beyond the edges of the known world. I guessed I'd have to make a trek the next day to retrieve briquettes and firewood from some jerkwater store and pay premium prices. I took a few minutes to explore around the campsite and located a fallen tree that still had many branches left on it. I immediately put the boys to work, retrieving firewood. We got far more firewood than we could have carted up in Opus. We even had enough wood to get great coals for hot-dogs, marshmallows, and the steaks I had thought I needed briquettes for!
About an hour after sunset, Jim called my attention to an unusual glow just above the western horizon. A Minuteman II missile had just been launced out of Vandenberg AFB, some miles to our west, as part of a Star Wars test. The test failed, but we got some interesting pictures. This led to more night-sky photography. I took some shots of the Cygnus ((?) it was dark & I couldn't see where I had the camera aimed very well. It was aimed UP, and Cygnus was UP . . .) region of the Milky Way. Here are some from the Sagitarius/Scorpius region of the Milky Way. Jim came along and kept me company while taking pictures while the boys annoyed the other campers by making vulgar noises and telling rude jokes loudly. By the time we returned (2 AMish) they seemed to be sleeping peacefully. So we grunted and growled and shook their tent.
The next morning, Justin (note the hot-chocolate? I brought along hundreds of packets of chocolate mix, plus a bottle of Hershey's chocolate syrup. That entire bottle became empty in less than 24 hours!), informed us that a BEAR had used their tent for a windbreak during the night . . .
Early on we decided not to wash dishes at the picnic table. We didn't like the idea of traipsing through mud. Not having another table, we improvised. Next time I'll figure out how to bring along a flat table. I don't like having to rinse mud off dishes I just finished washing!
We did camp chores and hiked. Justin had a special adventure of his own. As the day waned, I set up to photgraph the sunset. As the sky darkened, I again played with my camera. Here are star-trails produced by leaving the lens open for 45 minutes. The bright star near the center is Polaris the "North" star. Notice that it is not quite true north--as this telephoto shot makes clear. The trees were lit up by the campfire. By day they actually do have green needles. I also played with doing multiple exposures, Jim was a willing model. The nights were cold, but not this cold. I discovered a half-shot roll of film in my camera bag--this was a ten-year-old shot I took in Norway in 1990! Brrrr!
Hope you enjoyed sharing our adventure,
Visits
10/07/2001