Date:         Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:53:15 -0700
Reply-To:     Michael Elliott <camping.elliott@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Michael Elliott <camping.elliott@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Long Trip Report
In-Reply-To:  <0843CDCE-894B-4654-A6A9-CD142E84770E@COMCAST.NET>
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Long trip report:

I left home at 4:30 am on Sunday morning week and a half ago. By noon I
was in Lone Pine, CA, and it was over 100 degrees. Mellow Yellow does
not have AC, and I parked in the shade of some little sycamores at
Tuttle Creek campground to wait out the heat. Sweated a lot. Tried to
nap. Drank fluids. Told myself I would stay there until 5 pm or when the
temp dropped below 95.

By 4:30 it hadn't dropped and I was purely bored so I cruised up to
Bishop and ate some pizza, figuring the temp /surely/ would start to
drop when I was finished, but no -- it was still hot. Decided to drive
up the grade to Tom's Place anyway and Mellow Yellow did just fine even
though the cheap-o bimetal temp gauge I have Velcro'd to the inside was
registering 109 by the time I reached the top. Turned left and climbed
up 1800 additional feet into the mountains and found a cool spot to
spend the night at East Fork campground. I was hammered -- dehydrated
despite having a Styrofoam cooler between the seats with ice and soft
drinks in it into which I dipped a lot. But I was very pleased at how

It was much cooler in the morning, low 40's. I left early and wandered
up 395, driving through recommended and interesting campgrounds
(Deadman, Glass Creek, Convict Lake, did NOT take the time to visit the
Mammoth Brewing Company [because I had plenty of craft brews with me
anyway], June Lakes Loop, and Lundy Canyon [Drillock]. Before I turned
west at highway 89 to head into the mountains I filled up at the Topaz
Resort.

I followed 89 through Markleeville and Woodfords, then onto 88 to check
out Woods Lake campground, passing through  Woods Lake was a
disappointment - the lake itself is very pretty, but the CG was not to
my liking, feeling close and dark, and has no sites from which the lake
is visible. I spent the night there anyway.

The next day I decided to visit Wrights Lake down I-50 on the west side
of the Sierra. I figured I had enough gas to get there, and assumed that
I could find gas along the way. There was none to be seen and the drive
from I-50 to Wrights Lake was longer and climbed more than I expected,
so I began to keep a close eye on the gas gauge. Wrights Lake campground
looked to be very pretty, but it was full. Drove all the way back UP 50
and over Echo Summit (Mellow Yellow plugging along quite happily) and
decided to visit the Blue Lakes, about which Pete (pete952@comcast.net)
here on the list had once described and shown a pretty picture of.*

But I was led astray by my GPS (DeLorme Topo 6). Instead of showing me
the easy way in (off 88 via Hope Valley), Topo 6 decided that a 4WD road
leading past Red Lake near Carson Pass would be more, uh, "direct" I
guess is the word. I didn't have enough sense to check its reasoning.

There is no way that an overloaded 2WD Westy could get in on that road
-- the potholes could swallow a collie -- but while I was trying to
horse Mellow Yellow around them I figured that either I was a weenie
driver or the road had fallen into disrepair. It wasn't until several
days later that I went and re-read the description of how to get there
(Best of Tent Camping, Northern California) that I realized my error. We
could have gone back to visit the Blue Lakes later, but we found a sweet
spot that we liked. But that's getting ahead of myself.

Saw a lot of bicyclists with high-end road bikes cruising along the
highways and over the passes.

After giving up on the Red Lake road route with my furry tail between my
hind legs, I began to wonder if I'd find a place I liked near enough to
Reno to pick up Mrs Squirrel several days later when her conference was
to end. I went looking up highway 4 and found a nice quiet site at
Silver Creek campground below Ebbetts Pass. The day I arrived it was
sort of overcast, and the next day was mostly cloudy. I deployed my
solar panels in spots of sun where I could find them (trees and clouds
in the way) and for two days it clouded and weakly thunderstormed and
drizzled in a fairly disorganized fashion. But every day I was able to
bring the aux battery back up to fully charged, so the little solar
setup works fine keeping up with the Norcold and my reading lights.

Made some bread, drank some wine, chatted with the campground host. At
no time were there more than three other campers in the campground.
However, I learned that the highway would be closed from 5 am until 3:30
pm for the annual Death Ride (http://www.deathride.com/) on the day I
was meant to pick up Mrs Squirrel. That explained the cyclists cruising
all over the Sierra that I had been seeing -- they were in training.

There was no cell service anywhere up highway 4 and I had to drive all
the way nearly back to Markleeville to reach Mrs Squirrel to discuss the
matter. She suggested I pick her up one day early. I headed back to camp
with about a quarter tank of gas to camp until pick-up day.

Left the campground, with camp set up, at 3:30 figuring on spending a
bit of time in Minden, hoping to find a hardware store (needed some wood
glue to repair a failed shower deck (http://tinyurl.com/34c8b4) which
split at a hinge screw. When I got to Minden I was running on fumes
(there is $4.50/gallon gasoline at Markleeville, but I didn't buy any
out of principle, I guess) and tried to find the Ace hardware the host
told me was there, but gave up after about 20 minutes of searching and
made the long drive up to Reno.

Unlike the highway south of Minden, which is mostly open road, 395 north
of Minden is the main street through several towns and communities. It
was evening rush hour and basically took forever to get to Reno through
all the traffic lights and stop and go traffic. Some hefty grades, too.

The short of it is that I picked up Mrs Squirrel and we hit an
Albertsons supermarket for basic shopping and dry ice for the cooler
(she likes lots of perishable food items), then Trader Joes for what you
can't get at a regular supermarket (sun dried tomatoes in oil for a
recipe she had in mind, a couple bottles of good wine). By the time I
got her up to Silver Creek it was well after dark. We went quickly to bed.

The next day we watched cyclists climbing up and racing down the highway
road, and Mrs Squirrel napped a lot, which is how she always starts a
camping trip.

On Sunday we decided to leave, as Silver Creek is just an okay camp
ground, not really memorable. But which way to go? We perused the camp
guide books (whereupon I found my mistake in re Blue Lakes and felt
silly) and all night long I debated whether we should head north and try
Blue Lakes again, or pop over the top of Ebbetts Pass, drop to the west,
and try our luck at Highland Lakes (see this guy's blog entry:
http://kevingong.com/Hiking/200307HighlandLakesTrip1.html ).

I chose the latter, and we were not disappointed despite our campground
host telling us that he'd stayed at Highland Lakes once and would never
go back due to the wind. The road in is dirt, but easy. When we got
there we were not real enthusiastic about the camp sites, all of them
being exposed to the prevailing westerly wind and very open without any
privacy. But Mrs Squirrel is tenacious and soon had us driving into the
upper campground. All the sites there face west, where the wind comes
from, so any wind screen that a fellow might erect would not only block
the afternoon sun, but the view of upper Highland Lake. There were a
couple of other parties there, and when you see the folks bundled up
like it's below 40F outside, sitting in chairs facing a smoky fire,
hands in pockets, you know it's not comfortable.

But, as I say, Mrs Squirrel does not give up easily. She had us drive to
the farthest upper rear corner of the campground, and we found a sweet
spot, site #32. It was over the crest of the hill so the wind was
blocked, it had a spacious view of the lower Highland Lake, and starting
at our feet and sweeping down to the lake was a carpet of grasses and
wildflowers.

We spent several days there. I had purchased and brought along a little
Sevylor inflatable kayak to poke around the lakes on (the 120V pump
draws about 17 amps from the battery through the inverter, took about 20
to 30 minutes to fill the boat, but the panels were always able to bring
the battery back to full by 1 pm at the latest).

Made more bread, erected a screen house to keep out the bugs (not my
kind of a place, I had originally planned to camp with the kids and
grandkids and I got the screen house for the wimmins and chillens, but
those things feel too confining and isolating for me); and kept an eye
out for any Mr or Mrs Bear that might want to chow down on unguarded
food. We hauled the cooler into and out of the van depending on whether
we were there or not to act all threatening if someone of the ursine
persuasion were to eye our foods with an appreciative and curious eye.
But no bears. No critters at all.

After a few days it became much cooler, and mostly cloudy although the
wx channel out of Reno (WXK58, Slide Mtn., 162.550 MHz) never mentioned
it. Mrs Squirrel was fretting about being out of touch with one of her
sons for so long (a separation/child custody drama that was occurring)
so she and I felt that leaving our lovely campsite was in order.

By noon we were back on the road, by 7pm I put us back in Tuttle Creek
for the night ($5/night, such a deal), where we would overnight before
the final push back home.

This would be Mrs Squirrel's first desert camping experience. The sun
had just gone down behind the Sierra escarpment and the campground was
in shade and cooling. The charming little creek was splashing and
burbling. She was looking around curiously when the campground host
stopped his Jeep out on the street to casually mention that there was a
raccoon that had been raiding camps for food ("Okay," I said, trying to
wave him on, knowing how Mrs Squirrel feels about loose critters), and
by the way, a bear had been spotted a couple days ago ("We'll be
careful," I said, hoping he would leave), ... oh yeah, he added, someone
saw a rattlesnake recently.

At this point Mrs Squirrel climbed up into the van and said that there
was no way we'd sleep with any open windows. I shot that man a look that
if looks could kill he would have left in a basket.

"Thanks a lot," I thought.

Of course there are raccoons -- they are little food scroungers but not
aggressive.

Of course there might be a bear coming by once in a while to check
things out and look for freebies.

And of course there are rattlesnakes: it's the frickin' southwest desert
for crying out loud! I consider rattlesnakes to be gentlemanly guys who
always warn you if they are getting nervous about you getting too close,
and they don't range about attacking people. Rattlesnakes that have the
poor luck to land near a campground have very short lifespans.

But try to tell that to a woman. That fool did nothing more than scare
my wife and put her off desert camping. I'll need to do a lot of repair
to overcome the damage he did.

Anyway, I reassured her that having the poptop screens open would be
safe. But even so, it was over 80 in the van, and I knew I'd not be able
to sleep in such heat, so I then convinced her to let me open the rear
hatch and snap in the mosquito screen. I had to close off the bottom of
the screen with our adjustable shower curtain rod at the foot of the
mattress. This, of course, was nothing more than cosmetics, but it made
her feel safe.

A cooling breeze blew over us all night long. In the morning we found
raccoon feetsprints on the windshield. Little burglar had been trying to
find a way in. So THAT'S what Mrs Squirrel was investigating in the
middle of the night with her flashlight when she said she heard
something! I just said it was a moth beating its wings against the
screen, rolled over, and fell back to sleep.

Mellow Yellow performed flawlessly the whole trip, even after I baked it
on the climbs, and ground the sh^t out of the auto transmission trying
to force us up the steep hills of that 4WD road to Blue Lakes.


* Pete also kindly provided to me a wealth of information about
restaurants, camping, routes and insider information about the area
around Calaveras Big Trees, where we had originally planned to camp for
a couple of nights with the kids and grandkids. They bailed (decided to
go to Disneyland instead) so our plans became a lot less structured.
Never had a chance to meet Pete, but my thanks to him for all that he did.

--
Mike "Rocket J Squirrel" Elliott
71 Type 2: the Wonderbus
84 Westfalia: Mellow Yellow ("The Electrical Banana")
74 Utility Trailer. Ladybug Trailer, Inc., San Juan Capistrano
KG6RCR