Camping with Jason

I'll write more later about this adventure!

So this was the last weekend before we will have moved and I wanted to get some good hang out time with my main man Jason. For those of you who don't know, I have two really long time friends. On, Chris, whom I've known since like 1st grade or something, and the other is Jason, whom I've known since 7th grade. Really good guys, really good friends.

Jason and I met up in Yreka which I'm not sure how to pronounce because the founders of that city seemed to spell it wrong. Its interesting because a little more east is the other yreka (Eureka). Anyways, we met up there, got all my gear packed into Jasons truck and headed up into the wilderness.

The first idea was to go to some mountain and hike it. This was Jasons idea and I'm glad it did not come to fruitition because that peak was over 9,000 ft and I'm not entirely sure we would have made it! The problem we had was we had no map and couldn't find anybody or anyplace in town that was selling maps with the fireroads and service roads in the area. So we had no clue how to get anywhere. Even the dang ranger station was closed!

After driving around for about an hour and half we decided we didn't like the area so we changed up the plan and headed for the scott creek, salmon river area. We drove and drove and drove up high into the hills on dirt roads looking for a cool spot to camp. We wanted a view site, and weren't having very much luck until we cruised down an overgrown road off of another service road, off of another road. We had no clue where we were but we managed to find a sweet spot with a view of what we thought would be a sunrise in the morning. Despite the numerous cow pies, the site was perfect.

The one thing that the ranger station had lots of was bear brochures and warnings. We read them, and decided to put our engineering know how to good use! According to the wildlife professionals, our bear basket should be suspended 10 ft in the air, and at least 4 feet from either of the trees. The picture presented to us was a simple system. Throw a rope over a branch and pull the basket up. Well, the trees in the area didn't have any branches like shown! So the brochure was pretty much good for nothing. As you can see in the pics, we managed to string up a pretty good setup, which we placed our food in at night.

Bears were constantly on Jasons mind and he made both of us paranoid. With a campfire our viewing distance was like, 10ft if that. Pitch black and our ears began to trick is. We heard lots of sticks being broke and our minds got crazy on us. We decided to point the truck towards the road in case we had to have a quick getaway. We didn't have a gun or anything and hoped our bear basket thingy was good enough to keep them either away, or busy enough to let us get away! Did you know bears can climb trees and run up to 35 MPH?

The first night I slept very little. Jason snored the night away. Between his snoring, bear sounds, and my dreams I didn't sleep very well. When the morning came I was ready to go though! Today was hiking day.

A quick breakfast and packing up camp took us on our way to "Lovers Camp" which was a trailhead for one of the most used trails in the area. Don't know what it was but we went on it...remember we had no maps this entire time.