I (Mitch) have every other weekend off, and I'm trying to get us in the habit of taking a little trip on these weekends whenever we can. The inaugural trip was a jaunt down Rock Creek, a blue-ribbon trout stream less than an hour east of Missoula. And who doesn't love driving on a one-and-a-half lane icy road that drops directly off into a frozen creek on one side and is also littered with rocks?
That's me on the ice showing Melissa that it's plenty thick to walk on by jumping up and down on it. I'm told four inches of ice is enough for a person, and a foot is enough for a truck. This ice was at least eight inches thick.
Our first day we just scrambled around the suspension bridge across Rock Creek to the trailhead. The rocks in the background are the feet of the Sapphire Mountains.
Her fears assuaged, Melissa does a dance on the ice.
There wasn't much snow in camp or on the roads, just ice; all that white is ice. Our fire ring was completely filled with a giant cylinder of ice. We tried building a fire on top of the grate, but the embers just fell through. So we put a bunch of wet boughs between the grate and the ice and later had a nice fire and grilled hot dogs on it. Note Ludwig's brand-new chains, on this, their maiden voyage.
Walking around the campground (which we had to ourselves) we found this deer skeleton. A little way away we found its fur and a leg, complete with hoof. I wonder if it got hit by a car, wandered into the campground injured, and was ambushed by coyotes. Or maybe it got shot, ran off, died, and was picked apart by crows. In any case, Melissa took about 40 million pictures of it, but I'll spare you the totality of her weird obsession and just post these two.
Melissa isn't grossed-out enough to not enjoy her morning tea.
After tea we walked to the trailhead. We'd rented snowshoes because we weren't sure what conditions to expect on the trail. I hadn't planned very well, as we had nothing to carry the snowshoes in when we weren't wearing them. Fortunately, they fit nicely inside our camp chair bags. This narrow bridge spans Welcome Creek just upstream of where it empties into Rock Creek.
At one point beavers dammed the creek with a damned dam, and the resulting pond put the trail under a couple feet of water. We had to go up the side of the mountain and around this obstacle. The side of the mountain was a rock field covered by snow, so on went the snowshoes.
Melissa was a natural snowshoer.
The actual trail was covered in ice, not snow, so the snowshoes weren't really needed on it, and we were worried about bunging them up on rocks and such. But without them, my boots didn't have near the traction they needed so I could negotiate the ice, especially on the steeper stretches. After falling and breaking my wristwatch, I decided I'd had enough and we turned around. We plan on buying some shoe chains for future hikes like this. The above shot is Melissa below a ginormous lodgepole pine or a ponderosa pine, I don't know which.
Back at the trailhead parking lot, we decided to boil up the rest of our hotdogs. Past instances (to be covered in a future post) of boiling water inside Ludwig in wintertime had proven problematic, so we set up our portable camp table and cooked outside. It was pretty warm the whole weekend, probably no colder than 30 degrees or so. A guy in a VW Vanagon Synchro Westfalia (a 4-wheel drive camper) stopped by and talked to us, and implied that we were crazy for taking a VW as old as ours on this road. I directed his attention to the chains. With them, we didn't think the road was all that bad, frankly.
This didn't turn out to be as spectacular as I'd hoped. On the way home, Melissa filmed me blasting Ludwig through some deepish puddles on the icy road.
Here are three of the many, many air-cooled VWs we saw when we lived in Southern California. SoCal is the center of the air-cooled VW universe, and a wide variety of models in a wide variety of conditions could be encountered on any trip of middling or longer length. As far as immaculate VWs go, we'd never seen so many before moving to Goleta, and certainly will never see so many again. For example, this is a splitty (1967 or earlier) single cab Type II spotted on some Godforsaken Orange County or Los Angeles County freeway. Notice that even though this is a major, eight-lanes-in-one direction road, traffic is at a complete standstill, a not infrequent condition of these "freeways". This is basically the same vehicle that 02McDonald and I drove from Lincoln (NE) to New York and back in July 2001, although in about a bazillion times better condition. I like the color of this one, and single cabs are a blast to drive, but I could do without the aftermarket wheels.
This is the road that I rode my bike to school on every day when I was a grad student at UCSB. It's a ten-minute walk from this spot to the beach, so this stretch of road was a perpetual impromptu parking lot. Sometimes RVs and cars would be parked along here for a week; presumably people were living in them. This later bay window Westy was a frequent inhabitant of the lot.
I don't know what possesses people to do crap like this. Actually, I have my suspicions. Taken along the beachfront in Santa Barbara.
