Re: TR: Summer of `74
Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 12:27 pm
July 7th 1974:
Left Meadow Mountain Lake about 9:00 a.m. and walked up to a pad and came down and had lunch at Whiskey Creek. Then we walked up to a pass and walked down and hit a road that wasn’t supposed to be here according to the map. Then we camped at a creek not knowing where we were, and it started to rain.
Memory is a strange thing. One of the memories that has always stayed with me from this trip is an image of a lunch stop, on the grassy banks of a little stream, where I can clearly remember mixing up my Wyler’s lemonade on a nice sunny day. It’s always been clear to me that his had to be somewhere around Tahoe, definitely not south of there, almost certainly not north of Donner Summit. And here it is – we had lunch at Whiskey Creek. Why that stuck so hard, I have no idea. Although it could be because it was the last pleasant thing to happen for several days.
John recalls that it wasn’t raining when we camped or when we went to sleep. We had had no rain at all on the trip thus far, and we threw down our gear in a meadow. It started to rain in the night. John, Tim and Matt were all on one tarp as groundsheet, and they threw their second tarp, intended to be the roof, over themselves when it started raining. I was on my own separate little groundsheet, and either I had actually set my tent fly up (I had just the fly from a one-person tent) before going to bed, or I took the trouble to get out of bed and set it up in the night. At any rate, it stayed up through the rainy night, and by morning my buddies were definitely wetter than I was. I had some rain coming in, but my bag was mostly still dry, as was most of my gear. I seem to recall that I had used clothespins to hang either a plastic garbage bag or my rain parka across the open front of my shelter, and that helped some. During the day the other guys propped up their roof with fishing poles to create some interior room, but it was pretty miserable over there.
July 8th, 1974
Woke up and it was still raining and my sleeping bag was soaked-through and matted. So decided to stay there and wait through the storm and hope it doesn’t last until tomorrow. In the sleeping bag I am cold and wet.
I don’t recall anything about that day, but I think I was a little drier than the other guys – so far.
July 9th, 1974
Today it was still raining, but we had to go somewhere so we packed up and left at 12:30 for Lake Tahoe. At Lake Tahoe we dried out our clothes and sleeping bags at the launder-mat. Then we went to A&W for some root-beers, Ice creams, papa burgers and French fries. Then we camped on the beach of Lake Tahoe.
My shelter luck ran out the second night, as the wind came up and my tent stakes pulled out of the now soggy ground sometime in the middle of the night, and I spent the rest of the night with my fly wrapped over me. By morning I was lying in a puddle. I was able to get the fly back up once it was light, but by then the deed was done.
For Lake Tahoe, read Tahoe City. By the time we left Barker Pass, we were completely soaked and all our gear was wet. Everything we had was wet – even the inside of my bag of M&M’s and peanuts was wet, as I discovered at the laundromat. I remember the colors from the M&M’s running all together. You haven’t lived until you have stuffed a truly soaking wet down sleeping bag into a stuffsack, squeezing the water out of it as you go. I have vivid memories of walking down the Barker Pass Road in the rain, in soaking wet jeans under rain pants, culverts overflowing onto the road. We just walked and walked, no point in stopping to rest in the pouring rain. When we got down to the lake, we walked along Highway 89. It would have been about 10 or 11 miles from Barker Pass to Tahoe City. At the laundromat, my hands had been so cold for so long that they were stiff, and I couldn’t get my damp money out of my wallet to put it in the change machine to get coins for the dryers. Matt had to get it out for me. I guess we pretty much took over that laundromat, the four of us with all our gear, sitting there in wet clothes until the first loads came out of the dryers, then changing into dry stuff so we could start another load. I have to think that A&W food tasted mighty good. I don’t suppose we could get away with camping on the beach at Tahoe City today!