Bumping Camping
Scott Mclean
More on camping.
I’ll touch on trips to Deep Creek and Conrad Meadows.
I’ll start with Deep Creek.
We would go from there to the old Copper City mine site. There were a few buildings still standing when I was young. Steve, myself, and whoever was with us, be it our cousins Tim and Terri or another family of friends from Selah would want to play in the old buildings. Our parents discouraged this and definitely forbade the old mineshaft! For some reason they thought we might do something stupid and dangerous.
We always went in the pool on the downhill side of the road at camp. Deep Creek feels about two degrees above ice!
There were always trips to Lilly Lake for swimming or Granite Lake for fishing. Sandy and I camped up at Granite Lake and fished one time with Grandpa Sorenson.
Sometimes we would go up to the old Lookout site at Miners Ridge. Still a great scenic view over Cougar Valley and miles of wilderness.
editors note:
I still remember Kyle peeing off of Miners Ridge, and watching navy planes fly through the valley below.
Back at camp, we kids thought it was mandatory to shower off under the culvert at Deep Creek. Instant headache and shivering!
Now for more of the mischief. One camping trip included the friends from Selah. They had gotten into making homemade pop using syrups. Tasted awful and had no carbonation.
Steve and I found a game trail at the edge of camp and decided to scare whatever was using it. There was a substantial sapling hanging over the trail. We bent it back and devised a tripwire system with fishing line.
For some reason we decided it was wise to tie a softball sized rock to the end of the branch. I don’t know if we had visions of bagging an animal or something.
My older sister and the oldest girl in the friends family had ticked us off with bad attitudes, and somehow piles of deer crap got in their sleeping bags. Never wise to tick us off! Some time after dark we heard a blood curdling screech from the area of our boobytrap. What we got sometimes had the disposition of an old bear but was nominally human. The father in our friends family had walked out to relieve himself and inadvertently tripped our boobytrap. The rock on the end of the branch had sprung out and hit him right between the legs.
He kept yelling in a higher pitch and the other adults went to see what was happening. About that time, the two teenage girls found the deer droppings in their sleeping bags. Steve and I made ourselves scarce for a while, knowing we would be the prime suspects.
I went on enough on this one that I will handle Conrad in another story. Until then I will leave you wondering why Tim and I decided to make a raft on the river a few hundred yards above the falls.
More later!