Camp Nights 1-3
My personal challenge of 30 nights under the stars in 2010 has gotten off to a slow start. Between saving up for the my April New Mexico trip, and buying needed gear, I've not had much money. Not to mention the weather has not cooperated.
Just the same, I got one night in January, and so far, two in February. There is not too much to tell about them, as that they were all just quick car camps, and I even managed to leave the memory card to the camera at home for the last one.
In January I revisited Lake Trammel for the first time in years. Lake Trammel is a small lake south of Sweetwater. Only small boats are allowed on it, which makes for a more peaceful place to be. Or at least it used to.
I spent a lot of time at Lake Trammel as a child. We'd go odd weekends, or for a week at a time in the summer. Starting around eight years old, my father would throw the canoe in the water when we got to the lake, toss me a life jacket and say "Don't be back until dark." By foot and canoe I wandered all over that place.
Back then the city paid for a lake keeper to live on the lake and keep things in order. Don would drive around slowly on a four wheeler to empty trash barrels and check permits. As far back as I can remember he was the Lake Keeper. He kept the place clean, and the lake was a great, quiet place to camp. Officially swimming was prohibited, but if it was during the week, or there were only a few people around, he'd let me.
Of course time doesn't stop, and I grew up. Started working out of town and didn't have much time for camping. There was a brief time in 1998 that I was working in Snyder and would drive over to Trammel to fish all night on the weekends. And then for a while in 2000 I'd take a girl camping or go fishing, but damn, that was ten years ago. I'm pretty sure Don got cancer and died since then. The Lake Keeper house and bait shop are empty, and the lake is pretty trashed now. It has been hard in some ways to go back to see how the lake has become. Even when they had to drain the lake to repair the dam and it took eight years to refill, it was better than it is now.
It was with these thoughts and memories in my head I went back to Trammel in January to camp. I picked one of my favorite campsites near the back of the lake, where a creek feeds into it. Tall grove of oak trees, greenbriar, shinnery. Pretty much exactly like where I live now, but without the sand. It is a good place to get out of the wind, and used to be a remote part of the lake.
It is trashed now. Completely trashed. Bottles, cans, condoms, burnt foil everywhere, and the trees are scarred up from people hacking at them for wood. I spent a while cleaning it up a little and then set the tent up for the night.
As with all my photos on this blog, click them for a full sized version (and to surf all the other crap I've shot in the past.
Right before dark, a load of college kids showed up and were agitated that I was in their party spot. Two of them came to talk to me.
"Hi, I'm Ryan, and we go to school at TSTC, how are you."
"I'm Rowdy, good to meet you."
"You out here to do some fishing?"
"Nah, just getting out of the house for awhile, how about y'all?"
"Well... It is too expensive to drink it town, so we come out here. This is kinda our spot that the come to and the end of each week."
I look around at all the trash, "Yeah, I like what y'all have done to the place."
"We won't bother you tonight, its just that this has kinda become our spot."
I wanted to tell Ryan that I had been camping in this spot before he was born, and that right about he was standing I had a girl in my sleeping bag around the time that he stopped using crayons.
Instead I just asked, "So, how's school coming?"
Ryan and his friend were starting to realize that I was not going to move that night, or invite them to share the campsite, so they moved on down the creek. I could hear their music, but it wasn't too bad. They must have not brought much beer though, because they left at 8:45PM.
The rest of the night was pretty good. It got down into the low forties, and started raining around 3:00AM, but I was dry and warm. It was still raining in the morning, and it was a muddy mess outside. I read for an hour or two, but it didn't look like the rain was going to leave, so I finally packed up the wet muddy tent and called it good. Night one down.
Abilene State Park
In February I took a friend and his daughter for her first camp out in Abilene State Park. Abilene State Park is a tiny, and frankly, rather boring state park. I've only been there a couple of times, but Pliml thought it would be a good start for his daughter, Lara.
It had rained and snowed for the last week, but we were able to find a sunny, and fairly dry campsite. I brought my cheap red tent, and Pliml tried out a new cheap backpacking tent.
We showed Lara how to make a fire with only sparks, and I tossed some stuff on the fire to make colors.
We had the classic hotdogs over the fire, I put together foil packs of hamburger, onion, red bell pepper, carrots, potatoes, and spices and cooked them on the coals. And for the first time in my life, I made S'mores. (Hey, I was never a girl scout.)
Unfortunately, Lara's mat sprung a leak, and I let her use my self inflating mat. I'd brought along my queen sized air mattress that I never use when I'm alone, and never in winter (Yellowstone taught me that.) Pliml helped me air it up, and they went to bed while I sat by the fire, happy, but knowing that I would be cold sleeping on the air mat. It was 37F when I went to bed.
Around 1 AM I woke up freezing. I have a 15F sleeping bag, but the air mat sucked all the heat from me. I spent the rest of the night doing 50 crunches inside my mummy bag every hour for warmth. Finally, around 5:30 I got up and brought the fire back to life. Pliml and Lara snored off and on until around eight. She said she slept well, and was very warm all night.
I think the trip was successful, as that she wants to go again.
Lake Trammel, again.
Yesterday, I was able to get the night off from work. It was a last minute thing, and if it were not for the holiday time I would be losing soon, and for our staffing levels, it would have never happened. But late yesterday I was flying out the door for Trammel. Perfect timing too. The weather has been warm and sunny this week. days in the 60s, nights in the 40s. The forecast for my next days off are crap, so this really worked out for me.
Being that it was a Friday night, I wanted to find a more secluded spot than my last trip to trammel. I checked on a couple of my old favorite spots, but seeing the trash in them made me sad. I just about had settled on one spot, and was getting ready to pull the tent out when someone down the creek cranked up their radio. Off I went to another find a better spot.
For the next hour I drove around looking a new campsite. Nearly got the car stuck at least three times, and going down a oil lease road, was sure that I was going to spend the night camping next to my car in a spot I couldn't get out of in the morning. I'm not exactly new to that though. Once upon a time I had a tiny three cylinder Geo Metro that I would take into places it had no business being. More than once I'd have to take everything (including spare tire) out of the car to make it over rocks (to the point that I would bounce in the car to help "hop" over them.)
At one point yesterday I realized that I might need my little toyota to make a couple more years, so I got out to hike out the next stretch of road/trail before committing my car to it. Coming over a little hill I could see what looked like cattle grazing off the side of the oil lease road on the other side of what used to be a reserve pit on a rig location. I dropped down off the hill and walked towards the animals, with the berm of the reserve pit between us. There shouldn't have been any cattle there, and there were not. With the wind in my face, I climbed over the berm and there were ten or eleven feral hogs. The smallest was about 60lbs, the largest over 200lbs. I stood there awhile watching them before they noticed me. Finally one saw me and they ran off. I had been less than 25 feet from them.
After some more hiking I found a way to get the car back on better roads without tearing it up, though it was close in places. I didn't get the tent up until after dark, and I left the rain fly off. Spent the rest of the night bouncing between reading and lying in the tent stargazing. I woke up around 5AM, with a new set of stars to look at. It felt a bit funny knowing that my coworkers were still at work, with an hour left, when I had spent the entire night alone and quiet.
It never dropped below 50F last night.
Just the same, I got one night in January, and so far, two in February. There is not too much to tell about them, as that they were all just quick car camps, and I even managed to leave the memory card to the camera at home for the last one.
In January I revisited Lake Trammel for the first time in years. Lake Trammel is a small lake south of Sweetwater. Only small boats are allowed on it, which makes for a more peaceful place to be. Or at least it used to.
I spent a lot of time at Lake Trammel as a child. We'd go odd weekends, or for a week at a time in the summer. Starting around eight years old, my father would throw the canoe in the water when we got to the lake, toss me a life jacket and say "Don't be back until dark." By foot and canoe I wandered all over that place.
Back then the city paid for a lake keeper to live on the lake and keep things in order. Don would drive around slowly on a four wheeler to empty trash barrels and check permits. As far back as I can remember he was the Lake Keeper. He kept the place clean, and the lake was a great, quiet place to camp. Officially swimming was prohibited, but if it was during the week, or there were only a few people around, he'd let me.
Of course time doesn't stop, and I grew up. Started working out of town and didn't have much time for camping. There was a brief time in 1998 that I was working in Snyder and would drive over to Trammel to fish all night on the weekends. And then for a while in 2000 I'd take a girl camping or go fishing, but damn, that was ten years ago. I'm pretty sure Don got cancer and died since then. The Lake Keeper house and bait shop are empty, and the lake is pretty trashed now. It has been hard in some ways to go back to see how the lake has become. Even when they had to drain the lake to repair the dam and it took eight years to refill, it was better than it is now.
It was with these thoughts and memories in my head I went back to Trammel in January to camp. I picked one of my favorite campsites near the back of the lake, where a creek feeds into it. Tall grove of oak trees, greenbriar, shinnery. Pretty much exactly like where I live now, but without the sand. It is a good place to get out of the wind, and used to be a remote part of the lake.
It is trashed now. Completely trashed. Bottles, cans, condoms, burnt foil everywhere, and the trees are scarred up from people hacking at them for wood. I spent a while cleaning it up a little and then set the tent up for the night.
As with all my photos on this blog, click them for a full sized version (and to surf all the other crap I've shot in the past.
Right before dark, a load of college kids showed up and were agitated that I was in their party spot. Two of them came to talk to me.
"Hi, I'm Ryan, and we go to school at TSTC, how are you."
"I'm Rowdy, good to meet you."
"You out here to do some fishing?"
"Nah, just getting out of the house for awhile, how about y'all?"
"Well... It is too expensive to drink it town, so we come out here. This is kinda our spot that the come to and the end of each week."
I look around at all the trash, "Yeah, I like what y'all have done to the place."
"We won't bother you tonight, its just that this has kinda become our spot."
I wanted to tell Ryan that I had been camping in this spot before he was born, and that right about he was standing I had a girl in my sleeping bag around the time that he stopped using crayons.
Instead I just asked, "So, how's school coming?"
Ryan and his friend were starting to realize that I was not going to move that night, or invite them to share the campsite, so they moved on down the creek. I could hear their music, but it wasn't too bad. They must have not brought much beer though, because they left at 8:45PM.
The rest of the night was pretty good. It got down into the low forties, and started raining around 3:00AM, but I was dry and warm. It was still raining in the morning, and it was a muddy mess outside. I read for an hour or two, but it didn't look like the rain was going to leave, so I finally packed up the wet muddy tent and called it good. Night one down.
Abilene State Park
In February I took a friend and his daughter for her first camp out in Abilene State Park. Abilene State Park is a tiny, and frankly, rather boring state park. I've only been there a couple of times, but Pliml thought it would be a good start for his daughter, Lara.
It had rained and snowed for the last week, but we were able to find a sunny, and fairly dry campsite. I brought my cheap red tent, and Pliml tried out a new cheap backpacking tent.
We showed Lara how to make a fire with only sparks, and I tossed some stuff on the fire to make colors.
We had the classic hotdogs over the fire, I put together foil packs of hamburger, onion, red bell pepper, carrots, potatoes, and spices and cooked them on the coals. And for the first time in my life, I made S'mores. (Hey, I was never a girl scout.)
Unfortunately, Lara's mat sprung a leak, and I let her use my self inflating mat. I'd brought along my queen sized air mattress that I never use when I'm alone, and never in winter (Yellowstone taught me that.) Pliml helped me air it up, and they went to bed while I sat by the fire, happy, but knowing that I would be cold sleeping on the air mat. It was 37F when I went to bed.
Around 1 AM I woke up freezing. I have a 15F sleeping bag, but the air mat sucked all the heat from me. I spent the rest of the night doing 50 crunches inside my mummy bag every hour for warmth. Finally, around 5:30 I got up and brought the fire back to life. Pliml and Lara snored off and on until around eight. She said she slept well, and was very warm all night.
I think the trip was successful, as that she wants to go again.
Lake Trammel, again.
Yesterday, I was able to get the night off from work. It was a last minute thing, and if it were not for the holiday time I would be losing soon, and for our staffing levels, it would have never happened. But late yesterday I was flying out the door for Trammel. Perfect timing too. The weather has been warm and sunny this week. days in the 60s, nights in the 40s. The forecast for my next days off are crap, so this really worked out for me.
Being that it was a Friday night, I wanted to find a more secluded spot than my last trip to trammel. I checked on a couple of my old favorite spots, but seeing the trash in them made me sad. I just about had settled on one spot, and was getting ready to pull the tent out when someone down the creek cranked up their radio. Off I went to another find a better spot.
For the next hour I drove around looking a new campsite. Nearly got the car stuck at least three times, and going down a oil lease road, was sure that I was going to spend the night camping next to my car in a spot I couldn't get out of in the morning. I'm not exactly new to that though. Once upon a time I had a tiny three cylinder Geo Metro that I would take into places it had no business being. More than once I'd have to take everything (including spare tire) out of the car to make it over rocks (to the point that I would bounce in the car to help "hop" over them.)
At one point yesterday I realized that I might need my little toyota to make a couple more years, so I got out to hike out the next stretch of road/trail before committing my car to it. Coming over a little hill I could see what looked like cattle grazing off the side of the oil lease road on the other side of what used to be a reserve pit on a rig location. I dropped down off the hill and walked towards the animals, with the berm of the reserve pit between us. There shouldn't have been any cattle there, and there were not. With the wind in my face, I climbed over the berm and there were ten or eleven feral hogs. The smallest was about 60lbs, the largest over 200lbs. I stood there awhile watching them before they noticed me. Finally one saw me and they ran off. I had been less than 25 feet from them.
After some more hiking I found a way to get the car back on better roads without tearing it up, though it was close in places. I didn't get the tent up until after dark, and I left the rain fly off. Spent the rest of the night bouncing between reading and lying in the tent stargazing. I woke up around 5AM, with a new set of stars to look at. It felt a bit funny knowing that my coworkers were still at work, with an hour left, when I had spent the entire night alone and quiet.
It never dropped below 50F last night.
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