This is a special place to my Dad.
This is a place he's been visiting for more than 30 years. As such, I've used names we've given to local landmarks or redacted the names of places that might be too revealing.
Please, if you know the locations shown here, I encourage you to enjoy them as much as I did - and follow my lead by not mentioning their names or locations in order to keep them a little less well-known, and special.
For more on my approach, you can read Do you have a GPX for that?.
There's no camp site more special than the one I visit with Dad every year in the Sierra. I've been going for a lot less time than he has - he assures me that I'm gaining in age, though we both know who the ancient one is - but we've both come to really enjoy the time we spend there each summer.
It was a shock then, when we found our favorite spot inaccessible last summer! With 459 trees down over the road - some of them more than 4 feet in diameter - there was no way we could clear them all, and we resolved ourselves to a backup site. Still good, but not the wonderland we wanted.
In a stroke of luck, we ran into the USFS road crew on our way home. After exchanging contact info, six weeks later we got word that they'd cleared the road! Immediately, we made plans to visit the following week.
Just before we were going to head down, I got a call from Pops. He was worried about smoke from the Garnet Fire making camp unpleasant and so - 15 minutes before I was set to start my 18-hour drive down - he bailed!
I still went, Solo in the Sierra, and spent a day cleaning up a dozen trees in camp. I wonder now, if that was his dastardly evil master plan all along. If it was, it was brilliant.
This year, we're going to try again to both get to camp. Hopefully, it will be a Sierra Redemption!
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, this trip is coming soon...Consider subscribing to be notified when it's here!