Last month we returned to one of my favorite camp spots, Sugar Pine Reservoir. Tucked up in the mountains near Foresthill it's got everything a summer heart could desire: warm piney air, water to swim in and a thousand stars to try and peek behind. It's also a great place to stage a 3-day tin can massacre if you happen to have an arsenal of Red Ryders...
(This summer brought to you by the advice of Will Rogers.)
Said advice is also being helped along by a golden jambox emitting the perfect sounds for fleeing the city with the windows down, drinking micheladas around a campfire and pontificating suicide vs. Suicide (and it's impact on Springsteen's Nebraska). In accordance with Camp Rules, there was most definitely no fucking (comma) complaining.
There was, however, a great deal of this throughout the weekend.
And a not insubstantial amount of this as well.
Sugar Pine even has a little island you can swim out to. It's like heaven for the simple pleasures.
One of those pleasures being a campsite remote enough that you can have 3 Red Ryders, a handgun and pump action rifle all throwing BBs at the same time.
By the second night our set up was amazing. Shatterblast disks, tin can pyramids, water bottles in the trees and a camp skillet way off on a branch. There is no sound quite so rewarding as the glorious metallic "ping" of a BB hitting its target.
BB guns may have consumed most of our energy, but no good trip is complete without a bit of knife or hatchet action.
Lest we should forget, there was also a crazy huge fire raging in the area. Every time the wind would shift, a haze of smoke would cross the sky and give everything an unreal amber sort of filter. Coupled with the incredible lack of people for a summer weekend (much of the area having been evacuated) and the occasional chopper grabbing water from the reservoir, it was a bit like our own personal Apocalypse Now. Not to mention that we arrived on Friday the 13th and probably only staved off a full scale Zombie Apocalypse Now through our continuous shooting and a healthy dose of chair flinging.
We also consistently killed it at dinner making. Somewhere in there I bet Alanna's got the pictures to prove it. She's also got photos showing that there were in fact women on this trip, something I managed not to document. Go figure.
Then all of a sudden it's time to pack it all up and head for the city. The trip home is never without a tinge of sadness but a sandwich at Worton's in Foresthill helps ease the suffering.
Their parking lot also claims one of the best views in Northern California, hands down.
Even when viewed through a lens of wildfire smoke.
There's also a secret spot I keep tucked away for just those times when the traffic starts to grind and you wish all that golden daylight wasn't being wasted on a return to civilization.
A few more beers, another hour of bare feet on grass and crickets singing in the air.
Just don't let your heart burst while the sun goes down and the warm breeze plays over your face and you can't help but think if things ended right then and there, it'd be kind of perfect. Or maybe you just have on keep on running til you catch that feeling one more time.
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Gotta get out while we're young? Its been a summer of yearning for perpetual adventure and this gem only made it worse, in the best way possible. One of these days we'll get back up there but in the meantime, you should go see for yourself what I'm always rambling about. It's a 3 hour drive to Giant Gap campground but with good company and ample tunes the pavement flies right on by and if the going gets really rough you can take a detour off to Plainfield Station. All I'll say about that particular roadhouse is that it's on County Road 98 in Woodland and if you make the effort to find it, you deserve every magical moment you spend there.