Klamath River, CA
Elevation: 4,090ft.

The birds and the sun woke me up before my alarm. The room was quiet, the AC was loud and my blanket felt warmer and safer than anything I had ever felt before-VBRRRROOOM came a logging truck tearing up the hill behind our cabin and I was up. The alarm went off, Charles’ alarm went off, Matt’s alarm went off and a resounding round of “fuck” was exchanged. Starting up the stove, Matt boiled water for tea, Charles started packing his pack and I stayed lying in bed. Next door I could hear the girls stirring and I knew it was time. Spike 3.

Slamming the dusty tailgate of our white F150s we gathered around to look at our instructions for the week. The mission was to get to Yreka, have our radios looked at (again), then to head south towards Weaverville to make contact with the Shasta-Trinity National Forest Ranger and Dispatch. We were going to be spending this spike in a new forest and so we needed to establish check-in/check-out protocols and emergency protocols. Radios couldn’t be fixed (the tech didn’t have the right cord, not his fault, we are using Oregon radios in California) and Weaverville didn’t know what we were meeting them for. A hectic 3 hours of driving the winding roads between Northern California’s towns and a few confusing conversations with the Forest Service later and we were on our way to our first camp site. Thank god for driving days. It was already hot, our sore bodies weren’t really recovered from the last spike, we were all tired and it felt like, at least for me, we were starting with an already low moral. But one good thing about all of it that won’t ever change - it’s beautiful out here.

The goal was to stick together as a 6 person team for the first 3 plots and then to split into 3 person teams for the rest of the spike. It was always planned that we would function in 3 person groups but two spikes of working with 4-5 people (Kim joined us this spike making it 6) didn’t really prepare us (me) for the added pressure and labor.

Right off the bat Shasta-Trinity proved to be a different type of beast than I was prepared for. Over the course of the last two spikes I learned a lot of lessons concerning field work and field dress primarily because of the heat and the terrain. I had to give up on being clean, ditched the carhartts for breathable field pants and accepted the thorns and poison oak (that shit is just too hot for hiking up and down mountains) and lost the wool buff and used my face mask buff for my head instead. That was perhaps my biggest trade off. There exists a tree in Northern California that epitomizes suffering. Lithocarpus densiflorus (LIDE3) aka Tanoak. This tree grows dense and prolifically with multiple boles stemming from a central bole or from a pre-fire stump and it’s leaves near the ground can be spiky. But worst of all it’s leaves are coated in a fiberglass-like dust that will explode off into the air if you so much as brush the branches aside. Hiking through it we churn up clouds of this dust, so much that it sticks to our clothes making us appear fuzzy and yellow. You can imagine how his dust just burns our throats and eyes. But, because of the heat (hi 90s is the norm), we have all but abandoned our bandanas in exchange for air and not having a heat stroke. Anyways. Shasta-Trinity was filled with Tanoak and Poison Oak (Toxicodenron diversilobum aka TODI) and the slopes were near impossible to climb.

Pacing my breath, I grabbed LIDE3 and QUCH2 (Quercus chrysolepis) hand over hand to get up the slope. My task was to measure the woody fuel load along the top and bottom lines of our rectangular 30m x 15m plot. What this meant was categorizing all of the twigs, sticks and logs that the tape crossed into either 1, 10, 100 or 1,000 hour categories. This meant how long it would burn in a fire and how much it would help fuel the fire. For the most part this is a pain in the ass because you have to crawl along the ground over and under whatever is there and count each stick for 7.5m but sometimes the forest gods put you under a LIDE and on top of a massive pile.

Our first campsite was by far one of our best. Denny Campground was situated between the two tiny mountain towns Daily and Denny and was just a short walk down to a beautiful emerald pool formed by two gravel bars along the New River. On our last day there we gathered around the truck to gauge our water supply and to divide up trees for processing. But first, as was our usual custom when a stream was nearby, it was bath time. Taking off our clothes we joked around about our cuts and rashes and passed around the communal Tecnu bottle. It was then that Eleanor uttered my favorite quote of the season thusfar, “I hope the things on my legs aren’t- horse”. “Horse?” I asked looking at her like she was crazy. “Horse, there’s a horse”! I looked up and there trotting towards us through the dusky lught was a brown orse with white freckles on its face and chest. I was both panicked and awed.

His name, as we later learned from Lily who drove into Denny asking around if anyone had lost their horse, was Orion after the constellation. He was a free-range horse who’s owners let run loose during the day and he returned to their ranch at night. Denny was a town small enough and removed enough that that would actually work. Orion hung out with us for a bit as we worked and then we headed down for a cold refreshing bath.

It’s the random horses and the cool cool streams that keep me from burning out. It’s the small simple things like looking forward to breakfast for dinner after a nice bath that remind me why I chose to take the leap into this fied. Life if full of perspective and I have learned more in this month than I could have imagined. B for D!

We ended our last plot as a full team on a “hell plot”. From the topo maps and the information given to us about the plots from Alan we could only get a ballpark idea what the plot was actually going to look like. It was going to be a wet plot that burned in 1999, so big trees and a lot of brush. The topo map told us it would be a long, steep hike in and out and that the plot itself was on a steep slope.

Despite the hot day, the shit tone of LIDE3 and TODI and the exhaustive amounts of large trees we had to cut and carry out of the field (30) we kept our spirits and humor high.