Sunday and Monday October 2,3, 2022 Traveling to Last Chance Creek, CA.
We left about 10:30 and met on the road to take off on our trip. After traveling about two hours we pulled over here in a wild bird refuse just past Williams CA. for a break.
Downieville camp spot
We planned to make our first night’s camp near Downieville CA., so we continued on to Downieville. I was headed to my uncle’s old mining claim on some narrow dirt roads just outside of Downieville. I didn’t remember exactly where his claim was or just how bad these narrow roads were if you met another rig.
We traveled the narrow dirt roads making a couple wrong turns and weren’t real sure where we were when we stopped here to walk down this road to check it out a ways. It was getting late in the day so we wanted to make camp and it didn’t need to be at my uncle’s old place. We drove down this road about 200 feet and stopped to camp for the night on the road.
Day 1 camp
This was the first place we found to turn around on the road and figured it will work for the night as not too many people travel these roads.
Local guy
We were sitting there on the road in our chairs when a guy in a Jeep drove up so I waved him down to talk as I wanted to know where exactly we were. It turned out we were on the right road and he was headed to his claim which was near my uncle’s old claim. I say old claim as he has passed on.
We also asked about getting gas in Downieville, but there no longer is a gas place there so he told us where the next gas place was up the road where we were going. We had plenty of gas but while out exploring one needs to keep the tanks as full as possible, just in case.
Anyway we spent a good night there and the next day we headed out down that one line road hoping we wouldn’t run into another rig. We didn’t and continued on our trip to get gas.
Out of gas
Well, that place was out of gas and wouldn’t get any for two days so we inquired about the next place that was about 20 mile up the road near where we were heading.
They had gas here and we didn’t mind waiting our turn.
Now we were set to head for our day 2 camp spot at Last Chance Creek, about an hour north of the place we got gas, Sierraville CA.
This is the big valley we traveled north on after getting gas.
There were some big cattle ranches out here.
Map check
My GPS was acting up so we stopped here to fix that and look at our maps as we weren’t exactly sure where exactly we were going, except it was at Last Chance Creek in the forest.
We continued up the valley.
And eventually left the valley and headed into the forest.
Last Chance Creek
We arrived at the creek and now had to locate a place to camp so we tried several side roads that we though might take us down to the creek.
This road dead ended so we turned around and went to a spot we’d checked out earlier and thought would work for camp 2.
Camp spot 2
This camp spot on the creek was just about perfect. We set up camp and sat down for a break.
Crawfish trap
There’s a big beaver pond right in front of us. Marty put out a crawfish trap here to see if we can catch any of the little critters.
And a trail cam
Marty also put out a trail cam pointing out on the water to see if we can catch any beaver at night.
We plan to spend a day or two on this creek exploring it, looking around a bit and likely changing camp spots.
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.
Mud bugs. Probably pretty tasty up there, not so much on our old ranch.
Nice out of the way spot.