Checking Springs, Fixing One For Water, and Some Exploring the Creek

Saturday June 10, 2023 Plumas National Forest CA.

Posted 4 blogs today

Beaver lodge

First thing this morning I walked up the creek about a hundred yards to this spot to retrieve the game cam I set out last night. I think those big rocks have a beaver den under them as I hear one under there splashing every time I come by and I’ve seen it out in the water here just about every time I come by.

 

The game cam didn’t didn’t get anything though.

Repairing an old spring to get some water

We drove on over the short distance to this old tank that was fed by an old spring they tapped for the cabin that is just down from this watering tank.

 

The pipe from the spring that fed that watering tank was broking off about two inches above the ground and the water was running out on the ground, so it was a bit too hard for us to get into our water containers.

This is the old cabin that I think is what the government forest workers call a guard station, or work cabin. It’s in fairly good shape but doesn’t appear to be used much. That tank is part of the spring water system for the cabin but doesn’t appear to be used any more.

 

We needed some way to  hook into the broken off plastic water pipe that was supposed to feed that water tank up on the cabin side, so I hunted around the yard to see if I could find something that would work.

On skids

This old building is on skids and was likely from the old logging days around here as we saw some more of these in some of the other old places we’ve seen around the area.

 

There’s a bunch of horse shoes and that big ring was to hook something to the cabin to pull it around. There wasn’t much laying around this place to fix stuff. I suspect this cabin was a work shop and the stuff I needed was inside, but it was locked up tight and I wasn’t about to break into it so I kept looking around some more in the yard.

 

I found these two pieces of plastic pipe which might fit inside the broken off plastic pipe at the metal tank so I packed them up to the tank to see if we could do anything with them to fix the broken pipe.

 

The little black pipe fit inside the broken pipe but was too loose, but the other black pipe with the stripe on it just barely fit and it was perfect for the job and sealed right up with no clamp or anything.

We got water

We got the water to flow  into this pipe from the broken off pipe in back of this tank.

 

Pure clean water

We filled up all our empty water containers and had a good drink too.

 

We left the new pipe long enough to fill water containers and long enough to put back in the tank so wild critters can get a nice drink of water at the tank. The tank was full of rain water when we got there, but will soon be full of nice fresh spring water. I also left a fresh tin can for a good drink of water for anyone that might come by, although, it didn’t look like anyone was taking care of this spring anymore, except us.

 

The water from this spring was excellent and I gave it a 10 our of ten.

Looking for Murdock’s Spring

After a good break from all the work, we drove across the road looking for another big spring that was listed on the map as Murdock’s Spring.

It took some time to hunt this one down but we finally located it. This old spring has this cement tank likely to water animals as the tap wasn’t very sanitary.

 

The one for people was likely here under those boards and fenced in, not working any more.

 

The spring we fixed the pipe at, was much better than this one.

Creek access point

The next thing we wanted to do today was see if we could find one last creek access point we found on the map so drove on down by this meadow to look for it.

 

There were some big meadows down here the creek flowed through.

 

We found the access spot by the creek that we were looking for. We’ll come back someday when there isn’t so much water in the creek.

 

We were at the end of the road, so turned around and headed on back to our base camp about six miles up the creek from here.

 

It started to rain and hail on the way back and shortly after we got back to our camp spot it started to thunder and it rained up until it started to get dark.

Nice day.