Bob's Eyes

Exploring the Last Chance Creek Area In Northern CA.

Posted on October 5, 2022 by Bob

Tuesday October 4, 2022 Last Chance Creek, Northern CA.

Posted two blogs today. The first one is below this one if you want to read in order.

Explore day

This is where we woke this morning overlooking a beaver pond.

Fishing

Marty decided he’d try some fishing so he got out his stuff and put it together to try his luck, he wasn’t sure there were any fish in the beaver pond.

Marty fishing away.

Caught one

In a short time he was surprised he had a decent size eating fish on.

He decided to have it for dinner and cleaned it when it slipped out of his hand and back into the water. He was able to get it to shore with the tip of his fishing pole.

Sitting around camp

That’s what we did, just sat around shooting the bull about old times and making plans to explore this area.

It would have been easy just sitting there all day, so I finally said we need to be on the road exploring by one. We make it by 12:30.

We were interested in the creek so we drove down any road we could find off the main road and explored, looking for camp spots and just looking around trying to check out the cheek.

Down this one

This is the first road we checked out headed towards the creek.

It went on down through here to the creek but there was no camp spot.

Map check

We drove up the main road looking for stuff and stopped here to have a look at the maps. There were a lot of big meadows in this area that the creek ran down through.

Dead end road

This road looked promising so we took it to this spot where it was blocked just ahead and no near by the creek.

Break spot

We got turned around and I said to Marty we’ll stop for a break on the way out on this road in the shade under some trees and look at the map and decide what to do next.

Tonight’s camp spot

We decided to go on back to the same place we’d camped and, well, camp.

It was only a few miles back up the road so we did that.

A walk along the creek

While Marty was fixing his fish for dinner I went for a walk down along the edge of the creek to have a look around.

The first part of the walk, there were lot’s of beaver dams backing up the water until I got to this one. It was about six feet high, but below it there were no more dams for awhile so there was less water.

Crawfish area

We didn’t catch a single crawfish by our camp in the beaver pond last night. But this area below the last beaver dam is more what we were looking for to camp by to catch them. The water is only about a foot deep with lots of small rocks on it’s bottom.

Marty had camped up here years ago and said the place he camped was just full of the little critters, but he can’t remember just where that spot was.

We just have to find a camp spot by the creek that has these same conditions which we will try to find tomorrow during our exploring and continuing on up the road.

I walked down the creek to here to this open area then turned back and headed to camp.

I stopped to look at this last beaver pond that had a six foot high dam. Lots of water.

I gave Marty a report of my walk and he said his fish was cooked to perfection.

Day’s end

We sat around our camp here until just before dark and called it a nice day of exploring.

Nice day.

We are crossing into Nevada in a bit.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged last chance creek trip | 1 Comment

Marty and I Take Off On Our Camping Trip, Day 1and 2

Posted on October 5, 2022 by Bob

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.