Red Slide, It’s Been Forty Years

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, January 14-16 2014 Red Slide CA.

Sliding Down the Red Slide

This is three days of stuff, so there are a lot of photos, and I just couldn’t cut them down much, so this is a bit long.

It’s been about forty years since I last slid down the slide, called Red Slide, a bit younger then. So when John invited me up to his hunting camp for a few days, I jumped at it, as his camp was real close to Red Slide, which is a place I hiked in my late twenties, I believe it was, sorta in the old days.

So at noon on Tuesday, we met at Ray’s house and I followed Ray and John for the hour and a half ride to Red Slide, out Mill Creek Road to a locked gate where we entered a real scenic road to his camp area. The property here is all private, with several locked gates to go though.

Here we are at the main gate. I’m following Ray and John in, in my van.

We crossed several creeks.

This is another one of them. If it rains hard, you get locked in by the high water.

Still heading on in.

This was my first view of Red Slide as we headed on in.

A bit closer to Red Slide.

We arrived at John’s camp around two, the frost had just melted for the day.

First thing we did was cut a little fire wood and bring it back to camp. My back was hurting a bit, so I mostly watched Ray and John do most of the work.

I walked around the area of John’s camp a bit as they were setting up there stuff. Nothing to set up when you have a van.

I walked though this forested area. Lot’s of acorns falling and some pig sign too.

That night we had our dinner and got the outside fire going where we sat until it got too cold and we retired to his tent that had a wood stove in it. His camp was in a frosty area.

The next morning I woke up to John’s truck starting around nine AM. John had been out hunting by himself early and he had to go pick up the wild pig he shot. Time for me to get up.

Here’s John preparing to process his kill.

Now that the meat was hanging, we could forget about hunting and do our hike up to the slide, so we started off around noon heading for the slide. Of course that meant we had to hike to the top of this mountain.

Here we are just after starting off on the hike. I’m following these two guys.

This is another mountain in the area called Rocky Mountain, which will be some more hikes, someday.

And here is the Red Slide as we were hiking up to it. We had to go around the left side to hit the ridge to get on up there.

A lot of the upper trail looked like this. We huffed and we puffed. :O)

This is the top of the mountain, almost there. Huff, huff.

See that down there? That’s where we are going.

Yes, right down there. We’d all been on this slide before in our lives, but not together, so we knew it could be done.

Here we are at the edge of the top, contemplating how to get down since we hadn’t been up here for over forty years, Ray and I haven’t anyway.

John took off first, Ray was thinking about it. Things weren’t quite as we remembered it.

OK, you guys with replaced hips. Ray has one and some knee problems and older bones, but that’s him in the white shirt. See John, way on down there?

Interesting enough, even though it was going down below freezing here at night, the slide had a lot of these blooming wild flowers on it, growing in the rock

It’s rather steep, with loose rocks. The loose rocks make this all possible, as they slide down the hill with you.

I’m just catching up with Ray and John.

John’s about ten years younger than Ray and I so he was watching out for us most of the time, although we didn’t need him to, thankfully. Down we go.

This is looking back up the slide to get an idea of it’s steepness.

We made it down without breaking our necks. The bottom part after the slide part was quite hard on us as our legs were mostly done in from coming down the slide, so it was slow and a a bit hard on us and we were a puffing. We had about an hour to get back to camp, before it got dark, so we had to keep moving.

It wasn’t too long before we passed this wild boar and the buck up in the background. Wow, there’s a lot of critters out today.

Ok, to be honest, they are targets by a cabin for archery practice. :O)

We made it back to camp just at dark, about a six hour hike.

Of course it was happy hour and we were all in need of some pain meds for our hurts. Maybe John, not so much.

This is our camp fire that night where we relived our day. John was impressed that Ray and I made it at our age and maybe a little relieved also that he didn’t have to pack us out.

It’s not a hike you can take just anybody on, for sure.

That night I was sitting in my van when a leg ham cramp started in my right leg. Ouch, ouch. That lasted about five minutes and I was thankful that the left leg hadn’t’ gone off too.

About ten minutes later the left leg went off and that one too lasted about five minutes before it stopped. That was real painful, but I had asked for it. I was sure hoping that those nasty ol cramps wouldn’t revisit me after that and they didn’t. Ouch, just thinking about it. :O)

That night was real cold, maybe in the twenties. This is what the camp looked like when I finally got it going that morning, frost on the ground, big time.

My sore back was feeling a lot better after all the action it got coming down the slide when I got up this morning, which was good as I wasn’t sure what it was going to feel like after the slide.

We broke camp around noon and headed on out. we stopped at Devil creek to look at some rehab work they were doing on the creek to improve the Coho salmon habitat.

Yes, this is one of the areas that the salmon and steelhead that I see coming up the river come to spawn every year. Fish raised in this kind of environment get a chance to learn to survive, something most hatchery fish don’t get. A fish has to learn to survive if it wants to make it in the ocean without just being something else’s food. The other day a biologist told me they were planting some of the hatchery Coho salmon in places like this, so they could learn to survive and return to the area to spawn.

Here is Ray checking out the creek.