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For the FYI file, 'Baby Ruths' do not float. I did a buoyancy test years ago. And, 'Hershisers' are curve balls............

We used to pack mules into the Pasayten wilderness. One year my packing buddy and I were Mule deer hunting in there and when we got up it was snowing hard and when we met back up at noon at camp there was about 3 feet of snow on the ground and no let up. We struck camp and loaded the mules and bucked about 4 feet of snow over the pass to get back to the Chewack river. I believe the area we was in was called Spanish camp. Big open high country. Fun times.

I got to spend the day with my youngest son today, in an area that we've camped, hunted, and fished for about 50 years (he's 52 now)and it was a great outing, bringing back many memories of adventures past. We left early this morning for an area east of Manning Park, and just north of Washington State's Passayten Wilderness. This is on the east side of the Cascades, so much drier terrain than the coastal side, where I live. Although it's a long weekend here in BC (Canada Day), we only encountered 2 camps in over 60 km of logging roads and trails, and only 3 or 4 trucks on the roads, so pretty much had a vast area to ourselves. The highlight was making it in to the remote campsite on Placer Lake via 4 km of challenging 4x4 trail, which my son hadn't seen since he was about 8. The H3 handled the rough trail easily, and we had our lunch there before heading out onto more of the 100's of km of logging and mining roads in those mountains. In the past I've seen many mule deer and bears in the area, even a couple of moose and a mountain goat, but today all we saw was 1 grouse, a few chipmunks, and some ground squirrels. The only glitch for the day was the H3 refusing to start after turning it off at one of the viewpoints, 20 km from pavement. It would crank over, but not fire up. This is only the second time it's happened in the 3 years I've owned it, but I know the cure to bypass this anti-theft feature, known as "passlock" , so a little patience got it going again. The trick is to turn the key on to power, but not start, wait at least 10 minutes, then turn to start, and it runs. Apparently, many GM vehicles are prone to this glitch as they age, so it's annoying, but not too hard to overcome. WE were back home at 9:30, after stopping in Hope for a nice dinner, tired and dusty, but happy to have had the day out together.

I went out Saturday afternoon to check out the location of a decades old sighting right in my city. The location is a large regional park that encompasses a mountain that is bordered by farms on the west and south sides, some light industry on the east side, and the Fraser River on the north side. The park covers much of the crest of the mountain, and the entire mountain is about 10km e/w and 5km n/s. The park itself is heavily forested in mature second growth timber and has a network of old logging roads and more recent mountain bike trails. The sighting story involves a small group of Cub Scouts who were on a camp out near a small lake on the mountain top. They were playing a game of hide and seek in the forest a few hundred meters from the campsite when they noticed that another being had joined in the game. They described the new player as a hair covered person about 5' tall, who would peek out from behind a stump or tree, then disappear, to show up again behind another bush or stump. This apparently went on for 15 minutes or so, before finally leaving the game for good. The weather was cool and damp for my trip up there, after weeks of extremely hot and dry conditions, so visibility was limited near the summit by a combination of clouds and smoke from forest fires in the nearby mountains. There were only a few vehicles in the park, probably bike riders using the trails that lace the area, as seen in the map screenshot below. I spent several hours driving and walking the old roads, but found no tracks or other evidence, but did spot a nice healthy looking blacktail deer, a young buck with his antlers just emerging in velvet, about 4" long, shorter than his ears. The orange line on the Gaia screenshot is my route, and the white dotted lines are the bike trails.