The town defies the laws of physics with it’s street-front porches and barns that lean. It’s country dilapidated; being once a bustling source of gold and lumber in the sixties. Now, due to lack of jobs, it’s a town of biologists mainly studying salmon, or retirees that don’t mind the cold.
In the winter, the roads close, so no one goes in and no one comes out. It’s a hunker down, canned goods, generator operated, hunter and gatherer bitch of a winter, but its the kind of thing that a hearty soul like most that live there can handle. Although some still leave in travel trailers for smoother tides before the everlasting winter rears it’s ugly head.
We went straight through the town and into the mountains. Passing cars on the narrow road is a game of survival of the fittest. One side is a mountain face and the other is a three hundred foot drop to the river below.
There’s three completely different habitats there. In the shadier areas there’s a rain forest, there’s a normal forest where the sun shines, and a desert atop the peaks.
The land is ripe with grapes, blackberries and elderberries, and teeming with game like deer, bear, quail, grouse and dove, or so we thought.
On the left side of the river and across the road from camp, up a mountainside littered with half-burnt pine trees (from a wildfire a few years back), poison oak, loose rock and shale, is the spot I chose from last year. Trudging through is the hardest part because the steepness varies in grades and it only gets worse the higher you climb. Some of the time I had to run on the balls of my feet and catch a pine tree to anchor myself, with my pack and my .270.
Even though its difficult to climb, there’s worn deer trails with week old scat and tracks, and a prominent bear trail with a few days old scat. These trails criss-cross up the whole face of the mountain.
Opening Day at 7:00 AM, I was up and slipping into my Gulch Gear, of which the owner of the company happened to be a friend of Dustin’s dad and was with us on the trip. He gave me the camoflague in the Inceptor style, which has a more desert look to it, but blends well into all terrains, even though it wouldn’t seem that way. It blends into the Oak and Pine habitat surrounding us particularly well.
I went up the mountain, with Dustin, taking four or five steps up and stopping to look around and make sure we weren’t spooking anything.
Halfway up to our spot, I saw something move about a hundred yards ahead of me. It was the brown ass end of something, moving behind the trees. I stopped suddenly and watched a cinnamon colored black bear walk out into the open. There weren’t any cubs trailing it, and it was much bigger than the legal fifty pounds. My heart started pounding adrenaline through my body, and I was excited and terrified at the same time. I dropped to my knees, sliding down the mountain a little, and waited as Dustin raised his rifle, I watched him wait until the bear was in full stride for an open shot at his heart and lungs, with my ears plugged. Then he took it and silence filled the air. The bear dropped and rolled, and almost immediately, Dustin chambered another round that just so happened to jam in his gun.
Our reloads were crimped wrong, since the dies were set for the nickle plated brass ones Dustin’s dad used, and we used the same die on his brass. All of our reloads were crimped wrong, we found that out a few months back when we tested them at a hundred yards. His dad’s gun jammed, and then mine, and Dustin cut his hand opening my bolt to get the round out, and sprayed blood all over my action. We forgot about it of course, and it didn’t get cleaned again until we left for this trip.
While Dustin was struggling to open his bolt, I watched the bear get up and run.
The deal was, if anybody heard a shot they had to turn on their radios to listen to the shooter announce whether it was a miss or not. In a shaky voice, I told Dustin’s dad and brother that he shot a bear.
They came up ten minutes later to begin following the blood trail. We found the initial shot, where there was a spot of dark blood and tissue sprayed across the mountainside, and where the bullet pierced through a leaf. From there we followed the blood drops, down some deer paths, in between pine trees, oak trees, brush and rock. We followed the drops for three hours, losing them for sometimes fifteen minutes, before finding them again and continuing on the path. We followed the blood trail up three hills and down three ravines until we determined that the bear bedded itself down in the last ravine, which was full of chest high blackberry and poison oak. There was no way of getting into it. It was too thick. So we called it a loss.
Dustin’s brother later in the week, shot a bear and lost it in the same kind of situation; in a poison oak infested thicket.
Surprisingly the buck population dropped quite a bit, owing to bear, mountain lion, bobcat and probably genetics. The only buck that was seen was by Dustin was when we were riding around on quads up some back roads. It was a spike, still in velvet.
We captured pictures of doe with fawns, single doe, foxes, squirrels foraging for acorns, decent sized bucks, bobcat, big bear, mama bear with cubs (one had a blond cub), and a rare photo of two mountain lion walking close together on a camera that we’d left up across the river all year, although the camera only took pictures until March. Before leaving, they would wade across and change the SD card and batteries for the next year.
The first few days we were out there it didn’t stop raining.
One of the most interesting places in the area is the old homestead. It was said by the locals that it burned down, but some say the government burned it down. Nobody said what happened to the grouchy old man that lived there, but its been abandoned for a long time.
One of the other most interesting spots was what we called the Bullock’s camp. A group of girls made a summer camp spot down by the river with a sign that said Bullock Girls ’94.
Lastly there was the mining camp. There were a lot of mining claims up there, but I don’t think anyone has done any digging since the sixties. We got as far as we could, past the camp of a man who’d been living there but was currently vacant, and into blackberry bushes. The blackberry bushes had overgrown the trail so much that we couldn’t get any farther to the actual mines.
More random pictures from our adventure:
Butterflies in the street. 
Signs from a hiked trail. 
A baby scorpion. 
A private footbridge. 
An interestingly colored leaf. 
A geode we found in the creek bed. 
Old Olympia can. 
Deer Jaw. 
Deer spine and other bones. 
A river frog. 
A memorial. 
Ar private footbridge. 
Another private footbridge. 
The Russian wilderness. 
Trout and Salmon. 
Something we couldn’t identify. 
A handmade fence for a corral.
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