Hard lessons in trailer camping
A flashback plus reflections
Dry heat shimmered among ponderosas crispy with drought as we hiked with our college-aged kids in woods where gnats spiraled in columns and deerflies zinged around our legs. Dust and the smell of pine filled my nostrils as we explored streams clear enough to count the stones on the bottom as they wound through the forest, filled with hungry trout.
Years ago, when our daughter was at Humboldt State in California, my husband, son, and I picked her up during the summer break and took a family vacation to stay in a state park cabin at Burney McArthur Park near Redding, California, famous for its stunning waterfalls.
The Burney area, and Hat Creek, a well-known trout stream, is at six thousand or so feet of elevation near Lassen National Park in the high desert area of California.
From the state park website: “The park's centerpiece is the 129-foot Burney Falls, which is not the highest or largest waterfall in the state, but possibly the most beautiful. Additional water comes from springs, joining to create a mist-filled basin. Burney Creek originates from the park's underground springs and flows to Lake Britton, getting larger along the way to the majestic falls.
The park's landscape was created by volcanic activity as well as erosion from weather and streams. This volcanic region is surrounded by mountain peaks and is covered by black volcanic rock, or basalt. Created over a million years ago, the layered, porous basalt retains rainwater and snow melt, which forms a large underground reservoir.
Within the park, the water emerges as springs at and above Burney Falls, where it flows at 100 million gallons every day. Burney Falls was named after pioneer settler Samuel Burney who lived in the area in the 1850s. The McArthurs were pioneer settlers who arrived in the late 1800s. Descendants were responsible for saving the waterfall and nearby land from development. They bought the property and gave it to the state as a gift in the 1920s.”
I still remember how hot we were as a family, trekking down the switchback path to view Burney Falls. Mike and Caleb forged forth with their shirts off as Tawny and I in proceeded in swimsuits and shorts. We all hoped to cool off in the “mist-filled basin” at the foot of the falls.
When we reached the bottom, that mist off the falls was so bone-chilling cold we could only tolerate splashing our hot skin while gazing in awe upon a hundred million gallons of crystalline water gushing in from every pore of a long, 100-plus foot cliff. The contrast of such a stunning excess of water in a land so dry was mesmerizing.
Fast forward more than ten years to 2018, when we bought our first trailer, the tiny Casita. We were eager to try it out, and trout season was opening in May in Northern California. Mike and I decided to recreate that fun holiday, revisiting our favorite spots but camping in our new-to-us travel trailer.
Newsflash: August in California is not the same as May. ESPECIALLY IN THE HIGH COUNTRY.
You’d think this would be obvious, but we were from Hawaii and still under the illusion that if it was sunny out, it was warm out. We hadn’t lived in California long enough to have a sense of the seasons. I gleefully packed shorts, tees, and a bathing suit in my little backpack, ready to lie out with a book and my dog on the streambanks. My mind was stuck on our August family vacation.
Mike frowned at my optimistically packed clothing. “You should bring something warmer. It’s high elevation there and it could get chilly in the evenings.”
That was hard for me to believe with the hot summer of our August vacation burnt into my memory, but I followed directions and threw in a parka along with some pants and socks.
Our adventure began with Lady Google, our faithful guide, failing us with a guesstimate of five hours of driving time to our reserved campsite. Hauling the Casita and taking small, winding roads through the hills took much longer than she anticipated (and thus, we planned for.) We finally rolled into our spot at an RV park near Burney fully eight hours later at 8:00 p.m, hungry and exhausted.
Fortunately, our site wasn’t too difficult to back into, since that was still a new skill Mike was learning.
Three men, also fishermen to judge from the piles of poles, occupied a giant fifth wheel RV next to our site. (Mike informed me that not all trailers are “fifth wheels.” This name is reserved for mammoth rigs that fasten to the bed of a truck with a big metal hitch-like contraption.)
They had a veritable mountain of firewood beside their metal firepit, and an older man, clearly the father of the two adult sons, was ill. He coughed with a horrific wet rattling and watched, horking up wet gobs of goo and spitting them into the fire, as we set up in the dark with much fumbling and cursing as Mike hooked up to sewage, water and power and prepared to flush the toilet in the trailer for the first time.
The Casita’s bathroom was a lot like the head on a boat, a cabinet-sized plastic closet that doubled as a shower, sporting a flexible hose with a head on it and a sink in the corner the size of a teapot. Mike kept a toolbox in there which served as a handy footrest during usage.
Not that we had actually used the bathroom yet.
At this point in our trailering experience (i.e. very new) I tried not to think about the toilet: how it worked, where the “black water” was going, and what could go wrong if we messed something up. The whole thing went in a mental comparment in my brain labeled “YIKES.”
Biting cold assaulted us when we were finally hooked up and “leveled,” a process involving plastic footpads, mini-bottle jacks, and getting a bubble on a level between two lines while yelling at each other where the bubble was. Grunts and grumbles are also featured, along with lying on the belly to deal with the jacks and pads. (And did I mention it was dark? And cold?)
We’d also arrived at the campground so late we didn’t have time to figure out what heater to use: the built-in propane one, the overhead one which doubled as an AC unit but had no thermostat; or the small plug-in room heater from home. We opted for the third due to unfamiliarity with the first two.
Temperatures plummeted into the twenties as the night deepened.
Regretfully putting away my shorts and swimsuit, I reassembled the interior from a bench and a table into a bed—the Casita was something like an interior game of Tetris—and made it up with the light bedding we’d brought. I climbed in wearing every stitch of clothing I’d brought: two pairs of yoga pants, three shirts, a sweatshirt and a couple pairs of socks. Mike was more optimistic in his usual shirt and boxers.
But early in the wee hours, he woke me up, shuddering with whole-body convulsions from hypothermia as the tiny plug-in heater utterly failed to perform. He got up to put more clothes on, then turned on the light and started fiddling around with the built-in heaters.
Eventually, Mike figured out how to get the propane heater going. Though it sounded like a dragon snoring and blasted air over our heads in loud, hot belches, the thing did have a working thermostat and we finally warmed up enough to sleep.
The bright spot in the whole night from hell was that we both got over our fears enough to use the toilet inside the Casita and didn't have to trek through the park to apply our bare butts to the seat of a frozen Port-A-Potty.
Cramped, tired, and grumpy, the next morning I nursed a fitful fire of condensation-wet wood and tried to warm my hands around a mug of morning beverage, wondering what the heck we were thinking with this expensive, pain-in-the-behind attempt at “fun.”
Camping, at that moment, was anything but. In fact the whole day before with its many harrowing moments as newbies pulling a trailer a long distance for the first time could not be categorized as anything but something we’d survived.
I hadn't been so cold since our road trip years ago when we camped at Big Basin National Park in Nevada (documented in Open Road) and were caught in snow. We spent a long, dark, endless night that I still remember as a unique agony that shivered my flesh from my bones.
That weird longing to return to the wilderness, to hunch over a fire and cook something you've killed… It must be an instinctive urge to return to a way of life that nothing but our DNA remembers.
That's the only explanation I could come up with for why so many people were with us in the icy camp, the hollow shells of their caves on wheels and the fragile veils of their tents barely keeping out the elements. We all emerged in the morning looking like death; and I was truly worried about the old gent next to us as he gargled phlegm beside the fire.
In the past, we’d either stayed in cabins or tented in this area, and we soon discovered that RV camping is a completely different experience, even if it’s in the same park.
People in RVs tended to be more chatty and friendly than I’d ever experienced while “real” (tent) camping, and they came from all walks of life. The Casita was not the most usual of trailers, either, and caused comment. A small, rounded, modest little thing, it contrasted with the many large, boxy metal RVs with aggressive names like Wolverine, Big Bear and Attitude.
We took a day drive when things warmed up to try and visit Lassen National Park, only to discover it was frozen over and closed. The road going through the park looked like it had been engulfed in a glacier where it dead-ended in an ice floe.
Though trout season was officially open, Hat Creek was a swollen torrent thick with snowmelt, zigzagging through high elevation meadows and tearing chunks of pastureland and forest out alike as it churned, pell-mell, toward the distant sea.
Eventually we found a sheltered crook in the surging stream that looked likely for fishing. Mike let me have the best spot without being obvious about it, and stood upstream to cast into a ruffle of current, leaving a sheltered undercut of riverbank, full of secret calm eddies, for me to plumb with my lure.
The hit of a fish on the line seems to send a jolt of adrenaline straight to the heart. As the line goes taut, there's a flutter, a tug imbued with power, a sense of excitement and possibility. I caught a good-sized brown trout, and hollered with victorious glee.
That humble name, “brown,” hardly describes the fish’s tapestry of colors. Green as pine shadows along the top fins, marked with the bubbles in amber of good ale on the sides and belly, and decorated with a row of red dots set in silver in the middle, the trout seemed embedded with rubies.
Mike, standing on a gray sandspit with a pole in his hand, was as I remembered from when we fell in love more than thirty years ago: tall, capable, focused, his big hands light on the rod, his accuracy perfect—and an inner restlessness quiet at last.
During the long drive back to camp I asked him why liked fishing. “I’m a hunter gatherer by nature, and when I’m fishing, I can just…stop thinking. It takes my full attention and all my skill.” A grin told me that made him happy.
I like fishing for the challenge, for the surprise of what I might catch, for the unique beauty of each waterborne creature, and finally for how good a fresh-caught fish tastes, seasoned by the effort to catch it.
We long for the inner stillness that nature brings just like we long for campfires, and cooking what we caught over them; it’s hard wired, history we no longer remember but seek to repeat.
Perhaps some of our modern existential misery would be cured if we all went camping more often and remembered the discomforts, as well as the simple victories, that our ancestors conquered.
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And how about you? Do you enjoy fishing?