So there I am. I have a week off and nothing to do.
I plan on going up to the Sierra Mountains, sniff around, and do a little fishing.
I stop at the ranger station to get the latest National Forest maps. The ranger ask me where I plan on going. I tell them I'm going up around Ice House and look around and do a little fishing.
They tell they can't let me do that!
I think this is the point I flipped out and said something like what do you man you can't let me go up and look around. Then I go into it is my national forest not their national forest. I tell them if they can't let me go up and look around they have failed at doing what they were suppose to be doing and protect it for all of us to go up and camp and hike and fish and a bunch of other gnashing of the teeth.
Anyway they tried to convince me you have to know in advance where your going to end up. I've never know where I'm going to be when I've went to the mountains. If I would have spent my life doing that I would have ended up stuck in places to crowded or place that just plain suck.
They seem to have locked down the National Forest and only open up enough campgrounds to keep everyone piled on top of each other where they can keep and keep and eye on us I suspect.
They say it is because it is getting to crowded. It is only crowded because they have everyone setting in each others laps. We used to have a lot more people than I ever see today but we dispersed out over the nearly 193 million acres nation wide.
Now nearly every campground has a camp host. I passed one going where the ranger lady told me not to go and couldn't believe the destruction caused by that one campsite. I would be ashamed if I was with any Boy Scouts and they saw that. I was going to go back and take a picture but I could bring myself to go out of my way to see something like that again. There is to many nice things to see in the National Forest you might miss doing something like that.
Anyway the place the ranger lady told me I could go was pretty good. It didn't have the camp host generator running. It did have the dogs barking and wood hacking till about midnight. Then it let up real nice for a couple of minutes and someone else drove back to their camp that was already set up but it sounded like they set it up again. Then the laughing started. Sometimes they sounded like children excited camping for maybe the first time. The next day the people I saw looked older. Anyways I laughed like that before and wouldn't want to stop it in anyway. It would have been nice to have been able to move a little down the road.
After I calmed down some the Ranger lady at the map placed showed me some of my old haunts still there. I don't know if I ever be able to get to them during times like I did before. Deserted pretty much. They were locked up now.
Something else I noticed I don't see many of the happy campers like I used to see. Back then you came across a very low Ranger, or other commercial people ratio, to regular people in the woods. Now it is totally flipped. Hardy a happy camper to be found but lots and lots of others. I'm not sure what to think of many of them. Last year I tried fishing and the Ranger lady said there was only a couple of dirt roads that were open to camping along. Then you couldn't be more than a car length from the road. I don't know if I could sleep that way. Any way I stopped along one of the roads and say two ladies setting down the road looking back up at me. I should have at least drove down and talked to them, about the camping thing, but All I could think was to getting back home. I hadn't had any sleep. For those two other people I saw many many white trucks from the commercial outfit that has contracted the camping from the our National Forest. I don't know what they were up to but I didn't like it and I didn't want to be approached by them.
I don't know what the deer hunters are doing.
Now I'm back with, "Nothing left to do."