Turner Mountain

We woke up at 6 am this morning, and then had a leisurely breakfast; we didn't get on the road until just after 8 am. We didn't feel much urgency, as we knew we were only going a few miles to the road we wanted to drive and walk on. Our route took us west along the road to Mineral, to a point called Mineral Summit, just a mile or so east of the town. At the summit we left the paved road and took a Forest Service Road (29N48), an improved gravel road in very good shape, all the way around Turner Mountain in a clockwise direction. The road stays mainly between five and six thousand feet in altitude, generally following the contours of the mountain. We crossed innumerable streams and dry creek beds, and rounded equally innumerable broad shoulders or narrow ridges.

Speaking very generally, the first half of the route was more interesting to us than the second half. We haven't figured out what determines which flowers are in bloom when -- altitude and exposure aren't consistent guides. Everywhere we went there seemed to be plenty of water, so that doesn't seem to be the determinant either. Perhaps it's the soil, or some other micro-ecological factor. Whatever the reason, we saw many more species of wildflowers on the first half, and they were much more abundant as well. The first half was only intermittently forested; many areas were open due to slides, rocks, or fires. These open areas (especially the road cuts along the mountain's shoulders or ridges) were often good wildflower hunting. When the road dipped into a ravine and we crossed a creek, we'd have the opportunity to clamber up and down the creek looking for water-loving wildflowers. And find them we did -- perhaps 25 or 30 species in the day, with many favorites (columbine, trillium, phlox, bleeding hearts, etc.) and many more we couldn't identify. We were particularly taken with one that lay flat on the ground, growing 3 to 6 flower clusters on crawling stems radiating about 3 inches from the center. Each flower cluster was one to two inches in diameter, and looked like a concoction made of pink crumpled crepe paper.

The second half of the trip was more forested, had fewer open areas, and many fewer wildflowers. Even the streams were largely devoid of wildflowers -- they looked like they have been scraped clean to the rock, presumably by freshets in the spring melt. This was largely the western flank of the mountain, which is the wetter side of these mountains, so this makes some kind of sense. We spotted a couple of trees with odd "bracelets" around their trunks, made of thick sheet iron or steel about two or three feet wide. My father spotted a tag on one of these trees, and reading it we discovered that these trees (we saw more later) had been selected by the Forest Service as genetic source material, and they're protected. I suspect the bands are simply markers that nobody could possibly miss, and so no lumberman could have an excuse about accidently cutting the tree down.

The mysterious ground cover that we saw on our first day was here in abundance, especially on the western side. We spotted one mat with a single cluster of blue flowers, which led my father to tentatively identify this as a prostrate ceanothus. The blue flower surprised us...

During the day we climbed quite a few steep road cuts. There are no retaining walls on a primitive road such as this one, and no terracing; the bank made by the road cut is therefore at the angle of repose already. There isn't enough of a root network in most places to stabilize the soil, so if you try to walk on this bank, or climb it, every piece of soil disturbed by your feet will fall down the embankment, and quite often soil from above will fall onto your foot. Worse, your feet may cause entire sections of the bank to slip and slide, taking your feet right out from under you. We developed several techniques for getting safely up and down these banks. My father's favorite method requires a tree nearby with branches sturdy enough to support your weight; then you simply use the tree as a handle to stablize yourself. I like to climb up by pointing my toes up and "crabbing" my way to the top; this awkward posture lets the entire surface area of my feet bear my weight, disturbing the soil less. Coming down, I dig my heel as deep into the soil as I can, on the theory that the deeper soil is less likely to slide. On the whole, experience showed that my father's technique was much less likely to end you up on your butt, but my technique would let you get into trouble in more places...

Just after we rounded the southernmost point on our road we encountered something quite unexpected. We were driving at perhaps 25 mph on a smooth stretch of road when all of a sudden something large burst out of the brush on the road cut above our heads, rumbled down the embankment and came to a halt just in front of us. It was a large brown bear, with sort of two-toned hair that was lighter at its extremities (an older bear?). It only halted very briefly as we bore down upon it; then it whirled around and skedaddled down the road in front of us. That bear was moving very quickly -- I stayed right behind it for something like a third of a mile, going at 25 to 30 miles per hour. The bear raised a dust cloud just like a car does on a dirt road; it drove like a Brit, down the left side of the road (and directly in front of me!). I'd guestimate the weight of that bear as between 350 and 450 pounds, but I could be off by two or three country miles -- this all happened so fast that I didn't really get to look at it closely, and couldn't even snap off a quick photo...

The road between Mineral and Mill Creek (a one-lane paved road) was used for a cattle drive while we were on our trip around Turner Mountain. We never saw the cattle, but it was easy to tell they'd been here: the road was liberaly coated with cow flops for several miles! The aroma in the warm evening sun was close to overwhelming. Driving over all these cow flops at around 40 mph caused an impressive splashing, and we could hear the bottom of my truck being thoroughly coated. It's probably going to smell pretty bad in a few days...

By the time we made it back around to Mineral Summit, it was almost 4 pm and we were a little tired. We decided to eat in our cabin tonight, but we didn't have anything to make a real supper of. So we stopped in both of Mineral's tiny stores and bought the best stuff we could find: a tin of corned beef, a can of creamed corn, and a bottle of applesauce. When we got home I sliced up the corned beef and baked it in the oven, made some rice, and heated the creamed corn. It wasn't a great supper -- not even close -- but it sated our hunger. In fact, it cured us of much of our desire to ever eat food again. We got to bed fairly early; did some reading and then fell asleep...