PackRat
Senior Member
I'm looking for a '70s 8 Ft. CO AK now, but was reminded of my first trip with the old 8 Ft. NCO I had back in around 1989 or so. The wife had to work so I soloed to get the feel for it and was out on Memorial Day up at Wild Plum campground on the Yuba River. I had a nice drive up on Friday afternoon and found a site, had my dinner BBQ outside and enjoyed the cool crisp mountain air around my campfire and appreciated that by 8:00pm that night it seemed every site was filled.
Off to sleep in the AK about 10:00pm or so. I guess it was about 4:00am or so I get woken up to the sounds of hail hitting the roof and rain...I realized it had also gotten pretty cold! I got up and opened the door to see what all the noise was about....a lot of the campers who were in tents were scrambling to pack up as there was so much water coming down it was flooding them out.
OK...Maybe I should have got out to help them, but like most of them, I didn't have any foul weather gear and getting everything I had wet did not appeal to me in the slightest. I had a change of underwear, sox but only tennis shoes and a light jacket that trip (dummy!) so I hunkered down and in about 20 minutes there were no more lights moving around and no sounds of car engines running.
At 7:00am or so I woke up and the rain had stopped so I warmed up the AK making coffee and had a bite to eat and discovered that almost all the tenters has split which accounted for half the camp sites.
I had owned a smaller non-raising shell/camper before but the ice box, the stove, the sink and the dry bed in that old 1960s AK convinced me that this was the way to tackle the Sierras! Many times afterward the thunderstorms in the high Sierra have come down and we have been able to sit back, have some cocoa, read a book and get ready to go fishing when it stopped and be comfortable.
Now and then my more macho buddies say I'm going soft but then Mother Nature will toss us another of those windstorms, hailstorms and downpours for a few hours and they'll be soaked and sitting in their vehicle waiting it out....or asking to come in out of the weather. It has also made it comfortable for both my wife and myself to go to some pretty fantastic places and still be comfortable in bad weather.
No snow camping for us, but still, between Memorial Day and late October the weather can be fickle and turn on you quickly...like most of you campers, we can ride it out snug as a bug in a rug!
Off to sleep in the AK about 10:00pm or so. I guess it was about 4:00am or so I get woken up to the sounds of hail hitting the roof and rain...I realized it had also gotten pretty cold! I got up and opened the door to see what all the noise was about....a lot of the campers who were in tents were scrambling to pack up as there was so much water coming down it was flooding them out.
OK...Maybe I should have got out to help them, but like most of them, I didn't have any foul weather gear and getting everything I had wet did not appeal to me in the slightest. I had a change of underwear, sox but only tennis shoes and a light jacket that trip (dummy!) so I hunkered down and in about 20 minutes there were no more lights moving around and no sounds of car engines running.
At 7:00am or so I woke up and the rain had stopped so I warmed up the AK making coffee and had a bite to eat and discovered that almost all the tenters has split which accounted for half the camp sites.
I had owned a smaller non-raising shell/camper before but the ice box, the stove, the sink and the dry bed in that old 1960s AK convinced me that this was the way to tackle the Sierras! Many times afterward the thunderstorms in the high Sierra have come down and we have been able to sit back, have some cocoa, read a book and get ready to go fishing when it stopped and be comfortable.
Now and then my more macho buddies say I'm going soft but then Mother Nature will toss us another of those windstorms, hailstorms and downpours for a few hours and they'll be soaked and sitting in their vehicle waiting it out....or asking to come in out of the weather. It has also made it comfortable for both my wife and myself to go to some pretty fantastic places and still be comfortable in bad weather.
No snow camping for us, but still, between Memorial Day and late October the weather can be fickle and turn on you quickly...like most of you campers, we can ride it out snug as a bug in a rug!
