SUNDAY: TONOPAH, TO SCOTTY’S CASTLE, TO MUMMY MOUNTAIN

The view from Mount Odie, looking east, was a vast valley stretching so far out, the distant mountains marking the far side were barely a bumpy graph across the horizon. Looking from here, amongst the concrete and metal ruins of some icon of industry, except for Highway 6, there was simply nothing out there. No houses, no trees, a void of human presence.

“What was this place?” Robin asked.

I looked around my feet, rocks ground to a powder with steel cable coiling through the debris, shards of multicolored glass sparkling through the mess.

“I’m guessing it was a mill for the mines.”

“These have got to be the most extensive ruins we’ve ever seen,” Robin said.

I don’t know about that, but the foundations stretched across the entire eastern side of the peak. According to the topo map, just on the other side of the mountain was the Tonopah Mining Park. The structures that once stood here are long gone, not even rubble below, but what is left is massive. There’s a boiler at the top, chocolate brown from rust, and concrete blocks, like pyramids with their tops hacked off, in a neat row at the center of some of the foundations. Maybe a stamp mill stood on these pylons, but they are also hollow, and the inside walls are charred, which would make me think these were used to smelt the silver. Inside the Park over the hill, there are the Montana-Tonopah Mill ruins. We never got that far, but from the aerial picture of them from the Park’s brochure, it looks very similar to what we stood on that Sunday morning in the onset of the day’s heat. Crumbling concrete sidewalks run from foundation to foundation, and along some of the sidewalks are red brick structures that remind me of backyard barbecues. Looking at them, I wondered if they were kilns, maybe for casting bullion bricks. We wandered off from each other as we explored. I went high, with Nick and Kellian tagging along with me, while Robin and Alex went low.

Nick led the way, and I found myself running through the parental litany of ‘No’, ‘Wait’, ‘Careful Nick, wait for me’.

Nick got to one level, and at one end, there’s a concrete structure, crumbling wood and tarpaper roof, that once you get to it, you realize it’s an elevator shaft. Only one story, but there’s Nick leaning through the door-way, tempting fate.

Dissuading him from that experiment, he now rushed to the other side of the concrete foundation, me and Kellian bringing up the rear.

Sluices made from thick, long planks of wood run down between several of the foundations to the road below. The cant of the hill makes it easily a 20 degree shot.

Nick pointed to one and said something in Shoshone. Before I could even ask Kellian to translate, my youngest son hopped into it and took off at breakneck speed down the hill.

I found myself running off the edge of one foundation and dropping down to the next, chasing the runaway Nick, bracing my legs against the dirt and rubble buttressed up against the sluice. Even before I caught up, though, to stab a hand in front of him and grab him around the chest, Nick had dropped to his butt and was using the edges of his hiking boots to slow himself to a stop. He could have pitched head first and slid the rest of the way, but luck, or keeping his wits, saved Nick from that. In fact, I think about it now, and he had to have had realized his predicament, ascertained what he needed to do, then with nerves of steel, pulled his legs up and dropped into the sluice.

He and I paused there for a moment, a pall of dust coming up from where I’d stirred it. This incident might have taken three to five seconds to play out. I looked down into Nick’s eyes and took deep satisfaction in observing terror in them.

We both looked down to the next level where Robin and Alex were inspecting something drilled into the concrete below. They hadn’t seen a thing.

“Daddy,” Kellian called out from above. “What are you doing?”

“Ah, well,” I started, giggled stupidly, “Just playing.”

“Jus’ p’aying,” Nick echoed in hoarse agreement. I quickly inspected his hands. He’d had the wherewithal not to grab the sides of the sluice, which would surely have left a porcupine’s worth of splinters imbedded in his tiny fingers. Ultimately, the only casualty was his jean bottoms are now rather shiny.

Kellian found some rough stairs and got down to us. There seemed to be no easy or quick way to descend to the level that Robin and Alex were on. The sluice Nick had slid in ended about five feet above the last concreted level. I pictured Nick shooting out of that chute and smacking the concrete slab Robin and Alex stood on, and it wasn’t a Kodak Moment.. Though wheezing for air, my heart still racing, I eased both twins down from the straight-sided cut.

We looked around some more, although I was quite ready to get going. In a couple mounds of tailings it looked like the buildings themselves had been put through a chipper/shredder and then a stamp mill. It was ground metal, glass, mortar, plain old trash.

Finally, our desert snooping sated, we got back to Joyland, hooked up the trailer, loaded up the Bronco, and headed out for Scotty’s Castle. I had filled our fresh water tank and dumped everything else. We wouldn’t be in a RV park for the rest of the trip. The hundred gallons we had would have to hold us for roughly five days.

We stopped for gas. The best price I’d found the day before, three dollars and twenty-five-point-nine cents a gallon, was at this stationin town, stuck between two tall buildings. I’m figuring there used to be a building here and it was torn down, because you had to walk around the building to the right to get to the store where you pay for the gas. I didn’t have to do that after all, since the gas pumps all had card readers.

We were real close to empty now. Maybe ten gallons in our one hundred gallon tank. I started pumping. At ninety-nine dollars it shut off.

We’d run into this before. Some systems won’t let you pump more than a certain amount. Ninety nine dollars, though, was a new record low. I’d only scored a little more than thirty gallons, which meant I was going to have to use the card something like three times before I could fill it up. I sighed with resignation, swiped my card through the second time and went to pumping again.

A sports car pulled up next to me. A middle-aged guy in a nice business suit jumped out. He smiled at me crookedly as he swiped his own card and did the necessary rituals to get fuel.

“What kind’a gas mileage you get with that thing?” he asked me.

“Five miles to the gallon,” I answered. “And look at the price!”

He nodded and chortled, furled his brow.

“Um, which way you headed?”

“South,” I said. “Scotty’s Castle, Mummy Mountain.”

“You passing through ‘Vegas? Stop! Stop pumping for a second.”

I shut down the gas. His smile twisted some more as he took a step toward me.

“Gas is two eighty-five a gallon in ‘Vegas. It’s only maybe a hundred fifty miles from here. How much gas you got in there?”

I did a quick bit of adding.

“I got sixty-four gallons.”

“It’s gonna take you all of thirty gallons t’get t’Vegas. Save yourself some money, and get out’a here.”

Heading south 0n 95, we had intended to stop at a ghost town called Goldpoint. Both the lady at the Chamber of Commerce and the scholarly gentleman at the Tonopah Mining Park gift shop had suggested we check it out. Sadly, we missed the road off of 95 that you take. One more reason to go on vacation year-round to check these things out again.

We cruised through Goldfield, a place that Robin and I had stopped at on the way back from the Vacation Into Hell. This was BC of course, Before Children. I didn’t remember so many structures from last time, and I remember things like that. The buildings I’m talking about, however, all look like they’re from the turn-of-the-Century-before-last. It seemed like it took forever to get to Scotty’s Junction. We turned west toward the state line.

I’d flippantly mentioned the Castle two months before when ruminating over the things to be seen in the area, and both Nick and Kel had lit up with the idea of seeing a real castle.

The road is well-paved on the Nevada side, but the wind started playing with me. It’s something like twenty-six miles to Scotty’s Castle from Scotty’s Junction. The terrain around here is bland and forgettable. We started a gentle descent. The California Border and the Death Valley National Preserve signs arrived at roughly the same time.

“We have entered the People’s Republic of California, my children,” I called back. “You must conform now, reach for that lowest common denominator. Conform! Conform!”

No one was listening.

A painful set of switchbacks started just about the time the road narrowed and the asphalt became unkempt and crumbling. We descended suddenly here. I didn’t mind going down so much, but imagined having to come back up.

I was watching the mileage. Unless we had a Nevada-style black hole, we should have been coming up on the Castle by now. The walls of the cliffs around us had risen, and off to the right, iridescent green plants peeked over the drop-off. I spotted stacks of what looked like wooden railroad ties that had simply disintegrated with age, stacked on flat spots along the hills. The mountains around us had risen and gained the gritty harsh character of desert landscape.

“There it is!” Kellian called, pointing to the right.

Damned if it wasn’t a castle.

I’d seen pictures of it, sure, but somehow the actual Scotty’s Castle, properly called the Death Valley Ranch Headquarters, is just a whole lot more impressive in person. Perhaps it’s the trip getting to it, passing through featureless, then rugged terrain to reach this oasis It all makes the Spanish Moore of a mansion all that much more startling. I noted, and I note to you, off to the right, just above the castle, is a campground. I didn’t get a chance to check it out thoroughly, but it seemed especially geared for trailers and RVs. It appeared nearly empty. There is no mention of it anywhere I look. It appears to be a national park-style campground. If I had known about this campground, we probably would have camped here.

There’s a dirt parking lot outside the fence of the Castle’s grounds. I pulled up there and leveled it. It had to be a hundred fifteen degrees inside the Bounder. We hooked up the dogs and bailed out

Just inside the fence of the park, everything turns phenomenally green. There’s a substantial creek flowing underneath the road here and running along the green park with handsome shade trees. Between the castle and the park was an asphalted parking lot, with maybe four cars in it.

I smiled. We had done good. We had the place practically to ourselves.

All the sites tell you, the first thing you do when you arrive at Scotty’s Castle, you sign up for the tour. With so few people here, I imagined it wasn’t that critical, but I held the dogs and Robin trotted over to the booth. She came back in a moment.

“We’re up for the next tour,” she announced. “The dogs are allowed anywhere on the trails or the park over there, but they’re not allowed inside the buildings. We can’t take them on the tour. If we take the tour, someone has to sit it out.”

“You missed the mining park,” I answered instantly. “Me and the dogs will explore the grounds.”

Of course dogs aren’t allowed on the tour, we knew that. I had entertained the idea of just locking the dogs in the RV for the hour the tour lasted, but in this heat, that wasn’t going to happen.

“We’ve got about thirty minutes anyway,” Robin said. She had a brochure, and started walking us around.

If you don’t know the history of Scotty’s Castle, you’ll want to go on-line and look it up. I don’t want to try to compress it here, only that a wealthy man and his wife built this castle in the desert, and their con-artist friend, Scotty, convinced everyone he owned it. You’d think the wealthy man would’ve been ticked about that, but from the reading I’ve done, the rich, very religious, couple thought the world of this guy Scotty. He had some kind of relationship with Keyes of Keyes Ranch in Joshua Tree NM fame as well.

We wandered the grounds for a while. Like any ranch complex, there’s more than just the ranch house. In the case of this particular operation, there’s a bell tower, an electric generating plant, and to the east, housing for cowboys and stables, all in a grand Spanish style, with tiled floors and wide walkways. It must have been something to be a hired hand on this spread. There’s an entire house behind the castle up the hill a bit that is the kitchen. The grounds and landscaping would make many a La Jolla home-owner jealous. I had been under the impression that the pool out front had been finished. As it is, cholla cactus grows in the dry sandy bottom, the cement around it still as pristine and sharp as the day it was poured into place.

We were coming back around the front, when Starfire came to an abrupt halt. She had the look of a worried, embarrassed dog as she suddenly cramped up and defecated a smoldering smelly pile of feces, right there near the front of Scotty’s Castle. She took two steps and drizzled out some brownish yellow custard.

I grimaced.

“Leave it,” my wife said.

I snapped a look at her. She shrugged.

“It’s a hundred fifteen degrees. It’s going to dry out in minutes.”

I pondered my options for a moment.

“I’ll go get the shovel,” I finally said. Behind her sunglasses Robin rolled her eyes as I headed back to the Bounder. When had she become so inconsiderate?

By the time I got back, my horde had rambled over to the buildings and walkways to the east. I spent some time scraping and scooping on the black-top. It would have been easier if it had been smooth concrete instead of the rubbly asphalt, but I managed to scrape and throw dirt on what was left, then scrape up the soaked dirt as best I could. It all went in a bag.

Along the top walkway, running above the bunk house, is a raised man-made stream. Rocks are piled along the path, cemented in some spots, and water flows from the abundant source that must be just above the complex. The artificial stream meanders through Pinyon Pine and junipers planted along the course. Despite being very beautiful, the whole stream struck me as somewhat pretentious, naive.

It reminds me of the Oak Knoll Inn, back when I was a kid. I would have been eight when Dad bought the Oak Knoll Inn in Boulevard, a small town east of the Lagunas, not that far from Jacumba on Highway 80. The Oak Knoll consisted of a bar, a restaurant, sixteen motel cabins, and an artesian well, as well as eighty acres out back. Those eighty acres had two notable oak groves, but mostly Chemise, Creosote, Red Chank and Mexican Manzanita. Far to the east of the pine and oak forests of the Lagunas, not quite there to the stark beauty of the desert, Boulevard is rather featureless terrain, to the casual eye. When 80 was the only artery running from El Centro and all points east to San Diego, towns like Boulevard, which serviced the travelers going to the beach or headed back east, Imperial Valley, the Colorado River. By the time my Dad bought it, though, Interstate 8 had already bypassed Boulevard, and the new-fangled freeway was scheduled to be completed within the year, down through treacherous Devil’s Canyon, making all the little towns along Highway 80 obsolete, future ghost towns.

There are ruins of something important to the west of the Oak Knoll Inn, foundations, a reservoir half full of sand, a stone basement half-full of water, but the raised streambed at Scotty’s had reminded me of a minor, sad mystery right out behind the cabins of the Oak Knoll in, on a flat dry piece of ground.

Someone, who knows how many years before we were there, had built a garden with raised beds and walkways, made from quartz crystal. There were big chunks of the mineral, glassy hard, ranging from clear to pink and burgundy to white, but mostly small pieces, neatly worked in tight to each other, then finally, I always thought begrudgingly, cemented together into rough bulwarks and bumpy walkways. All the footpaths led to a fountain in the center, in my eight-year-old eyes, a large thing, with a fountainhead in the middle of it. The top of the fountainhead had been knocked off, exposing a copper pipe that, I imagine, supplied the pool with water. Today it would be considered folk art. Back then,1964, the raised plots were bare of anything but weeds, the concrete pool, dry, all of it baked hot by the sun, parts of the walls and fountain breaking loose, littering the bottom of the fountain. Scotty’s attraction reminds me of that forgotten little garden and fountain. Someone invested a great deal of time there, gathering the quartz, from a nearby mine perhaps, fashioning the walls with that quartz and concrete, building up the fountainhead, fashioning the ornate top that some vandal callously broke. What had they imagined they were making? Did they think it would be a tourist draw, or was it just a simple attempt to express that human urge to create art that outlived its creator. It must have taken months, maybe years, to piece all those little chunks of quartz together, more time than just some thrown-together project.

I asked my mom and dad about it. Did they know who had built it? Did they know why? Both Mom and Dad seemed pointedly curt about the forlorn monument. They had so many other troubles then. Still, whoever had built that little flawed masterpiece of landscape art had done what I’m trying to do right now, writing all this out, to create something that people will note and know that I’d come this way. That when I die, I’ll be remembered for something other than being a forgettable file clerk doing a disrespected job. I will always feel a biting relationship with the artist of that little garden, whoever they might have been, for whatever reason they created that little quartz garden with the fountain and raised bed.

I think of Scotty’s fabricated stream, and imagine it too would have been abandoned long ago, when the copper pipes to it rusted out and needed replacing, or the concrete crumbled for lack of maintenance, if it hadn’t been built in a place, for several twisted reasons, considered a national treasure. How was my little memory of a garden any less so, except that it sat behind a forgettable roadhouse inn, with no known name for people to murmur when they walked along its paths, no history to give it worth.

I went up to the Oak Knoll Inn a few years ago. The quartz garden is gone, not crumbled to rubble with forty years of neglect, but scraped away by a bulldozer. Whatever was supposed to be built there never happened, or was torn down. I fear my attempts at writing face the same fate. Even if you read these words today, who knows how long Authorsden stays in business, or I stop paying for the site? Our existence, even the memory of our existence, is so fleeting.

Alex’s voice rent the quiet desert air. I had just dropped the bag full of poo into a trashcan. I looked around. It came again, a horrible, agonizing scream. This time I knew not to be ready to gather up body parts.

“NITRO GOT AWAY!” Alex was screaming between fits of sobbing. I looked around. I saw a ranger talking to a short little guy in front of the gift store, and there were several other people on the far side of the stream in the stables/bunkhouse complex. In the desert stillness, no one acknowledged my son’s fit.

I stepped as close as I could to my son, who reeled about in hysterical dementia.

“Stop – screaming,” I said as softly as I could and still be heard. “We’re in a public place and you’re screaming at the top of your lungs.”

THE DOG –“ Alex sobbed, pointing up a steep hill to the north.

There’s a wide path on the northern side of the stream, then a wall made of the local stone, demarking the end of the artificial landscaping. Just past a maintenance building there’s a passage through the wall that empties into the desert terrain. I looked up the hill, and I could see Nitro at the very top, tongue hanging out of his head, his legs spread like he was looking for an excuse to dash off.

“He’s gone!” Alex squealed like he was passing a kidney stone.

I swear, this kid should be in the soap operas. I pointed at Nitro.

“He’s right there. We have to go up there and bring him down. But first, for the love of God, stop screaming.”

“You want me to go out there in the sun?” he accused as he too now pointed up the hill.

I licked my lips as I stared at my son, trying to work through the logic.

“You’re so traumatized by Nitro’s escape that you’re splitting a gut screaming, apparently on the verge of an emotional breakdown, but you won’t go out into the sun, the sun you’re actually standing out in already, to find release and redemption?”

“Fine,” he huffed and charged through the passageway in the wall, “I’ll stagger around out there until I die of heat stroke.”

“Wouldn’t that be better than enduring such horrific agony here?” I asked as I followed him through the wall. I left the tri-fold shovel I’d used to scoop poop leaning against the wall.

Nitro had actually come down toward us, dragging his leash behind him. When he saw us headed his way, he bounded back up to where he’d been, and then over the top, out of sight.

“Where’s your mother?” I gasped as I climbed into the desert. The air was astoundingly calm, the sky a poignant crystal blue. Nothing stirred but my sobbing bitter son, me, and somewhere out amongst the creosote and cholla, Nitro.

“She took Kellian and Nick to the bathroom.”

“Starfire, too?”

My eldest son nodded through his misery.

“Go that way,” I told Alex, pointing at a path that skirted the hilltop. “I’ll go straight up.”

There was an old miner’s cabin behind the maintenance building. When I saw it, board planks leaning out from the walls, the battered roof tarpaper exposing the ribs of the building’s frame like tattered clothing on a skeleton, I wanted to make a bee-line to it and explore. I hadn’t read about this crumbling structure in any of the websites I’d seen.

First, though, we had to re-acquire a certain Rhodesian Ridgeback.

“NITRO!” Alex wailed out, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre survivor staggering away from the carnage, scarred in body and soul.

“Alex!” I hissed as loud as I dared. “In the name of the few strands of dignity I have left, stop screaming!”

Nitro came back over the rise, saw us, bounced and wagged his tail, all in mid-air, then shot away again out-of-sight, this game of hide-and-seek seemingly very rewarding.

I had to stop and drink some water. After only a few yards, maybe two thirds of the way up this hill, my heart was pounding in my ears.

Nitro trotted around the far eastern end of the hill, just above me. His head was low now. He saw me, and hesitated for a moment.

“Here he is, Alex,” I called.

“Nitro!” Alex moaned sharply and started charging. Nitro danced away from Alex, even though he was actually closer to me than the son.

“Don’t rush him,” I called out, sighed, then turned around to face the Castle Complex. From this vantage point, I could see the green belt that the water made, the dark verdant lawn underneath the canopy of trees out in front of the parking lot. There had to be a lot of water here. Past the road, west and south, jagged terrain with desiccated plant-life reminded me why ‘out there’ was called Death Valley. We were on the pleasant north-east rim of the valley. My water bottle was to my lips when I felt a semi-wet nose touch my dangling fingers.

I looked down and there was Nitro, slapping his tongue around, eyeing my bottle.

“Not this water,” I told him, shaking my water. “Come down here.”

With a gentle drop, I grabbed his leash as Alex reached us. We descended back to the half-wall, the wide trail and artificial stream. I grabbed up the shovel.

Robin and the twins watched our descent. As we passed the wall barrier, Robin stepped up within inches of Alex’s face.

“I could hear you screaming in the women’s bathroom,” she said in a sharp low voice.

“Sorry.”

“No, you’re not sorry. If you were sorry, you’d stop screaming. I swear, Alex, some day you’re actually going to be hurt, and I’ll take my dear sweet time getting to you.”

“The boy who cried wolf too often,” I said, and instantly regretted piling on.

“The tour starts in five minutes,” Robin announced.

I took the dogs and let them play in the water for awhile. The hour that the tour would take now seemed like an eternity. We went down to the park area, and the dogs dragged me around by their leashes. There was an Asian family, I’d say Japanese, driving a rented car, that was having lunch in the park. They grimaced at the dogs as their small toddler wobbled around, scowled furtive glances at me, the dogs straining at their leashes. I remembered the miner’s cabin, and decided to check it out.

I went around the west side of the maintenance building and came up on the cabin.

Generally, when I approach such a structure, I like to circle it as carefully as possible to see what is outside as well as in, the relationship between it all. In this case, though, the cabin was so close to the cliff it abutted, that I was sure there was no way I was getting the dogs and me around it without causing damage. And then, in that adjoining cliff, was a mine entrance.

It wasn’t Schmidt’s Tunnel, I can’t even recall now whether there was bracing inside, but for a coyote hole, it was pretty impressive. I studied it for a while, noted that the inside of the cabin included a cot, a cast iron Ben Franklin-style stove, and cabinets with some dishware still in them, all of it on the verge of collapse. With the dogs, I didn’t dare go inside. Normally I don’t anyway. I’m always worried about putting a foot through the slat floor.

Finally I headed back to the concrete stream, where the dogs once again drank long and hard.

At one point Nitro successfully managed to get his paw stuck between two rocks on the bottom of the stream, but after a few seconds of experimenting, I managed to get him loose.

There was a ranger, full beard, Smokey-The-bear hat, pot belly, standing near the entrance to the gift shop, talking to a short dark-haired guy with a camera. It seemed an amiable, if animated conversation. The ranger occasionally looked my way. It crossed my mind that maybe the ranger would frown on the dogs being in the water, so I pulled them out and started walking in the opposite direction, toward the headwater of the stream. I was ambling away, trying to look nonchalant, when the ranger launched down the trail toward me.

Busted, I imagined. I tried to work out my response. Stick to friendly. He was a federal ranger, after all, and my track record with them is ‘letters to the editor’. The little guy with the camera followed the ranger a short distance before slowing down. The ranger was moving quickly. As he closed on me I looked up with a smile. He too was smiling. I noted that at his present trajectory, he’d go right by me.

“Let ‘em in the water,” he proclaimed from a distance.

I’m sure my eyes fluttered. No hello, no ‘afternoon’.

“Let them –“

He slowed down a bit, but still wasn’t aimed at me.

“That water is here for their enjoyment as much as for you and me,” he said with jovial charm, his objective somewhere beyond my location.

“Thanks. Listen, ranger, what’s the story with the old miner’s cabin out behind the maintenance building here?”

The Ranger grimaced and waved dismissively as he passed.

“Who knows? One of Scotty’s scams, no doubt.”

And the Ranger shot by. I once again found myself thinking of my parents’ flippant attitude at my curiosity about the quartz garden.

The dogs must have understood the ranger, both were now in the water, me in the shade of a fine specimen of a Pinyon Pine.

“Good looking dogs.”

The short guy with the camera had sidled up to the shaded bench near me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m traveling across the country in my new Prius,” the guy volunteered.

I’m just way too out of practice. The guy is offering to tell me his story, with amazing bluntness, and all I can wonder is if he’s hitting on me. I’ve got something like thirty minutes before the family gets back, I don’t have to worry about Kellian jumping in the water or Nick slipping on the rocks and cracking his head open. When I was young I would have started doing the ‘who, what, when, where how, and why’ without hesitation. Yeah, I’ve found myself having to explain my heterosexuality to too many horn-dogs misreading my chatty interest for flirting, but I have also expanded my understanding of human nature. That might sound trite, but over the years I’ve talked to Hara Krishnas, Jesus Freaks, COGs and would-be looters. I’ve plumbed the depths of their thoughts, been amazed by their complexity, and disappointed with their stale shallowness. I know more for taking the risk of talking. Besides, surely gay guys don’t troll for old flabby men.

One of the things I have learned to do, that I didn’t do as a kid, is ask myself. ‘Why are they approaching me?’ Thing is, you can’t ask them directly, you have to let the person volunteer enough to make a guess.

“Yeah,” the guy with the really nice camera continued, “I’ve gone just about anywhere I’ve wanted to. Chased down some Jeeps way off-road. All I had t’do was take it easy.”

“The true secret to off-roading,” I offered.

“And averaging forty miles to the gallon,” he continued. “Forty.”

“I’m jealous,” I complimented. “Who you traveling with?”

“Aw, well, alone actually.” He sighed and studied Nitro delicately moving through the water. “Yeah, haven’t had much luck in the interpersonal relationship thing. You?”

“Family, wife, kids, dogs.”

“How many kids?”

“Three.”

He sucked air through his teeth as he looked away.

“Three.”

“Children are an expensive hobby,” I agreed.

“Don’t know if I’d want to bring kids into a world where the environment is going t’hell right before our eyes. Have you seen Al Gore’s movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’?”

“Waiting for it to come out on DVD.”

“Oh, you really shouldn’t wait, it’s so important for us all to know what the Republicans are doing, how they’re killing the whole planet, quite frankly.”

“All for a good economy,” I assented.

“And it’s not all that good an economy. Its down-right bad. Homeless, people starving, all so fat-cat Republican wives don’t have to scrub their own toilets.”

I blinked.

“I missed something.”

“It’s all in the movie. Global warming, the supposed War On Terror. Gore spells it out so clearly. If this keeps up, if the Republicans stay in power another term, the oceans are going to rise twenty feet and all the major metropolitan areas along the coast will be wiped out.”

It was right then that I realized that the ranger had not been hurrying to some pressing duty, but running away from the man with the nice camera standing before me. My eyes widened.

“Where the Democrats’ base lives. All the Blue states.”

The man gave me a bemused smile.

“No, no. This isn’t some conspiracy theory. It’s science.”

“Well, now, I just heard Rush Limbaugh question that,” I countered, although I tried to make it as conversational, non-confrontational as I could. “It’s not like the planet hasn’t gone through this before. We had a mini ice age in the sixteenth, seventeenth century. One of the reason there was such a push to find new lands –“

“First off, why should you listen to some drug addict about anything? And believe me, as a recovering alcoholic, I can tell you, he’s still using.”

“Why should I listen to Al Gore?” I said. “Just another politician finding something to leverage me out of my civil liberties.”

“No, no,” The little man with the Prius turned more directly toward me. “This is about saving the planet. What are rights worth if you’re dead? Besides, no one but the Republicans are taking away your rights. What’s more, right in the film, they talk about the CO2 levels being something like seventy-five times higher now in the ice cores than at any time in the history of the planet. It’s really beyond too late, you know.”

“I remember ‘The Last Days of the Late Great Planet Earth,” I said. “Computer models showing we’d all be dead, the planet baked over, by 1985, if the whole planet didn’t go ZPG, and I’ll default to your expertise, but I don’t think it has. And besides, if it’s too late to do anything, what am I supposed to do?”

“Well, first off, don’t have any more kids, but most important of all, vote the Republicans out, and put sanity back in, put people who care about the planet, who’ll vote for the Kyoto Agreement.”

“Wait, wait,” I said. “I’ve read that the Kyoto Agreement doesn’t apply to major polluting nations like China --:”

“Look, I don’t want to debate this. Go watch the movie.”

I smiled.

“D’Okay.”

“Watch the movie, and you’ll see.” He turned now and walked away from me. “Just watch the movie.”

“I’ll do that,” I answered.

“Just watch the movie,” the enviro-Evangelist threw out over his shoulder. I assume he went looking for more fertile fields for converts.

The family appeared shortly.

“I can’t find my wallet,” Alex informed me. His voice quivered “It’s gone.”

“How much money was in it?”

“Fifty dollars.” Alex sounded bitter.

We walked around, a few minute’s worth, before Alex exclaimed, “It’s gone. I’ve lost it!”

“Did you have it when we went up the hill after Nitro?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we –“

“It’s gone, Okay?” Alex interjected, with a tinge of accusation in his tone.

“Keep your voice down,” Robin said through gritted teeth.

“When was the last time you saw it?” I asked. The litany of questions and responses played out in calm query versus bitter angry outbursts. The last time he’d thought about it was when he put it in his pocket, back at the RV. He realized it was gone when mom asked him whether he wanted to go to the gift shop, right after the tour ended. It was a black wallet.

For the next thirty minutes I walked around, climbed up the hill in the energy sucking heat. I did not find his wallet.

“I want to go to the souvenir shop,” Robin finally proclaimed.

“I’ll keep looking,” I answered.

The kids all went with Robin.

There were so few guests at the Castle, I couldn’t imagine anyone else having found it. The family spent quite a long time in the gift shop. I imagined just leaving without finding it. Serve the kid right, losing his wallet, but that wasn’t the right answer. He’d lost his wallet, certainly an accident. It was his attitude I wanted to punish. Although the surliness, the effort to somehow blame someone else for him losing it was stupid, it was more of a misguided self-defense. That fifty dollars was money he’d earned and saved from birthday gifts. He’d saved it for this trip and had spent little of it.

I ended up walking back to the RV with the dogs. Shuffling them inside, I looked around.

In the back of the Bounder, where Robin and I sleep, was a black wallet with something like forty-two dollars in it. Alex’s library card was in it as well.

The dogs walked me back toward the castle. The Taylor Horde intercepted me halfway there. All four of them held plastic shopping bags weighty with plunder. I did my best to hold up Alex’s wallet while gripping the leashes.

The look of relief on Alex’s face was palpable. Robin looked sour. She turned back to Alex.

“Go back and tell the ranger you found it.”

As it turned out, they had stopped by the Ranger’s office to report the lost wallet. Robin took the dogs, and the dogs took Robin and the twins toward the RV while Alex and I walked back to the Ranger’s Office.

We stepped into what appeared to be a part of the actual Castle structure.

It was the full-bearded ranger I’d talked to earlier, behind the counter.

“Um, sir?” Alex started. “I found my wallet.”

The ranger stared at us for a moment. Where there had been a big-bear of a smile outside, now there seemed to be a tincture of something else. After a pause, he silently shuffled paper and pulled a single sheet around to face us, placed a pen on top of it.

The office was air-conditioned, a bit dark after being outside. The walls curved around behind us, a curious thing that made me wonder what this section originally served in the Castle architecture, or if perhaps it had been added on.

“Sign off here.”

Alex seemed to know what to do. It was his report, I surmised. I believe I attempted conversation, and got curt, short answers. Having fulfilled our goal, I wished the Ranger a good day. He begrudgingly nodded. That is my last memory of Scotty’s Castle.


“A little disappointing,” Robin volunteered. “You could take all the pictures you liked, but it’s so dark in there, to protect everything from the sun, nothing will come out. Mind you, it’s beautiful. Very Spanish, Moorish.”

Robin and the kids lounged about the RV cabin. The dogs were absolutely spent and slept, tongues hanging out. As I drove, the wind blowing through and making it all bearable, Robin read out of the books she’d bought at the gift shop, and shortly started getting pissed.

“Did you see all the railroad ties stacked all over the place?”

“Saw it as we were coming in,” I said.

“Well, there’s even more behind the place. The guide said the rich guy had bought all those ties with the idea they’d use them in all the fireplaces all through the castle, and every fireplace we passed, there was at least one of those ties in the fireplace. She told us that those were the original ties placed in the fireplaces because they were never used. The Castle never got cold enough to burn a fire, yet right here, in this book by the wife, she says how brutally cold the nights got at the Castle, and then she describes snuggling close to the fireplace while Death Valley Scotty told a yarn.”

“It’s certainly our experience that it gets cold in the desert,” I said. “Land of Little Rain, World of extremes.”

Robin continued to find fault in the guide’s information as I drove. Really, that’s infuriating. Where did the guide get the erroneous data?

From Scotty’s to 95 to 156, the by-way that would take us to our reserved spot at the NPS campground on Mummy Mountain, was a mere 156 miles. We left Scotty’s Castle just around noon, which meant we’d be starting up the mountain to what the topo map said was a forest, the Toiyabe National Forest, around three. It was a 5200 foot climb over 16.75 miles. We certainly climb quicker just getting over the Lagunas. (Actually I just checked, from El Cajon to the pass just before the Golden Acorn Casino, the highest point on the freeway, is 41.3 miles, with a rise, from 622 feet to 4229 feet, of 3607 feet.) I had a strange experience, though, many years ago, not with 156, but another road just a little further south, 157, that leads to the same area. I was alone in a 1986 Ford Escort. It was something like January, and it was unbelievably cold. The climb to the mountain top was eight miles, and considering there was snow swirling around in Las Vegas, chances are, I wasn’t making it to the top without chains, which I’d already tried to purchase.

I started up the byway from a dead stop, of course. Speed limit was 45 miles an hour. I never got near that. I drove maybe three miles, and had to pull off. I was flooring it, and the darn Escort was rolling to a stop. I never got out of second, it was a manual transmission. I sat there wondering if I'd blown a head gasket or something God-awful like that. These Escorts came with no extra gauges. I didn’t know if I was overheating, or low on oil, only that I had half a tank of gas. I tried it a second time, and never got out of first, and once again, rolled basically to a halt. There was a turn-out, and I used it. The engine ran rough, knocking a bit, I smelled the engine, which is always bad. Worrying that I was making a bad situation worse, I turned around and rolled down the hill. By the time I got down to 95, the engine was humming, the car didn’t smell.

This hundred fifty some-odd miles seemed to take forever. Down through the Sarcobatus Flat with such place names as Coyote Hole and Alkali, through an oasis with a bustling RV park called Springdale. South of this we picked up the Amargosa River, Sober Up Gulch and Oasis Valley to the west. We picked up another abandoned railroad grade right here shortly before coming into Beatty.

For the life of me, I can’t remember a thing about Beatty, even though I needed to make a sharp left turn here to stay on 95. Through the Amargosa Narrows, into the Amargosa Desert, with the Bare Mountains to our north, we headed east, south-east, the old railroad grade more south, until it was only a thought to the west. Place names like Razorback Ridge, Tatantula Canyon, and Wildcat Peak dot the Bare Mountains. Further on we passed through Amargosa Valley, the town, then past Skeleton Hills, and Specter Range, where another old railroad grade appears and disappears. At Point of Rocks, 95 actually turns north-east for awhile, then straightens up and goes due north until you hit two towns right next to each other, Cactus Springs and Indian Springs. Indian Springs looks like it exist to service the Nellis Air Force base, which is off to the north from 95 here. At Indian Springs, 95 turns south-east again.

Thirteen and a half miles past Indian Springs, we finally came up on 156. A stop-sign brought us to a complete halt.

I turned the Bounder up 156, headed south-west. It was roughly 3pm.

It is 17 miles to the Dolomite Campground, where we had site 12 reserved.

These mountains we were supposed to climb into from 95 looked like minor bumps on the western horizon. Looking at the elevation profile, the climb is continuous and smooth, no radical ascents, no hairy switchbacks, it’s a straight shot up and into Mummy Mountain.

We had trouble almost immediately. With my foot pinning the gas pedal to the floor in first gear, we couldn’t get above 25 miles an hour, on a by-way marked for fifty-five miles an hour. The engine heat stayed just about normal, but the transmission temp rose

I pulled over onto a wide spot, still well into the desert, and let the engine run.

“I was afraid of this,” I told Robin. “We’re going to have to unload the Bronco, and you follow us up.”

Robin’s gave me no more than a poker face.

We unloaded the Bronco, leaving me with nothing but the trailer to drag. Sitting here right now, I can’t even imagine what I could have done more.

I pulled back onto 156 and started dragging along. All of seventeen miles, that’s all we had to cover. Looking around, it didn’t even look like much of a climb. Still, I may have gotten it into second only a few times. The transmission temperature climbed, then radiator fluid temperature climbed. There was no turn-out. I looked in my rear-view mirror. Robin tracked me. Although several vehicles had gone down, none had come up on us.

Off to the right, a pair of wild burros, a mom and baby, stepped out from behind a large yucca plant to watch us grind by.

“Look at the wild burros,” I called out, and my voice trembled.

Now the radiator temperature was getting critical. I couldn’t imagine we’d made it half-way, still no turn-off. I had to get off the road. I pulled it over, sitting at a brutal cant. Robin pulled off behind me.

I left the engine running as I ran back to the Bronco.

“The engine and transmission are really hot. We’re going to have to let them cool off.”

“Why are they overheating?” Robin asked.

“Because I can’t get up the speed to have air moving through the radiators to keep it all cool.”

Robin looked away in disgust.

In the next fifteen minutes, perhaps one car passed us going up, and very few coming down.

The terrain here was dense desert foliage with a smattering of Juniper. Lots of Chainfruit Cholla, something we don’t have in Southern California.

The burros had taken off when we pulled over. I made the call and turned the engine off, hoping that didn’t blow too much fluid. I also turned off the refrigerator. Sitting at that angle could easily damage it.

I finally fired up the engine, waited for it to settle to an uneasy idle. The temperatures were still high, so I waited for the fluid to circulate through and hopefully cool off. I didn’t smell anything, but then again, I didn’t smell the rear brake drums either when they melted down the last trip. I’m just blown away the rear end just didn’t tear loose. Speaks well of the GM P-30 truck drive-train and frame. I really wasn’t satisfied with the numbers, but it was nearly four, and time was slipping away. Night-time was 8:37, but I’d hoped to get up there and let the kids run around a little.

I honestly didn’t know what to expect. The Ag Department web site doesn’t give you much, few pictures. All I really knew was that campsite 12’s parking spot was forty feet long, the longest parking platform at the campground, and ten feet too short for our combined RV-trailer rig. ‘Cover:’ the site map asked, then answered itself. ‘None’.

I had this idea pictured in my mind of a Pinyon-Juniper biome, with low trees and scanty evergreens with rocky escarpments breaking it up. There were some radical hikes and climbing routes suggested at the website, so I had this idea of Joshua Tree, or even better, Moon Valley.

We had to get there first, of course.

When I pulled out onto the road, I floored it, and the engine just moped. It wasn’t until I backed off a little that it seemed to pick up speed. It was no better than before, and we crawled up the hill for perhaps twenty minutes, averaging fifteen miles an hour. The temperatures climbed past the last level I’d pulled off before, but I pressed ahead. I gritted my teeth and just willed the beast forward.

We were in second, when suddenly the transmission started jumping from gear to gear. The engine began knocking, for the first time. I immediately pulled over, the spot forced on me as bad as last time.

I put the transmission in ‘Park’ and waited for my heart to stop pounding. Was this it? Had I baked the transmission for good this time? The guys on the Bounder site talked about not letting the temp get above something like two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Hell, I’d just peaked three hundred. My sigh came out ragged. I once again walked back to Robin.

“I really pushed it that time,” I said as I stepped to the driver’s door. “We’re gonna have to let it set for a half hour this time, I think.”

Robin exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke, stared at me through her sunglasses, but said nothing.

“Did you want to come in?” I asked.

“No,” she said conversationally. “I’m fine here.”

I returned to the Bounder. I let the engine run for another five minutes, then shut it down, and watched the clock.

In twenty minutes of driving from the last stop, we might have covered five miles. Figuring we’d made a little more distance before that, that placed us somewhere between half and two thirds of the way there.

It was an arbitrary number, thirty minutes. If the transmission was blown, we were there permanently. If it wasn’t blown, was it damaged? Was this the end of the trip, a new Vacation Into Hell I wouldn’t be able to write down? I’ve never actually chronicled that vacation, although I can tell you snippets of it. It just isn’t funny, finding a motel room in Denver, waking up in the wee hours of the morning and pissing blood.

The terrain had changed substantially over the last five miles. The landscape showed scraggly Pinyon Pine and a thick stand of tall Juniper. Up ahead, the mountains that had seemed inconsequential now started to have shocking jagged peaks capped in white. We were still five miles away.

It was past four when I tried to start the engine. After a few cranks, it caught, but where, twelve miles ago, it throbbed confidently, now it faltered and stumbled. I revved it, and it seemed to gain some of its old stature. I sucked a breath in and shifted into first gear.

The Bounder moved back onto the road. Once again I found myself unable to exceed fifteen miles an hour, the engine and transmission fluid temperatures, which had dropped substantially, now rose, once again, toward the paralyzing highs that had made me pull off twice before. The engine coughed and hacked, protesting with a kick every couple minutes as we dragged higher into the mountains.

The terrain changed from Pinyon Pine and Juniper to Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine. Not the stressed thirsty forests of the Laguna Mountains, but lush green dense growth.

It looked like something from Yosemite. The whole western horizon was majestic pinnacles and stark blue sky.

The temps were once again at those destructive highs. I was just about to pull off, when the road suddenly leveled off. We slipped through a pass, and abruptly we were in a national park like you see in the brochures. I would check the map later, when I could. The nameless pass is one of the highest points 156 reaches. The next highest would be the Dolomite campground.

This would be the third time we’d encountered Toiyobe National Forest. The Ruby Mountains near Elko, the Shoshone Mountains off to the west along 376 north of Tonopa, and these mountains north of Las Vegas, are all apart of the Humbolt-Toiyobe National Forest. This, however, was even more of a shock than the Ruby Mountains. Seventeen miles back at roughly three thousand feet we’d been in a dusty bland desert, and now we were in a forest and cool air, at eighty-three hundred feet. To cover those seventeen miles had taken nearly two hours.

We cruised past a ranger station. Now there were people everywhere, pulled off the side of the road, walking around in lush meadows, picnicking at tables set just off the road. The by-way had some twists here, so I had to concentrate, but according to the topo map, there’s a large number of structures all along this road and connecting roads. I had read a small blurb on the internet about this being a popular winter vacation spot, but I didn’t see any sky resorts or runs, and since I had in my mind that it would be Juniper-Pinyon at best, I hadn’t checked it further.

A sign pointed to a road that rose sharply to the right, ‘Dolomite’. I gritted my teeth and started up it, the fluid temperatures still hovering at critical.

Maybe a hundred yards into the thick wall of pines, and we came to a stop sign, and another sign that said ‘Check in with Host’.

A gentleman in a golf cart pulled up, all smiles.

“Hi there,” he said as I leaned out my window.

“Hi, we’re the Taylors,” I called down. “We’re reserved for Site Twelve for Sunday night?”

He waved dismissively.

“All that’s handled by the reservation people. Twelve is up a short distance. How many in your party? Any pets? Now you want to follow the rules about your pets, but ever’body’s got ‘em up here, so it shouldn’t be a sore point. Keep ‘em in at night, that’s the best thing anyway.”

“I’m a little worried about my length,” I said. “How much of an issue is that?”

He notched an eyebrow.

“So long as the wheels are on the asphalt, it ain’t an issue, that’s all we ask.”

“Fires okay?”

“What’s that?”

“Is it all right to have a campfire.”

Now he looked vaguely irritated.

“Well, yeah, sure, in the fire ring, of course.”

“Just wanted to be sure it was okay,” I tried to explain. “What with all the fires damage out there.”

He still didn’t understand, but he seemed anxious now to cut me loose.

“You have a good time. Can’t help it, really,” he added as he drove off.

I put the Bounder back in gear, and started up the one-lane road.

We never got past ten miles an hour, of course, we were hunting our campsite, but just before the bathrooms, there was Campsite Twelve.

And there was someone already camping there.

I came to a halt, stared long and hard at the campsite. A small Samurai-style vehicle was parked on the very long asphalt drive, a dome tent set up just past the picnic table. A young lean man with long blond hair sat at the picnic table. Two plump children sat with him, one perhaps in her early teens, looking glum and bored.

I stared at them for awhile, then stared at the number, double-checked the reservation confirmation form I’d run off the printer at home, then back to the marker with the number ‘12’ on it. Next to the marker monument was a metal tag that had ‘reserved’ printed across the top in distinct bold black letters, then, written in felt pen below: ‘Taylor’.

I looked back up from the tag at the three individuals at our picnic table. The blonde pointedly didn’t look our way, but spoke to the sullen-looking chubby youngsters with excited animated gestures.

I ran through my options. We could look for another campsite, only none of them were as long as this one. What’s more, they were probably all reserved, just like our spot was. Who in Las Vegas wouldn’t drive the seventy miles to this gorgeous cool spot if they could get away for a weekend?

There really wasn’t an option, I just hate confrontations. I sighed, threw the Bounder in ‘Park’, put on the emergency brake, and got out.

I walked back to Robin, explained the situation. She stared at me through her sunglasses, puffed on her cigarette, shrugged, but said nothing.

I walked up the driveway toward the threesome at the picnic table.

The blonde finally acknowledged me with a start as I made it off the asphalt. He jumped up and bounded to me, all smiles.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” I said with a smile. “We’ve go this camp site reserved for the night.”

“Oh,” he said with the cadence of a surfer dude. “You sure? Y’know we just shot up here for th’night ourselves and ….”

And then he went on and babbled for a while. I glanced back at their little car, Utah plates.

“We’re all set up, see?” He pointed back at his tent and the two children, who looked just about bored to misery, looking dead-eyed at me.

“I’ve paid for this site,” I said conversationally. “We reserved it.”

“Oh, suresure. Yeah, well, y’know, I’ll hop on my bike and cruise around a bit, and find us another spot. Gimme thirty minutes, maybe a little longer.”

I nodded, looked him straight in the eye.

“I’m blocking the road.”

“Oh, Yeah! Sure! Well, I’ll pull my car off. Okay?”

I turned and walked away, with a ‘Thank you’ thrown over my shoulder.

I got back to the Bounder, whose engine still ran with a slight wheeze and cough that I hoped could be attributed to the altitude.

In a moment, the surfer dude fired up his vehicle, and drove it off the asphalt slab up to the picnic table. As I backed the RV in, I spotted him hopping on a bike, saying something to the children, who did not acknowledge him or anything else. He glanced at me as he rolled off on his bike, his con-artist-shuffle smile replaced with hurt and malice.

I put Alex out, and he guided me in as the twins shrieked and cried over some slight of honor. I backed it up onto the campsite’s driveway, past the trailer’s bumper, all the way until the trailer’s rear tires reached the edge.

There was enough room for Robin to pull in sideways, which she promptly did.

Even before I leveled the Bounder, I walked back and turned the refrigerator back on. There was little leveling to do, but from experience I know to place all three legs down, or the cabin rocks with every gust of wind or shift of weight.

Now we all crawled into the Bounder, and basically hid while we waited for the surfer dude to return, tear down camp, and leave. It took about thirty minutes. I did go out and stack our gear on the trailer so we could move them quickly into position.

“What’s wrong with the refrigerator?”

Robin nearly shrieked.

“Oh, I turned it off back down the hill.”

“What?” Now she really was shrieking. “Why?”

“We were sitting at a radical cant,” I answered. “The refrigerator can get damaged running at too sharp an angle.”

“This food here is nearly defrosted! What were you thinking?”

I do not apologize anymore. I don’t say I’m sorry. I looked away as if contemplating the question she posited, and then responded, “That I didn’t want the refrigerator ruined?”

She gasped in disgust and turned away from me. I exited the Bounder, and continued to move items around to the other side of the trailer.

With having backed in, the door to the RV opened away from the campsite. Most of the gear for camp is also stored on the passenger side. Only the fire wood is on the driver’s side, so I hauled as much of it out as I thought we’d need.

Finally, the surfer dude returned. He spoke softly but pointedly to the two fat kids, who sullenly began picking lanterns and gear up, and putting it inside the small car. They left without any acknowledgement.

Now came out the camp chairs, the little tables to set our drinks on.

The kids were off running. Good. We had three hours of sunlight left. I tried to get Alex to help me haul wood up to the fire but his glowering demeanor made it more work than it was worth.

We staked the dogs out, with the rope running from two huge Ponderosa trees with the concrete picnic table between them, and the dogs gleefully set about wrapping themselves around table, chairs and us. I set out their water and food. The water they wanted, the food seemed to have no appeal.

The description for the campsite on the ReserveAmerica website says ‘Cover: None’. We were under a massive canopy of pine trees that defies anything you’ll find in San Diego County, except maybe Palomar Mountain.

From our campsite you could see, through all those trees, massive white-rock peaks, sharp teeth stabbing up into the south-east sky. Pine trees that looked like toothpicks covered spots at the base of the fangs, and in some places on the pikes themselves, hanging on in cracks and crannies, cavities in the majestic molars, defying physics.

“Did you know it was going to be like this?” Robin asked.

“No.”

“We could have spent a week here.”

I nodded, then got the fire started. It was actually going to be cool.

As I positioned the wood to get it lit, I saw Kellian headed for the campsite below us. A family had pulled in with a pop-up tent trailer. My stomach tightened, and I wondered how I could stop her from imposing upon them, but without bellowing down to her, or running down and dragging her back. I saw no way that I could diplomatically stop her.

“Where are you cooking?” I asked.

“Over the fire,” she answered. “Steak, ranch-style beans, flour tortillas.”

I nodded with satisfaction, this being the absolute best meal to have while camping, but said nothing.

I popped my first beer of the evening, and felt quite poor. No St Pauli Girl, only Bud Light.

We would have stayed up later, but every passing dog set off ours and every other dog in the campground, and there were lots of them, so just around nine-thirty we went in.

Some time in the dead of night, the dogs went ballistic for about five minutes. Ultimately I went out and surveyed our camp, but I found nothing. I wish I had been more observant.

Day Nine ended.