Month: November 2010 (Page 1 of 2)

Or, the reason I have to stay home from work today:

 
The view out the front room window.

 
The view in the front room.  Now seriously, could you kick this poor doggie out in the snow when the forecast high temperature is 24F for today?

Tomorrow is supposed to be slightly warmer.  And she does have a neoprene vest to wear.  She hates it but it's better than being a doggy-popsicle.

 
Three weekends ago we got together with 3 other couples to enjoy dinner and conversation at Wild Ginger in Seattle.  This particular group tries to get together more than once a year but sometimes scheduling is difficult.  We all live out in the hinterlands (Puyallup, Kent, Woodinville, Stanwood) so Seattle is most often the central location unless someone is hosting an overnight party.

This picture was taken early in the evening.  The reflection makes it look like I have olive soup but what I actually have is a Hendricks (gin) martini with three olives.  I can only drink one of those and remain upright and without a hangover as long as I pace myself with milder beverages (i.e. a couple beers) for the rest of the evening.

Dinner, conversation and fun lasted for at least three hours.  Wild Ginger serves meals family style and each of us ordered appetizers and entrees to share.  Ahi tuna, duck and steamed buns, chicken satay, eggplant, spicy green beans… Yum, yum, yum!  We finished the night with either a dessert or dessert drink.  I had Madiera since Randy and I had reserved a room at the Sheraton, which is within easy walking distance.  However, our part of the dinner bill cost more than our room.  Imagine 3 other couples paying as much.  We were a profitable table that night.

The weekend was really nice and relaxing.  We don't spend an entire weekend in the city very often so waking up in a nice hotel room with a view was a treat.  I mentioned in the morning that if we were able to get that particular rate every night, our monthly housing bill would only be $3500, which is less than many people's mortgages.  We briefly fantasized about that… housekeeping, laundry, no lawn or weeding… Not sure what we'd do with the pets.  Or our camper.  Okay, not practical but fun to think about.

Before breakfast we arranged a late checkout then went over to the Hilton for their top floor view at breakfast.  Not sure I'd recommend that unless you want the buffet.  They don't seem to want to wait on you if you'd rather order from the menu.

After breakfast we walked all over the place, down to Pioneer Square and up to Belltown then back.  Nordstrom's was having their half yearly sale, which I could not resist.  I bought two, yes two, cashmere sweaters for half price.  By then it was lunch.  We ate at the Tap House, which is just a block or so north of the hotel.  They offer something like 160 beers on tap.  I had a well-crafted Belgian and probably the best ahi tuna salad I've ever had (it's the dressing that makes it special).

Then on to Play It Again Sports for skis.  Their skis are in remarkably good shape — no damage to the bottoms or even topside in most cases.  I bought a modern pair of Head skis.  Fat and shaped.  My Volants from 2001, which were modern shaped skis back then were too out of date for them to consider for trade.  But I got a good deal and they matched the color of the cashmere I bought at Nordstroms.  Bright pink!

Ordinarily I don't care about matching my skis to my outfit.  Well, I still don't.  It was entirely a coincidence but a fun one.  I do a little research on skis but don't ski well enough yet to entirely notice the nuances between models.  I finally noticed the difference between my 3-buckle and 4-buckle boots last year.  Some day I'll notice the difference between skis but not yet.  One of these days I'll get on my new inbound skis but for now I'm enjoying my backcountry skis until more than one resorts open.

It never left me stranded and always got me home safely.

Fini.

I know Denise wants me to hurry up and finish this story so I will try to do that in this post.  However, I'm not making any promises that it will end here.

Let's see, it's January 2007 and Randy and I have just met formally in a park n ride at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday.  Apparently he knew who I was prior that but it's easier for men to sort out who the five women are in a class than it is for five women to sort out 50 men.  Also, Randy has a young face.  He kept getting carded at bars until he was 40 so I probably thought he was 25 when I first saw him and immediately filtered him out.

On the ride to Blewett Pass, where the ski trip was planned for that day, I got to know him better and most importantly learned he was only a few years younger than me, not 15 years younger.  Well, that's okay then.  And it turns out he's a beautiful skier.  I would say his form is actually quite pretty and graceful when he's on a line about which he feels confident.

Lee hadn't exactly worked out the route so there was some headscratching and turning around here and there until we finally found the route.  That was fine.  I'm not that good of a skier and it gave me lots of time to not exhaust myself by falling a lot.  Fortunately Lee and Mike aren't that great either so I was in good company and paired myself with Mike at the end of the ski.  We pretty much stuck together as a group as we went up with Richard breaking trail much of the way.  Richard is a fireman and is very fit.  I think Randy broke trail for a while too because he's good at it.  I stayed in the rear because I was recovering from a bad cold and was still coughing up a lot of gunk.  Yuck.  I try to be polite about it but generally I can hold my own on the uphill so stayed behind either Randy or Richard when I wasn't trying to cough up a lung.

Eventually we found the summit of Diamond Head and had a nice lunch break.  After lunch Richard dug a pit so we could look at the snow layers on the steep (yikes!) slope we wanted to ski.  It looked stable so Richard took the plunge and skied down while we watched.  The snow stayed on the slope so Randy followed then Lee, Mike, and I sort of skied, sort of fell down the slope.  Whee!  We were going to make another lap with Richard and Randy in the lead.  Lee and Mike were tired.  I was enthusiastic but had gotten snow between my skins and skis so couldn't keep the skins on.  I think Randy and Richard made it mostly back up to the top before turning around to ski down.  I remember them both skiing down beautifully and wish I had a picture to share with you but I didn't have a digital camera back then.  Sorry.

We took a different route out, a route that through the woods and a little tricky and slippery.  I think I started falling a lot more and was getting tired.  Lee and Mike were definitely tired.  This is where Mike and I stuck together while Randy and Richard figured out the route back to the truck(s).  At one point Mike and I took a wrong turn but figured it out when we saw the highway below us.  Oops.  We found our way back before anyone started worrying too much about what happened to us.

On the way back, I was still in the backseat between Mike and Jay because the trip leader always gets the seat of honor.  I was happy rubbing shoulder with two warm bodies because by then I was cold from sweating and falling in the snow all afternoon.  We stopped for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Cle Elum.  I went to the restroom to put on some dry clothes.  When I returned the only empty seat was next to Randy.  Not sure if it was by design or by accident but who cares?

By the time we got to the park n ride in Lynnwood, we as a group had talked about other ski trips, places we wanted to go, things we wanted to do.  Nothing like a long vehicle ride to provide the right bonding atmosphere.  Randy and I made a non-specific promise to keep in touch by email.  We may even have exchanged phone numbers by then on the pretext of doing more skiing.

Obviously we kept in touch.  I invited him to go to an REI to find equipment I needed for the remainder of the class.  We thought about snow camping prior to one of the field days for classes but the conditions were less than ideal so we bunked at the cabin of someone he knew in the area.  We did these little innocent things until he asked me out to dinner on Valentine's Day.  Then his intentions were crystal clear, although anyone who might've been watching us knew where we were headed.

Since then we've been on lots and lots of trips, skiing, mountain biking, backpacking, hiking and so on.  Many of them were in the Toyota, which was getting less and less comfortable as time went on.  After all, the driver seat had form fitted itself to my butt, which is apparently crooked so that the right side sinks a little (oh dear, what does that say about my butt?). The back begins to hurt a bit after a long drive.  Also, there's a vent on the floor of the passenger side that continually blows cold air at the feet.  Plus Randy is very tall so hunching in a Toyota is not comfortable.

Then came the day that something was clearly wrong with the Toyota.  By then I was replacing lots of little things.  The brakes, spark plugs, all routine maintenance stuff.  But something more wrong was happening and the diagnoses was the valves.  This was in 2007 because I also had to have a tooth pulled, and what the heck why not drain my savings account right then.  The valve job, which was quite extensive cost over $3000.  Well, why not buy another vehicle?  Buying another vehicle would've cost a lot more and I wasn't ready to part with the Toyota yet.  Besides after that $3000-plus I'd practically have a new vehicle.  Well, the motor anyway.  The following year I replaced the shocks so that it didn't feel like I was sliding sideways over railroad tracks.

The Toyota had at least 160,000 miles on it at this point and was still our primary adventure vehicle since Randy replaced the Ford with a Scion, which was a nice car for daily commuting and getting to Seattle and for his mom to get in and out of.  I wanted to wait until the Toyota was 20 years old (2014) or had over 200,000 miles on it before I replaced it.  At the rate I drove, which was not much daily because generally I take the bus, getting to 200,000 miles would take a long tme.

In 2009 I bought a 2007 Chevy 1-ton, thinking it would be a good backup vehicle as the Toyota was getting a little more creaky but nothing was really wrong with it.  But we bought a camper so the Chevy turned into an RV.  Which was fine because generally I was just driving the Toyota to the bus stop and we'd use the Chevy on weekend trips.

But then just this year I needed to visit my grandmother in Spokane.  I couldn't face taking Greyhound again even though I had done it for the last several years.  I didn't want to drive the Chevy that far by myself.  It's a crewcab and seems like a huge waste of space to drive alone.  I was thinking of driving the Toyota although it's not comfortable for a 5-6 hour drive.  Randy offered his Scion, for which I was visibly grateful.  He had made plans to go mountain biking with one of his friends for the weekend so would take the Chevy and camper.

Except his plans got cancelled so he stayed home, with the Toyota in the driveway for his only practical means of transportation.  Now the Toyota is no longer comfortable for me and is doubly uncomfortable for him so he stayed home all weekend, not wanting to venture out.

While I was spending all that quality time in his Scion to and from Spokane I thought about the few weekends we do spend apart.  Sometimes he wants to ride his mountain bike on trails that scare me.  Or ski lines that are too challenging for me.  Sometimes I want go climbing, which scares him.  Or go backpacking, which has little appeal.  Or go cross country skiing, which he thinks is boring.  And the thought of taking my Toyota to the mountains to do these kinds of things for either of us was starting to hold both of us back.  If the choice was to stay home or take the Toyota, we'd stay home.  Sad.  Maybe even pathetic but the Toyota now has at least 180,000 miles on it.  And a friend from work wanted to sell his 2005 Suburu Forester with only 33,000 miles on it for what I thought was a great deal.

So I bought it.  And while having dinner with another couple with whom we are planning a week-long ski trip the subject of vehicles came up.  Chris immediately said he'd buy my Toyota.  I'd forgotten that on an earlier trip having mentioned it and that Chris said he might be interested.  Ordinarily I avoid selling vehicles to friends.  But I was honest about it and named a fair price for its condition.  Now I know that Chris has a lower standard of comfort than I do because he's a duck hunter.  Granted, I do lots of uncomfortable things but duck hunting sets the bar a whole lot lower in my opinion.

He didn't even want me to clean it out.  I assumed he'd throw some dead animal in the back as soon as he had the chance.  So a little more than a week ago, we made the deal.  I drove it one last time and shared all I could remember about it.  But like a comfortable, long-term relationship you forget all the inconvenient parts and adjust.  I told Chris as much as I could but I've adjusted to that truck over the last 16 years so I'm sure he's finding out on his own the things I failed to disclose.  For that I apologize.  I am grateful that the Toyota is in good hands and will still go on adventures, Chris-style adventures.

I now have Suburu, which has been on one adventure with me — to Mt. Baker last weekend to ski.  I know the first owner used it as a puttering around town car.  The second, my friend, did a few things in it because I found his Forest Pass in the glovebox.  We have many adventures ahead of us.

The next several years didn't involve the Toyota much because we had the extra cars.  Our driveway and garage was full of a 1963 Chrysler, a Saab that was Dave's primary commuter vehicle, the Mercedes, and Toyota.  Los Angeles just wasn't a good fit for a stick shift and no air conditioning.  And weekend adventures in the mountain were farther away so we didn't go every weekend but enjoyed the mountain biking, rock climbing, and other things we could do that were nearby.

Stoney Point (rock climbing) was a 20 minute walk from our house and walking was much easier than trying to find a parking spot along a busy road.  There were two mountain biking trails that were pretty easy to get to from our house without having to get in the car.  If we wanted variety other trails were available within 30 minutes.

Time and distance is important on weekends if your daily commute is an hour or more.  Quite honestly I didn't feel like getting back in the car on the weekend nor getting up particularly early if I didn't have to.  That left skiing out because the good skiing was hours away.  Mammoth Mountain was about 5 hours away.  Big Bear was probably 3 or 4 hours.  Mountain High was a little more than an hour but it was only good for night skiing since the snow was all man-made.  I didn't enjoy night skiing very much because that often means skiing on ice.  And even still, driving to Mountain High often meant driving there in the late afternoon and running the air conditioner.

Seems to me we did other things because Los Angeles has a lot to offer that is completely different than wandering around the outdoors.  For the five years I lived in Los Angeles, the Toyota didn't get much use, except on the occasion where one of the other vehicles was down for repair.  Or we needed to haul stuff.  Once I remember exploring the backroads of the Los Padres National Forest in July.  We may have been looking for a place to either camp or backpack or possibly just scouting for future trips.  It was hot and a huge relief when we dropped back down to the ocean air near Ventura.  Nature's air conditioning.

In the middle of those five years I had a complete change of heart about my career with the park service, particularly fighting fire.  I was burned (ha ha) out on the politics of fire when all I wanted to do was something good.  That's what happens when you become in charge of a program.  All the fun that you remembered as a firefighter, just going out and doing your job and being appreciated for it by the community, was gone.  Being in charge means having to take responsibility for decisions that you made that may affect the community.  I didn't have the stomach for it.  And transitioning to another field within the park service isn't that easy.  Remember the part at Lava Beds where I wasn't qualified for the job I had been doing?  Even though there would be a sharp learning curve for a short time to take on some kind of resource management job, the people who actually screen applications do not recognize the value of a good employee who has been in the system for many years.

I was far less patient back then.  I turned my back on my park service career and went to grad school at UCLA and got a master's in Biology doing work in biogeochemical oceanography.  Grad school is a transitional place best suited for people who don't know what they want to do right out of college.  For a working person it can be a little demeaning though I give a lot of credit to this department at UCLA for raising the bar on professional expectations of the students.  I was treated like an expert in my field with something to contribute.  Still, grad school is temporary and there are still those pesky exams and graded presentations.  That's what I didn't like.  It's not like we aren't judged every day in our working life but somehow receiving a grade is somewhat stultifying.

One thing I found out about my particular degree is that I don't enjoy spending weeks and weeks on a ship.  The crew and ship form a dysfunctional family for the length of the tour and there is all the drama, chaos, snitfits, temper tantrums, favoritism, bullying, and genuine affection for each other.  Plus the isolation from the world.  When I was on my research trip we were in the first war in Iraq.  By the time I got back a couple months later, President Bush had declared victory and the war was over.  So much happens and it doesn't matter whether you're paying attention or not, which is a lengthy subject in itself.

After grad school I started applying for jobs back up here in Washington.  I had given Los Angeles five years and Dave agreed that we could try somewhere else.  A few months later in August of 2005 I got a job with the Skagit County Health Department as a microbiologist in their water quality laboratory.  We easily sold our house in Los Angeles for a lot more than we paid for it and bought a 10-acre farm in the Skagit Valley that had a restored Victorian house and a 2-acre vineyard.  Sounds idyllic, yes?

The cats were loaded into the Toyota.  I had forgotten my previous moving experiences with them and put them in the front with me.  And had to listen to them meow the entire time.  The first night we drove all the way up to southern Oregon where Dave's sister lives.  We stayed in a dark motel that allowed cats.  Dave had a later start because he waited for the movers to finish loading at the house.  Still, he arrived by midnight then made a short visit to his sister the next day.  I got on the road early because I needed to get up to the boarding facility before it closed.  The cats were staying there until the movers unloaded all our furniture for us and southern Oregon is still a very long way from northern Washington.

Well, the farm was pretty neat but a working farm for two working people, especially for Dave who was commuting to Seattle is difficult to say the least.  Dave worked very hard in the vineyard.  I put up fences, trimmed blackberries, mowed the one-acre lawn by hand.  I'm not sure either one of us was having any fun at all.

I'd forgotten why Washington was calling me back.  All those mountains begging to be explored within a couple hours of driving.  I wanted to spend less time on the farm and more in the mountains.  Always in the mountains.  Dave and I definitely weren't having much fun together.  It was very clear that we wanted different things and the responsibility was just too much.  If you've followed my blog at all, it is reasonable to judge me as a fun hog.  Fun sow?  The fewer responsibilities the better because I do not like to be tied to chores.

We faced the music, parted amicably in 2006 and have remained friends and fellow admirers.  He moved back to southern California where he is happiest, met his wife and now has a one-year old daughter.  Perfect for him.

Unfortunately in 2007 the economy crashed, the housing market crashed and it took forever for us to sell the house, eventually at a loss.  Dave made a smart move going to back to SoCal because his job with WAMU in Seattle disappeared.  Some parts of the story just fix themselves not because of any foresight but because of pure luck, from following your heart?  That's another philosophical subject for another time.

Me?  Well, I took an avalanche safety course in November of 2006 through the Everett Mountaineers.  There were about 50 men and 5 women, two of which I had arm-twisted into coming with me.  I may be exaggerating on the population dynamics of the class but the point is that the number of men were overwhelming.  I did the most logical thing: ignored all of them.  Besides I was not looking for romance.  I wanted education and information so I could go in the mountains safely in the winter.

Then one of the instructors organized a backcountry ski early in January of 2007.  I had to get up at 4:00 in order to meet everyone at the park n ride in Lynnwood.  By then I had bought a house in Anacortes, which was a good 25 minutes even to the freeway in Mounta Vernon.  At the park n ride I didn't know anyone besides the grizzle-bearded instructor, Lee.  The park n ride was huge but easy to notice a bustle of activity at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday.

Everyone seemed to be milling around a large red Ford truck.  The instructor recognized me and made introductions because I was pretty much the only newcomer and definitely the only female.  I found out that the driver of the red Ford was Randy and he had assisted in the avalanche course as he had taken it a few years prior.  Lee took the priority seat, shotgun and I got in the backseat with Jay (another newcomer) and Mike who was Lee's friend.

End of Part 5 (I know, I know, just when it's getting promising again!)

I apologize for a break in this series but I was commuting to Seattle all week, which made my day much much longer than usual.  Randy really took care of me that week even though he had his own early mornings.

Now where was I?  Ah yes, packing up the truck with a few essentials that I'd need to live in SoCal without all the stuff that was in the moving van.  I remember little about the drive, except that it was a beautiful day when I left McKinleyville.  I can't imagine that I got far since I couldn't leave until at least late morning but I don't remember staying anywhere except for a motel in Ventura that allowed pets.  Did I really make the cats suffer in their crates for that long?  Possibly.  I do remember them meowing at me.

If you've ever traveled with cats you know it's impossible to give them a bathroom break.  Mine were not leash trained and I certainly could not just let them out at a rest area because undoubtedly they would've dashed into the nearest hidey-hole never to come out or at least not to get back into the Toyota, which they loathed.  I tried putting them in the litter box in the back of the truck but using it for which it was intended was about the last thing on their minds.  I could tell by the way they cowered in the corner and stared at me wide-eyed.  Fine.

There's a place near Ventura where Highway 101 is very close to the ocean.  It was evening so the light turned a little golden, a little pink.  A group (pod?) of dolphins played in the surf just right there.  It was perfect and I felt relaxed.

The motel was a Comfort Inn in a weird part of Ventura.  The cats were happy to be out of their crates, even if in an unfamiliar room with new places to sniff.  I was happy to be out of the truck even though I don't recall that the drive was terribly torturous.  It was probably hot on the 101 through Santa Rosa and Petaluma but I was used to driving with the windows down.

The next day I moved to my temporary quarters in Calabasas.  It was an airy house in the park (Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area) and the sun seemed to always shine.  Wildlife was everywhere, including some enormous rattlesnakes.  I looked out my bedroom window one morning to see a particularly large specimen sunning itself just behind the Toyota in the carport.  Yeesh!

The house was very near a state park, Malibu Creek State Park, which has a lovely, snake-filled grassland, trails, streams, rock climbing walls, hardwood forests with trails for hiking and mountain biking.  Dave and I would sometimes walk there in the evening or ride bikes on the trails, climb a little on the rock walls.

Living there was ideal for me but temporary since the park didn't provide housing for permanent employees who weren't law enforcement.  So Dave and I bought a house in the San Fernando Valley with a pool that was sort of half way between our commutes.  Our real estate agent did a fabulous job finding that house for us.  That was June of 2000.

Shortly the park hired a woman who lived further away than I did so we arranged to carpool as much as possible.  Traffic is awful in Los Angeles but having a carpool buddy really helped pass the time.  Sometimes I was even sorry to drop her off.

The Toyota wasn't really suited for stop and go commuting in Los Angeles, mostly because it didn't have air conditioning and no matter if the windows are rolled down, hot is hot if you're not moving, which is frequent in LA traffic.  And it's a stick shift so all that stopping and starting again is trying with a clutch.  So we bought a used Mercedes for a pretty good deal.  That became my primary commuting car.  Air conditioning, power windows when it felt like it, and an automatic transmission.  It was my first different car in quite a long time.

At some point, possibly prior to purchasing the Mercedes, Dave and I were driving on Valley Circle back toward home when we heard a strange whistling sound.  It was a hot day with lots of traffic as usual so we didn't think much about it, except that the whistling seemed to track us.  Then at a stop light we realized the whistling was the Toyota and the temperature guage had red-lined.  Thankfully we were very close to home.

Dave and his friend Mike peered under the hood for quite a while and learned that the head gasket had blown.  Remember the time back in McKinleyville when the thermostat had failed?  Dave theorized that the overheating had done some damage and it had just taken this long for the damage to be fully realized.  Turns out that the motor is made of two different metals so parts expand and contract at different temperatures and rates.  As long as the temperature remains stable it's not a problem but when the thermostat fails, it's a problem.

The Toyota was in pieces in our garage for weeks but eventually it all went back together and ran just fine for many more years.

End of Part 4

Okay okay, Denise tells me I must continue this story.  Thanks to those of you who encourage me to write it.

First of all, I want to mention that the point of all this was that for whatever reason that Toyota gave me freedom in a way I had never experienced before.  In many ways it was symbolic.  The vehicle was reliable, rugged, and allowed me to take it anywhere, literally anywhere I wanted to go.  I had never had anything like that.  Undoubtedly like most people, I thought I was trapped by convention and other people's expectations.  It wasn't so and having the Toyota helped me explore the adventurous side of me, which turns out is most of me.  Yet it's a responsible choice in a vehicle and I am nothing if not responsible.

Now, continuing with late summer of 1998.  Seems to me I had some sort of temporary housing with my Sister Cat (who was adopted as an 8-week old kitten from a neighbor in Tule Lake) until I bought my first house.  Many of us who worked for Redwood National Park lived in either Arcata (home of Humboldt State) or McKinleyville and commuted to Orick where our ramshackle trailer park offices were and the herds of elk roamed outside our windows.

We formed an unlikely carpool by parking on a side road next to the golf course at 6:15 a.m. and whoever had the most room drove the scenic route on Hwy 101 north to Orick.  The route passed through ancient redwoods, by the beach, and through an elk migration route.  Foggy morning required all eyeballs available to watch for a herd of elk that might be crossing the road.

On some mornings it was only me and one other person.  I'd drive that day.  One day like that in late 1999 or early 2000 a co-worker and I were on our way back to McKinleyville when I noticed the temperature guage of my truck red-lining.  There was nowhere to stop to check the radiator because that stretch of Hwy 101 is quite remote. Well I could check but I couldn't do anything about it except hope for the best. I turned up the heat full blast, slowed down and hoped for the best.  We made it back to McKinleyville.

When my truck cooled down I asked one of my neighbors for help diagnosing the problem. He helped me figure out that the thermostat was bad.  I didn't have much money then so with his help replaced it and got further advice to flush the radiator.  Problem solved.  That was the first problem with the Toyota that was out of the ordinary.  However, it didn't leave me stranded.

I lived in McKinleyville for 2 years.  During that 2 years David and I couldn't make it work any longer after having spent 6 years sort of but not really together.  Together in the sense that we were a couple but not together in the sense that we ever shared a geographical area except for the brief time I was in Florida and a slightly longer time we shared a house in Tule Lake.  I suppose I got tired of feeling like the relationship was going nowhere although I couldn't honestly say where I wanted it to go.

It was clear that David was going to stay in Tule Lake for the forseeable future and I had the better job with the better pay on the coast.  I suppose he said it all when he said he wouldn't fight fire on the coast because there were no fires to fight.  Nevermind that most firefighters on the coast spend all summer fighting fires elsewhere then did prescribed burning the shoulder seasons.  I just didn't feel like reasoning with him anymore when the logic seemed obvious to me.  That was the fall of 1999.

Since those of us at Redwood National Park were on a 4 day 10-hour workday schedule I always had three day weekends, unless I was on a fire.  To say that I spent my weekends idly would be a flat-out lie.  I am absolutely not a liar.  I spent a lot of time exploring the coast, the Smith River area, thinking about the Marble Mountains, the Trinity Mountain — remember I was often out on fires all summer so didn't see much of the mountains except under a cloud of smoke.

In the winter,  I thought about learning to ski at Mt. Shasta but wasn't particularly successful so stuck to cross country skiing at Lassen in the big forests, under the disapproving eye of the rangers when I went by myself.  I signed the trail registers and stuck to terrain I was comfortable with so stop worrying already!  And look, I'm still here to tell the story.

A long time ago my mother and I made the arrangement that I wouldn't tell her about my adventures until I returned safely.  That made checking in with anyone difficult but I had my friend Wanda and if she wasn't available my friend Terri was always available by a phone call even if she wasn't in the same state.

Shortly the New Millenium was about to happen.  While most people spent a lot of time worrying and preparing for some kind of cataclysmic end, I made plans with my friends to go to Reno.  Some of my friends were from the Umpqua National Forest.  Some were from the Whiskeytown Prescribed Fire Crew.  And one person, Ruth, was the one who got the job I wanted at Lava Beds.  The Toyoto took Ruth and I to Reno where we had gotten a good deal on one of the last rooms in town.  Oh what fun we had!  Dressing up, drinking too much, smoking cigars and envying all the people who had someone to kiss when the clock struck midnight.  Ruth and I had to share a bed in an awful motel but we weren't about to kiss.  We did hug though.

I also worked with a fun gal named Kathryn W.  She was arranging a ski trip with her brother and brother in law who both lived in southern California and invited me along.  Well, her brother Dave was single and my age.  To say that we hit it off immediately would be an understatement.  We really hit it off.  And what fun we had!  That was January of 2000 but I was not excited about another long-distance relationship.

Sometimes things work in a direction no matter what.  I'd never really felt like fate had much of an influence on my life but this time it was nothing short of a miracle.  I mean, what is a wildland firefighter going to do in southern California?  And Dave was a big-city corporate guy.  Even Eureka, the county seat of Humboldt County wasn't big enough.  Shortly, a job that would be a promotion for me opened up at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.  They were having a hard time filling the position. I applied, negotiated and got the job.  I was moving to southern California!  My path couldn't have been more clear.

By then I had adopted another cat, Lucy, to keep Sister company because I was gone a lot between going out on fires then being gone on some adventure or another on weekends.  On a sunny day in early May of 2000 I was waiting for the movers to finish packing my stuff so I could get in my Toyota with two complaining kitties and start on the long drive to southern California.  What I remember most about that day is that the park service had lit a prescribed fire in Los Alamos, New Mexico and it had gotten out of control.  I knew right then that my life would change and I couldn't turn around and pretend that I had not taken a job with much more risk and responsibility.  You'd think I would've learned about going to completely unfamiliar places but I had confidence that I'd figure it out.

End of Part 3

Part 2 of my Toyota story:
 
I left off in the spring of 1996 when I had just arrived in my 1994 Toyota truck in Whiskeytown (near Redding), CA for work as the only female on a 9-person prescribed fire crew.  I suppose it was time for me to find out what it was like to be the princess on a crew.
 
My housemates were two male crew members.  I had my own bedroom with attached bathroom.  They had to share the bathroom down the hall.  We had kind of a cool house with a big deck.  That summer we were hardly there to enjoy the deck.  Seems to me once the season started rolling, we were on the road the entire summer.  It was a good year for overtime $$ and we spent much of it on natural prescribed fires (i.e. lightning strikes in the wilderness) at Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park.  The rest of the time we spent in Marin County at Golden Gate National Recreation Area prescribed burning the oak woodlands to keep the fir trees from encroaching.  I got to know San Francisco that summer.
 
During one break in the action I drove with a friend to Santa Barbara with the windows down because driving through the Central Valley in California in the summer is not a treat without air conditioning.  I also had a friend in Ojai so drove down to see her.  And my friend in Lompoc got married that summer.  The Central Valley was becoming very familiar.  I kinda wished I had air conditioning.
 
I don't remember much about being a princess on the fire crew that summer.  I remember working hard, being very fit from walking up and down mountains with a pack and often a chainsaw.  I remember sleeping in the dirt, having few showers, a meeting lots of people from other crews on fires.  It was a really good summer and the summer I turned 30, although I don't recall being happy about that because I was still a temporary employee and lived in seasonal housing with two male roommates.  Not what I imagined at age 30.
 
That fall the season ended in October with a prescribed fire at Lava Beds National Monument, a park in Tule Lake, CA.  David had gotten a job up there earlier in the fall so it was nice to be only a few hours apart rather than a few time zones.  He had found a house in the town of Tulelake and I moved in until I found another job.  I definitely was not going back to Florida since David was now here and my former boss told me I couldn't have my job back (although his boss said I could come back if I wanted to — no thanks, I'd had enough fighting fire in swamp grass and pine flats).
 
I did a little volunteer work at Lava Beds then was hired on for the early season in February to begin prepping for an ambitious prescribed fire regime the fire boss had.  Tule Lake is a neat place because it is pretty much due east of Mt. Shasta and between Tule Lake and Mt. Shasta are these massive volcanic fields made of obsidian in the Medicine Lake area.  There's tons of recreation in that area including fishing, hunting, hiking, 4-wheeling, camping, skiing in winter if you can get up there with a snow mobile.  I have a picture of me with a stringer of fish standing in front of my Toyota.
 
I loved my job at Lava Beds.  I was in charge of the prescribed fire crew and David worked on an engine that was jointly shared by the Modoc National Forest.  We had different schedules but we often were on the same fires, sometimes at different ends of them.  One good example was the Huffer Fire at nearby Lassen Volcanic National Park.  It started out as a single lightning strike in a log.  My friend Rebecca from Crater Lake and I were called out to monitor it.  So we hiked up there with our tents and gear, spent the first couple days mapping a fire that creeped along a single downed log.  We mapped the vegetation around it, took weather measurements, and spent a lot of time gabbing.
 
Until one day when the temperature and wind both increased dramatically.  I radioed back to the main office that they might want to order a helicopter because this fire was building and spreading quickly and we were getting out of there.  The person in the office thought I was exaggerating.  Until they saw the smoke column from the office.  Rebecca and I marched down to a safe zone we had identified earlier.  It was safe then, when the fire was small and not spreading quickly.  It didn't feel safe anymore so we marched on to a second place, which still didn't feel safe.  Finally we ended in the dark at the edge of a big lake on a sandy beach.  That felt safe.
 
At daylight we packed up and hiked out back to the office.  The fire had really grown and now the managers were ordering crews to build line to herd the fire into the old dead lava flows and cinder buttes.  Rebecca and I were transformed from fire monitors to firefighters.  I was enfolded into the Winema Hotshots and acted as the crew boss for a few days since I knew what was going on with the fire.  We were out for at least a couple weeks and possibly the entire three weeks.  By then the fire had been herded and had no where to go.  It ended up being a long pencil shape because the wind had blown so strongly that first day.
 
Seems to me we had a fairly busy prescribed fire season that fall back at Lava Beds.  And we got a new boss.  It also seemed that my job was going to convert to a permanent position.  I was really excited about that but jobs with the government aren't that simple.  Based on the way it was classified, I wasn't qualified (on paper) for the work I had been doing all summer.  The reviewers of the applications weren't in Tule Lake.  They were in San Francisco and were definitely not firefighers. Yet they decided who was qualified and who would make the cut for the interviews.
 
I can't remember who got that job.  I ended up with a permanent job (finally) with the Umpqua National Forest up in Oregon, which was at least 2 hours away from Tule Lake.  I moved up to a duplex owned by a school teacher in Idlwyld Park, which is about 25 miles west of the crest of those part of the Cascade Mountain Range.  David and I had different work schedules.  I hated my job because even though I was permanent I was again/still the only female, and this time the oldest person on the crew.  Oh dear, perhaps I should've made another career choice.  I had been used to being in charge, making decisions and plans.  Now I was relegated to common crew person.  My bosses recognized my skills and would give me special assignments, including going out by myself to find fire scars on stumps in old clear cuts as part of a fire history project.  That was fun.
 
What I remember most was driving the lonely road from the Diamond Lake Ranger district to Hwy 97 down to Tule Lake as often as I could.  By then I didn't like anything.  Even David, although it wasn't his fault.  I just didn't know how to be happy in a miserable situation.  Later that summer we had a lightning bust and an arsenist.  So for a week the crew was hopping from fire to fire.  We were busy and had finally bonded as a crew.
 
In the meantime I had applied for a promotion at Redwood National Park and got the job.  I was moving back to California in a job that would challenge me.  I was manic with joy.  Everything I owned fit in the back of my Toyota.  My Sister Cat sat in a crate in the front seat with me on the move down to McKinleyville, CA.  She meowed the entire way.  I wished there was room in the back for her so I wouldn't have to listen to her whining.  She quieted down as soon as she was out
of that offending crate.
 
End of Part 2

 
Snowman on the cattrack near the parking lot at Mt. Baker ski area

 
Other snow players above Bagley Lakes basin.  There were an amazing number of skiers, snowshoers, hikers, snowboarders, and sledders out.

 
Yammering on about something.  I'm having a fun day, in spite of the look on my face!

 
 
One of the Bagley Lakes.  This shot was taken on our way back.  Our trip began from the parking lot behind the maintenance sheds at Mt. Baker ski area.  To my surprise there was pretty good snow coverage with only a few staubs and rocks showing through the snow.  We skied up to Artist Point then around the south side of Table Mountain toward Ptarmigan Ridge.  Randy thought the snow would be okay down a line from Artist Point but it was pretty heavy so we decided to tour instead of make runs.

Since we hadn't counted on very good snow coverage we got up late, anticipating a short day of skiing.  However, we did see a party way out toward the Portals.  At the junction where the route continues around Table Mountain toward Herman Saddle, we skied back since the coverage on the Herman Saddle side still showed a lot of boulders.  The weather was surprisingly nice — not 80% snow as predicted.  And the wind was fairly calm, the temperature around freezing.  Fairly pleasant really.  There was some avalanche rubble that had been covered by the week's worth snow but skiing over that wasn't difficult.

There no crowds on that side of Table Mountain; however, when we crossed back over to Artist Point it was practically a mob scene with skiers, boarders, snowshoers, etc.  We ripped off our skins and had a nice ski in some really decent snow.  The challenge was dodging the parties making an even later start than we had.  And the jumps the snowboarders had built.  The jumps looked like fun but not part of my skill set.

The cattrack back was completely packed down and icy from all the hikers.  We skied down untracked snow on between switchbacks on the cattrack and made some fun turns.  Then we were forced to ski the icy luge but fortunatley it's pretty flat so ice is a good thing.  Our totat time out was about 4 hours, with lots of options considered but dismissed based on crowds and snow coverage.  Elevation gain for the day was probably less than 2000'.