Going on Location
It seems like "travel stories" are becoming a regular feature here, and this entry is no different. You may recall that in April of 2003 my brother, two of my cousins, and I drove up to Pine Flat to "get away from it all." Our group was tragically limited by the absence of my cousins Scott and Ethan. We took this trip in June in order to remedy that fault; Ethan was down from Oregon, and Scott was free as well.
The actual purpose of this trip was to film parts of our up-coming epic motion picture, "The Ring Boss Part II: The Seventeen-and-a-half Really Tall Things". This is, of course, the sequel to "Part I: The Homeboys of the Ring". Though the exact details of both movies does not concern us here, I will say that if you were offended at Peter Jackson "modifications" to Tolkein's story, you should probably cover both eyes and ears and run the other way. A rough summary of the differences between the original and our version is as follows:
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Bilbo is dead.
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Merry and Pippin do not exist.
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Frodo and Sam skip Bree and Rivendell. The founding of the fellowship is never mentioned.
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Gandalf doesn't fight a Balrog in Moria. Instead, he trips and falls off a cliff and dies. We see his corpse, lying smashed on the rocks below.
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Frodo flees, and Sam is left behind to be carried off by orcs.
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Frodo carries on to Mordor after meeting Gollum.
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Sam escapes and is taken in by the tree people.
That's as far as we went. As you can see, we are diligent literary scholars with the utmost concern for the creative integrity of our sources.
In any event, here are a few of picture of the location where we filmed:
Although we tried to leave early and beat the heat, it didn't work. We spent most of the day driving. We stopped at a big culvert under the road.
That's my cousin Mark at the other end.
We amused ourselves for a while by standing in the pipe and yelling, singing, and pounding rocks on the walls. (The culvert had a great echo.) We tried to throw rocks from one end to the other. We walked all the way through to the other end, where we found a deep but stagnant pool of water. Here we fulfilled our manly duty by throwing big rocks into the water.
Follow me carefully, here: my cousin Matt is not a big guy; he's only 13. He picked up a large, flat rock. We knew he couldn't throw it far enough to hit the water; it would probably "bounce" in to the pool off the rocks around the pool. And so it did...except that two of the boulder it bounced off of themselves broke lose and rolled in to the pool. They probably weighed over a ton, each. Here, you can see both boulders in the water:
The submerged rock in the lower center of the image, and the long rock on the right side behind the bush were both part of the surrounding geology just a few moments before. This extraordinary display of rock-throwing prowess was universally hailed as the kind of feat by which myths and legends are made.
Moving on, we continued to drive further into the mountains. Rounding a bend, we saw this:
Not the power-lines in the foreground, but the massive granite bluffs in the distance. These are, if I read my map correctly, Patterson Bluffs. Determined to get a closer look, we drove for another hour.
Up close and personal. Although the bluffs look big, in reality they are huge. The elevation gain from bottom to top is more than a thousand feet. w00t!
I should mention that, in order to get the pictures above, we had to drive on the road above Balch Camp. If you have any fear of falling, heights, cliffs, or death you should avoid this road. It's a one-lane road, maybe wide enough for a car and a person on foot (although I wouldn't want to be the pedestrian) with few turnouts. The road is carved right out of the cliffside, so on your left, you have a sheer vertical cliff, and on your right, a sheer drop of several hundred feet into the river below. There are no guard-rails, either. In some places, the cliff face evidently curved too sharply for the road, so there are bridges over the gaps; these bridges literally span thin air. Of course, the road approaching a bridge is nearly always arranged so that you can see the bridge, and the fact that nothing is holding it up, before you drive over it. Luckily, this section of the road is short.
On the way back out, we stopped at our original stomping grounds, from our first adventure at Pine Flat in 2002. Here is a photo of the creek:
The water is very low here. The last time we visited, the water was so high that you couldn't cross the creek. Now, you can easily walk across on the rocks.
This view defines true beauty. This is a ziplock bag of hotdogs, which has been repackaged in a resealable beef jerky bag. This was here when we visited in April. It was here when we visited in 2002. The hotdogs in the bag (no, we didn't open it) look exactly the same as they did a year ago. I think the plastics industry should make some kind of commercial out of this, perhaps involving time-lapse photography (i.e., the seasons pass, the plants grow and die, but the hotdogs stay the same). The handsome devil on the right is my cousin Mark, by the way.
Tired, hot, and stuffed with junk food, we went home.
For all of you that like big pictures, here is a 1024x768 scenic picture, suitable for wallpaper.
