July 30 - Aug 2 3rd Annual Hambone Springs Camp

[hambone]

Sorry John. Have fun in the City of the Dark Heat.
Next time?

[LiveonJG]

Sorry John. Have fun in the City of the Dark Heat.
Next time?

God I hope so Bob.

-John

[natep73]

should we bring fire wood, can we have campfires, or is it too dry?

[Gypsie]

Firewood: yes!

Lots of it.

Big fire, late nights.

Both my chainsaws are defunct at the moment ('sides they're noisy )

8 days and counting...

[natep73]

is there any kind of water nearby, for dishes or drinking or anything, do we have to pack it all in?

thanks

[Gypsie]

Pack it in/pack it out ('ceptin whatever gets splashed on the flora or buried in a cathole )

Though there is a great spring that has delicious water. easier to bring a jug or two.

One of my fav camp tricks is to freeze plastic jugs of water (I prefer the square shaped juice bottles; 1 liter I think). 3 or four of those in the fridge/coldbox makes the cheese, eggs, bacon etc stay cold (and not soaked in melted ice) and I also have usable water as it melts in the jug.

7 1/2 days and counting...

[Gypsie]

Hey does anyone have a hand crank ice cream maker?

Holler out if you can bring one I think Ice cream would be a great treat in the outback.

T minus 7 days....

[hambone]

I DO have a hand crank. No ice cream maker though.

Here's the place again:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=45.1 ... 4&t=p&z=15

Directions:
Ore224 past Estacada to Ripplebrook to 57 to 58 to the Abbot Road.
It is paved all the way to the Abbot Road. On 58 you'll climb and climb. Once you get up to a sunny grove of younger lodgepole pines it will soon flatten out. You should soon see an Abbot Road sign in the trees to the left with a narrow dirt road heading West. There should be a sign for Hambone Springs, but it's a pretty obvious right turn into the camp. If you get to a landslide in the road you've gone too far. We'll mark the entrance. Abbot Road up to that point is on a steep narrow ledge. When the terrain flattens out somewhat you know you're close. Be prepared for an attentive drive! No problems in a bus though.
In total it's about 2 hours from Portland, perhaps a bit less.

I'm probably heading out early Thursday AM.

[natep73]

my wife doesn't have to work friday now, but from the way you guys have described the roads, I don't think we are going to leave late thurs, I don't want to drive up there in the dark, we will probably shoot for fri AM sometime

[hambone]

Don't forget it won't be dark until after 9 these days.
The road really isn't THAT bad but you do have to take it slow. Potholes, dirt surface, and narrow with a steep drop off. You'll earn your bus pilot wings for sure!

[natep73]

ya, the boys have a soccer game thurs night, until about 7, then we have the drive up and over from silverton, In my youth I would have done it, but with the wife and kids.......

[hambone]

I hear ya and agree! No sense making things tense, this is supposed to be a re-centering event.
See you Friday.

[justgimmecoffee]

Now that Sweet Pea is back up and running, I'm up for it.

Is there a caravan? I'm planning on leaving thursday.

[hambone]

I can be at the Estacada Ranger Station at 9 AM...

Mary killed us all: (found by accident while doing research)
http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.p ... 036.5;wap2

Roaring River Wilderness: No cars, no roads, no kidding
by Matthew Preusch, The Oregonian Monday April 06, 2009, 7:41 PM
Roaring River Wilderness

When President Barack Obama's signing pen lifted off a public lands bill last Monday, great pieces of Oregon were immediately surrounded by invisible lines.
Everything inside those lines is now wilderness, the most protected class of federal land.
Included in the 200,000 acres of Oregon that became federally protected wilderness last week is the 36,500-acre Roaring River Wilderness southwest of Mount Hood, which will now be off limits for logging or mechanized recreation. In simple terms, that means no logging or non-human-powered recreation. But wilderness amounts to more than a list of don'ts, and visiting just one corner of the state's 200,000 acres of freshly minted wilderness can explain why.
A day after and a continent away from Obama's White House signing ceremony, Erik Fernandez stepped across one of those unseen lines into the Roaring River Wilderness area.
"When I took that first step, I got a little choked up," he said.
The 36,500-acre area southwest of Mount Hood is shaped something like an Italy that's all hip and shoe and no leg. Generally, it traces the boundaries of the area drained by the Roaring River, a suitably named tributary of the Clackamas River.
Fernandez, wilderness coordinator for the conservation group Oregon Wild, spent a decade working to get this part of Mount Hood National Forest declared a wilderness area. Last Tuesday was his first time there since it was.
Joined by fellow wilderness advocate Leslie Logan, he hiked through soggy salal and sword ferns on a trail littered with windfall. Trees as wide as a man is tall dripped onto a forest floor so thick with salamanders Fernandez came close to squashing several with his hiking boots.
This forest looks the same as it did before Obama signed the bill, which is to say largely untouched by the influence of humans. The idea with wilderness is it will continue to be that way in perpetuity.
As a land-management concept in America, wilderness came to be in the 1964 Wilderness Act. The rather flowery language of Section 2(C) of that law describes wilderness as "an area where earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
Roaring River seems to fit that.
"I know to me, it's a sanctuary to go deep into nature," said Logan, a Portland teacher and volunteer at Oregon Wild who "adopted" the Roaring River parcel more than a decade ago.
In addition to providing the solitude of a place where "man himself is a visitor," wilderness does connote some concrete things.
Specifically, it means no cars, no roads, no permanent structures, no mountain bikes, no paragliding and in general nothing mechanized. Fernandez likes to say that you can still go hunting, hiking, fishing and camping there, but "you just have to leave your chain saw and bulldozer at home."
This wilderness has five trails -- Shining Lake, Shellrock Lake, Serene Lake, Grouse Point and Dry Ridge -- that were open to mountain bikes but where pedal-powered recreation is no longer allowed. And groups heading into the wilderness must have 12 or fewer people or horses.
In terms of managing the forests, no commercial logging is permitted here, though some restoration work such as road remediation is possible. So each new acre of wilderness means an acre less that the U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management can offer in a timber sale to supply local mills and fill the federal treasury.
But like most new wilderness areas, Roaring River has long been managed to protect its inherent wilderness qualities.
The Roaring River drains a new wilderness area southwest of Mount Hood and feeds the Clackamas River, which provides drinking water for many Portland-area communities.
That's good news for clean water, because the Roaring River feeds the Clackamas River, which provides drinking water to Lake Oswego, West Linn, Oregon City and Estacada, Fernandez said.
Salmon and steelhead leap up the Roaring River's falls to spawn. Bears, cougars, mule deer, elk, spotted owls and pileated woodpeckers take refuge in woods so thick few hikers ever wander there.
Ridges and meadows now covered in snow will bloom with lupine or Indian paintbrush come summer. Generations of Oregonians have made the hike or pack trip into Serene Lake or through Cache Meadow, hoping the mosquitoes have died down, said Doug Lorain, a Portland author featuring the area in an upcoming book.
Maybe as early as this summer, hikers may notice signs near familiar trailheads informing them they are now entering federal wilderness as they head to harvest at a favorite huckleberry patch or soak their toes in the Rock Lakes. But mostly, things will look the same.
"Now we can feel comfortable," Lorain said, "that this really, really beautiful area is going to stay that way."
--Matthew Preusch; mattpreusch@news.oregonian. com

[hambone]

If the Abbot Road is impassible for whatever the reason, here is plan B:

Highrock Springs | Dispersed camping | No Fee-No services| 6 sites - 16 ft. max
5200 ft. elev
Access via Forest Roads 4610-190

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=p&ll= ... 27509&z=15

Hey, is anyone besides Barry and I leaving on Thursday morning?