Category Archives: 06. The Range
The Return Trip
The next morning, the boys bade Walker so long in the morning and headed back up the Little Kern. They followed their footsteps from the day before back to Snowslide. The next day, the boys continued down the shaded but hot trail to South Fork, and immediately went down to the river for drinking water. [...]
Golden Trout Country
The next day put the heat behind Armen and Sam. The morning came with new vigor, and they gained Hockett Plateau before noon, Armen singing and whistling Happy Trails here and there along the way. They enjoyed a refreshing ford across the river, and proceeded east across the sandy plateau, passing green meadows along the [...]
Snowslide Camp
Armen awoke to another nosebleed, and looked around to discover a pleasantly wooded, sunbathed flat had replaced the deep, dark wood they’d encountered the night before. The topo map they’d bought in Visalia showed a trail that followed the river, and then headed directly east up a ridge. Armen had shown the ranger this trail, [...]
At the Gate
They followed the big turn at Yokohl Valley , and noticed a couple of nagging appetites as they rolled through Lemoncove. They stopped at a small pizza, beer, and biker place run by someone named Grandma, and carried the pizza box on down the highway when it was time to pedal on. It was nearly [...]
Across the Sink
One August morning Armen and Sam collected their bait, tackle, flashlights, matches, and bedrolls, hopped onto their bicycles, and rode off into the morning sun. They rode their bikes east down Grangeville Boulevard, then cut down 7th Avenue to Lacey Boulevard and continued eastward. Lacey, also known as California 198, had more traffic than Grangeville, [...]
The Natural
Golden trout country, an angler’s name for the upper Kern watershed, lies between the Great Divide and Western Divide of the Range, with a third divide—the southern end of the Great Western Divide—splitting the trout’s range. These three divides extend southward toward the sun, virtually parallel to each other. The southernmost ten-thousand-foot peaks of all [...]
The Trail
The thought of fishing for this uncommon, threatened species of fish in this newly conceived wilderness enticed Armen, and he set off immediately to recruit Sam, which he had little difficulty in doing. Armen did more searching through the library, and found a few references to an old trail that crossed golden trout country. The [...]
Isolation
Sometimes creatures migrate onto the land, and sometimes the land creates its own. When the land creates its own, it does not do so arbitrarily. Every creature is an expression of its creator. Even the immigrants express the character of the land, it is sure, for the mere fact that they have found their place [...]
Reference
When Armen returned to the library, as was his habit, he first made a line to the reference section, which too was his habit. He naturally found his way to the atlases without so much as a thought. He opened his favorite, the Times Atlas of the World, to the plate of the southwestern United [...]
Slough-Fishing
“How’d you like to go fishing with us Saturday?” Armen asked Sam as he walked into home room and sat down into his desk. “Sure,” Sam answered without giving proper consideration to his doubts. Armen’s grandparents were planning on coming down to Slough City for the weekend, and Grandpa Adroushan had offered to take the [...]