We had wanted to have a campfire and toast marshmallows for the last
few nights, but the weather had prohibited this activity. But this time the night
was clear and cloud free and the campers next to us - who looked like the
criminals in the film The River Wild - had made a fire, so conditions seemed
right.
We bought a bundle of logs and got some small twigs. Then we spent
the next hour trying to get the fire alight - and keep it going. In the end we
succeeded through a mixture of patience, lots of fanning (until our arms
ached), and ripping unwanted pages from our road map and burning Canada,
Alaska, etc. Unlike Prometheus we refused to steal fire from next door, even
when our fellow campers went indoors to escape the cold. We ate outside and
toasted marshmallows before retreating to the van when the cold and the
sound of coyotes baying at the moon got the better of us.
As an indication of how cold it was, the water hose was joined to the
ground by an icicle the next morning. More graphically, Emma’s butt did not
thaw out until three hours after we went back inside...giving rise to fears that
she might be suffering from Raynaud’s disease...which commonly afflicts
other extremities!
We set aside a day in this area in the hope that we would be able to visit the
Sequoia National Park. However, as noted previously the snow thwarted this.
Prior to this misadventure we had visited a small town called Johnsondale -
population 1.5 according to the signs! The landscape surrounding the town
was shrouded in snow and very pretty. So, we stopped in the town centre to
eat our lunch. But before we could enter the town we had to get the go ahead