Trinity River (West Coast Van Trip – Post 5)

Originally we were going to go to the Illinois River in southern Oregon, but the area we were targeting burned a few years ago and is no longer scenic.

I was also interested in visiting the Marble Mountain Wilderness in the Klamath National Forest in northern California, but it didn’t look like there would be a lot of places for van camping. It looked better for backpacking, but I don’t feel well enough yet to backpack. Maybe we can add backpacking in the Marble Mountain Wilderness as a future goal.

The current big Bootleg fire in southern Oregon, the early stages of which was impacting our Pelican Bay trip, continued to impact the air quality in the entire region, restricting our choices. In addition, last year’s August Complex fires impacted a lot of northern California forests.

As we attempted to avoid recently burned areas and currently smoky areas, we were pushed farther south and west than originally intended, and ended up along the Trinity River in California. It’s a beautiful river, but deep in a canyon with difficult access.

The first forest service road we randomly chose into the canyon was terrifying. I swear, Californians will pave anything! Everywhere else in the country one can assume that if the road is paved, then it’s reasonably easy access. But no, the road we ended up on was barely wider than our van. On most sections of the road, it would have simply been impossible to get by an oncoming vehicle without one of us backing up. It would have been very challenging to back up our long van on that road.

The twists were insane and the drop-off was absolutely vertical. I didn’t understand how the road even stayed on the mountain! Some stretches of road were covered in rock that had fallen from the bluff above, and in other areas the road was crumbling away and falling down into the ravine!

After several terrifying miles of that ridiculous, so-called road, we ended up camping for the night in a gravel parking lot. What a let-down! At least it was an empty parking lot. Because, who would want to camp there? Lol.

There was a short, steep hiking trail down to the river, heavily fringed with poison oak.

The river was beautiful, but lacking backpacking equipment we couldn’t actually camp by the river. We settled for taking some scenic shots and hiking back up to sleep in the van in the parking lot.

We hiked back down to take some more scenic shots the next morning.

I’m like, yep, it’s a river.

It was really beautiful in the morning.

We spent most of that second day trying to find a spot to camp with our van along the river, or along any of the smaller creeks and tributaries.

We had high hopes for a couple of campgrounds. One no longer existed (signs were gone and the area contained road construction equipment). Another turned out to be closed.

I don’t know why it says it’s closed for the season in July. What other season is there?

We gave up on campsites and tried to find some sort of van pull-out near a creek or tributary in the area. Even that proved too challenging, and late that afternoon we settled for a random hillside far above any water. It was pretty enough. And no one was out there, probably because there was no water.

The next morning we went on a hike up what looked like an old, abandoned road.

It started off gentle enough, but after awhile we were trudging straight up the side of the mountain. It turned out to be much steeper than we expected! It was a real workout! I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it even a few months ago, much less a year ago. I am getting stronger.

You can see smoke in the distance, but it wasn’t bad where we were.

This is a relatively flat section near the top as we started to head back down. Some of it was so steep I had to go down sideways to keep from slipping.

John regretted not wearing long pants! He was a good sport about it. Hilarious!

Not only were these grass seeds sticky like velcro, they were also sticky like sap! They were all over my pants; both the sticky seeds as well as a black sheen of sticky dirt smeared all over the bottom of my pant legs. I don’t know what plant it was, but all we were thinking was – thank goodness we don’t have the dogs on this trip!! Can you imagine that mess in curly poodle fur?

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