When I was young, my parents used to go on many family trips. There is one trip that I will always remember. It was a very warm summer day. I was fourteen, and my brother was eight. We packed our stuff and loaded everything into a 1971 Ford F-250 camper, and went to California to the Devil’s Postpone National Monument.
I remember my mom making Kool-Aid (black cherry) with the carbonated water from a natural Soda Springs. It was so weird that this water came out of the ground already carbonated. It resembled black cherry champagne. I still remember the favor to this day. Pretty Cool!
To get to the Postpile we had to go through the sequoia national forest very huge redwood trees one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen on this or any trip since. It was driving a cab over camper through the trunk of a giant Sequoia the road went through. This tree was hollowed out and you drove right thru it! That was so impressive to a young boy; you just can’t believe how giant these trees are until you’ve seen them in person.
On the way, we stopped at an Indian burial ground where no one’s camera would work. There were 5 different cameras in the group, mine was a disposable all mechanical 35mm camera right out of the package that I had taken several pictures with on the way up the mountain, and even it stopped working just before we got the Indian burial ground site and the cameras all started working again half way down the mountain from the grave site. No one could explain what had happened to the cameras to quench my curiosity.
The Devils Postpile is rock formation of hexagon shaped pillars of columnar basalt, and to a child it is huge and strange thing that it could form naturally. There was lots of trout fishing in lots of streams and lakes on this trip. There was one called rainbow falls the water was so blue and glowing and around the corner down from the falls I remember the river cut into the far side of the bank so you could let your baited hook flow with the water under the ledge an hook a good size trout every time, until I caught my limit for the day or my mom went for a swim in the freezing cold water trying to convince others to join her being a kid of course I did. I remember my brother and me climbing huge rocks and having to help him get back down he could go up no problem but couldn’t go down. We seemed to go on this trip every few years. My parents also had a lot of boats over the years and loved to water ski my dad would tow my mom all over the lakes and the river between California and Nevada, at one time we had a jet boat we would ski up river and the water was so smooth but we ran out of gas and floated down river to the gas station marina right on the water.
