Ancient and Honorable Order of Squirrels

Posted by Jordan

I found out that a Monday in mid-September is the perfect time to go camping. Through a random circumstance at work, I had this Monday and Tuesday off, so Jaicee and I packed the car and headed for the mountains. The weather was perfect, the leaves were turning colors...





...and because everybody is either back in school or at work, we were the ONLY ones in the entire campground. We had our pick of twenty campsites to choose from! WooHOO for privacy!!!

So, Devil's Head Campground in Pike National Forest is about the coolest campground I have ever seen. They put all of these camp grounds right in between huge boulders on the edge of cliffs and stuff... McLain, you would have loved it.


Our Enormous tent barely fit in the campsite. You almost have to have a soccer field to pitch that thing...












Naivie climbed all over the rocks with me saying "I'm a mountain goat! I'm a mountain goat!"




There were some of the coolest places to climb right in our campground...






And not only did we have a killer awesome campground all to ourselves, and perfect Indian Summer weather, but our food was camptastic! I submit that good camp food is absolutely critical to an excellent camping experience.


We experimented with a new Pepsi Chicken recipe for dinner the first night. It was sumptuous. I only wish we had a real dutch oven. Sheri's family was the inspiration for this recipe, but I tweaked it a bit and found that I enjoy it thusly:

Cut an entire package of bacon into little pieces.

Meticulously line the entire dutch oven in a mosaic pattern of bacon pieces. Try to recreate a famous work of art in pink and white hues, if you can.

Put in a whole bunch of boneless chicken. (several small fillets whole, or large fillets cut in a few big pieces).

Chop a whole large onion and throw it in.

Toss in about a cup or two of sliced mushrooms (Yes MUSHROOOMS! They are AWESOME in this recipe, even for all of you picky eaters! You'll like it, I promise! Even Jaicee and the girls liked it! Chop them smaller if you don't like the texture...)

Throw in several peeled, chunked up potatoes. (Big chunks. Like, thirds.)

Put the lid on and set it over the coals. Let the bacon and chicken fry for a while.

When you feel that the bacon is getting good and fried, squirt an entire 24-oz bottle of ketchup over the whole thing, then pour in a 20-oz bottle of Pepsi.

Salt and Pepper.

Mix it all up together (gently) and put the lid back on.

Let it cook over the coals for a couple of hours, until the sauce has reduced down to a nice saucy sauce, the potatoes are soft, and the chicken is pull-apart tender.

I promise, this is food so good it will change your life forever. The first bite was darn near a religious experience for me.


We had this little chipmunk that joined us in our camp when we got there, obviously drawn to our amazingly camptastic food.


It came practically to our feet and waited for us to toss it scraps of bread or whatever you feed chipmunks.



At one point, we returned to our camp (after venturing out for a while) to find that there was apparently a whole herd of chipmunks--or pack, or swarm, or flock, or pride, or whatever a large gathering of chipmunks is called--that had descended upon our camp and rummaged through everything we had out! They chewed holes in some of our plastic bags and drug them out across the camp. They actually knocked stuff off the picnic table and crawled around in our clean dishes, leaving little chipmunk poo sprinkled everywhere. Luckily, we had all of the food safely stashed so that the invaders could not get to it.

That's right chipmunks! DENIED! Your search was in vain! And you will never EVER get to taste my dutch oven Pepsi chicken!!

Rotten little twerps. They play on the "oh cute" emotion until you turn your back...

...they're just like in the original old school cartoons with Chip and Dale harassing everybody with their mischief.







The next morning hike to the Devil's Head U.S. Forest Service Fire Lookout Tower is SWEET. It's a 900-foot ascent over 1.4 miles, through aspens and pines, and intermittent outcroppings of granite boulders that jut out into the blue sky. A really nice hike on a well-maintained trail, with benches every half-mile or so, not too aggressive. It was perfect.





By the way, my little Naivie walked every single step up that mountain by herself. What a little trooper. She makes her daddy proud.

Norah, on the other hand, was a pain in the neck. Figuratively, because she was inordinately cranky the whole way up, and literally, because we packed her on our shoulders most of the way.








So, at the top of Devil's Head, there is a tiny cabin where dwells a little gray-bearded hermit of a man named Bill. He lives up there at the top of the mountain all summer with his wife, working for the Forest Service. Each day, he climbs 143 stairs leading up the giant granite crown of the mountain to a fire lookout tower.



And in that tower he sits. All day. Looking out the windows, watching vigilantly for forest fires...


...and entertaining the hikers that make it all the way to the top. Though he doesn't say much. He mostly just gazes out into the distance, looking for smoke.


Bill invited us in and let us look around his tiny little post. There was a wood burning stove, and an old topographic map. He had pictures and newspaper clippings of all sorts of things tacked up between the windows. And that's pretty much it.


We signed a guest book, and he gave us certificates that verified our arrival at the peak of the mountain, and by so doing, made us official members of the "Ancient and Honorable Order of Squirrels." Seriously... Says it right on the certificate!







Another cool factoid: Devil's Head is right in the migratory path of the noble ladybug. The rocks and bushes at the very top are covered in ladybugs.




After a few minutes in the tower, the perfect weather I mentioned at the beginning of this post decided to suddenly and dramatically give way to storm clouds. After a few flashes of lightning and some wicked thunder, we decided it was time to head down from the mountain, post haste.

The stairs down from the tower, by the way, magically became steeper while we were up there.



Luckily, we made it back to camp unscathed...

...right in time for the rain.

Yup. We got rained out of our camp. And let me tell you, breaking camp in the rain is not the best way to break camp. The girls sat in the car watching out the windshield while Jaicee and I scrambled to gather everything up and cram it soaking wet back into the car. Our tent gathered so much water that we couldn't even fold it. We just wadded it up into a massive soggy wad and stuffed it into the trunk. And down the mountain we came, smelling like a snuffed-out camp fire.

It was awesome.

Now all of our gear is sitting in the living room on a spread-out painter's plastic drop cloth, waiting for us to figure out how to get everything aired-out so that we can put it away. If I had a yard, I would pitch the tent and let it dry out, but alas, we only have our living room.

And our living room is smaller than our tent.

We'll figure something out. In the meantime, I'm just stoked that I had an opportunity to take my family camping. I really didn't think I would get a chance this year because of my new work schedule. But I did! And I am SO grateful for a good time.