Camping - Lund Park
19 Jun 2019Two Week Camping Trip Part 1 - Lund Park
We showed up at this campground on Brice Creek east of Cottage Grove after a somewhat stressful 24 hours. I spent too much time putting together a little shelf to hold our new inverter between the battery and propane tank, and building wiring to connect it. Then I spent more time creating a shelf for the bed of the truck that could hold our new solar panels. Then we packed an incredible amount of stuff into the truck and trailer. We brought the pizza oven, pizza peels, cutting boards, the paella pan and long spoon, tiny firewood for the pizza oven, big firewood for paella, and all the other stuff needed for a two week camping trip. After sorting out some last-minute issues with a local volunteer organization, we finally hit the road around noon.
That got us to the Lund Park campground in the Umpqua National Forest around four. Our favorite site from last summer was taken, and I nearly made a mess of the trailer by running over a stump hidden in the bushes while trying to turn around in a tiny loop at another site, but we ended up with a site that would be very nice unless “neighbors” show up.
After adding the solar panel and inverter to our trailer’s “electric infrastructure”, we found that the trailer battery was nearly dead after just a bit of water pumping. I pulled it out and realized we had purchased it in 2007, so it was really surprising that it lasted as long as it had. But that meant our first night was pretty dark in the tent, and washing up involved heating a pan of water and scooping it over the sink. Further, it seemed that the trailer’s refrigerator was not cooling off as much as expected, leading to worries about the amount of food we had brought that needs refrigeration. But we had arrived and our vacation was really beginning.
Daisy was so excited to be camping that she was ready to start at one in the morning. After a short walk she slept until around four, bugging me every so often until we finally got up at five to let her out again.
We decided to take a short hike, then deal with replacing the battery. The winter was really hard on the trees in this area, and many of these towering giants fell down. The Brice Creek trail had been cleared except for one monster log that we crawled under, but the Upper Trestle Creek Falls trail had not been cleared. Someone with a hand saw had cut branches off fallen trees to make crawling over or under them easier, but this one mile part of the hike took nearly an hour. The falls are still beautiful so we felt rewarded. We hoped that the other, longer part of the Trestle Creek Falls loop trail had been cleared, but instead it lacked the hand saw work, and we quickly encountered a mass of downed trees that made us give up trying to go that way. The return journey was still hard work, and we found that crawling under trees is easier going up hill than down.
We had a lunch of salad and veggie sandwiches, trying to use up as many refrigerator items as possible, but it seemed like the fridge was reasonably cold today, so we transferred everything from the cooler that would fit into it.
We drove in to Cottage Grove and found a Les Schwab. Three minutes and $125 later we had a brand new battery.
On the way back to camp we stopped to walk at one of the several BLM Recreational Sites around Dorena Reservoir. When we got back we installed the battery and set up the solar panels to catch the last few hours of sun.
For dinner we set up the pizza oven and fired it with wood to make nachos in a cast iron pan. They worked pretty well, and my wife made pizza dough for the next day.
Daisy let us sleep in a bit more the next day, until around 5:30. It was quite cool and we were happy to be covered by our duvet before getting up.
We checked the maps on the back of the campground info sign and decided to try driving six miles up a forest road to the Knott Trailhead. The Knott trail was originally constructed in 1871 as the first northerly route into the Bohemia Mining Area (of which Lund Park was one of the mining towns later developed).
This remaining section of trail follows a ridge line and our climbing and descending was eventually rewarded with a nice view of surrounding ridges from a rocky area with wild flowers blooming.
Someone had been on the trail recently on a dirt bike with a trials tire – it would be an amazing ride. We followed a side trail down to the site of an old cabin while we discussed whether we should buy a new tent trailer with some kind of shower option in our retirement, or stay with our former half-formed plan of buying a fifth wheel trailer.
We enjoy camping in out-of-the-way places where most fifth wheels would not be able to turn around, much less park. Tent trailers do not require heavy duty tow vehicles, so money would be saved on both trailer and tow vehicle. Lack of a shower and an only semi-useful toilet are the only real shortcomings of our tent trailer, so even if those were still “less than optimal”, we could spend a lot of nights in hotels taking showers for the price difference of a fifth wheel.
We got mobile phone reception from up on the ridge, so I was able to answer a text message and download some email.
We returned to camp for a lunch of sweet potato veggie-burgers with hummus and carrots. We got some new neighbors who expect companions to arrive, and they tried to convince us to move to a different site so they could have their group together, but moving a tent trailer takes at least an hour, so we declined. I guess that is one more “shortcoming”, but usually not a big deal.
We walked from camp across the road to the Adams Mountain trail. This trail climbs from Brice Creek up to the Knott trail, but we went only about 0.6 miles up this steep climb before meeting a forest road we had bicycled on last summer. Like the Trestle Falls trail, this trail also had been visited by someone with a hand saw, but there were lots of logs to climb over and under in addition to the steep grade, so we decided to walk back to camp via the forest road and Brice Creek road. It made a loop a bit over four miles long, and we really enjoyed seeing the mining claims of Lucky Loren and Martin the Miner that we remembered from last summer.
Back at camp we divided the pizza dough into balls and did some reading and I worked on our trip journal. After the dough raised a bit more, the pizza came out OK, although we found the breeze and cool temperatures meant we should have heated up the oven a bit more than usual.
We packed up and left Lund Park fairly early the next day. We stopped for a short walk on the rails-to-trails path north of Dorena Reservoir. The BLM seems to spend lots of money on this path and associated parks and boat launches. It does not seem to get too much use, so it made me wonder how they prioritize their budget.