My Trails

Morning heat.

On the second day of my stay near Troy, MT, a game warden stopped and informed me I was not allowed to camp there. I said I thought I was on national forest land. He said it was but a lumber company held the lease and didn’t allow camping. I like to think of it more as parking than camping, but he was nice and told me of other places where I could camp, so I packed up and left. I told him to put up a sign and he said he would.

It is not the first time I have been told to move and it won’t be the last. Such are the trails of this wayfaring stranger. Most of the time people are nice when they have to evict you, especially when they talk to me and find out I’m a nice guy.

The places he told me about were deep in tall trees, perfect if you want secluded, shady isolation, but not at all ideal for cell, solar and satellite. I continued on into Idaho and found a road up into the Kaniksu National Forest where I spent the night.

One of these times I will get in trouble driving down unfamiliar forest roads. Several times the road has ended with a gate or rutted surface, but I have always been able to turn around before the end, avoiding the hassle of backing out some great distance with only my mirrors for guidance.

There have been a couple of occasions when I sensed a road was a bad bet, and I am glad to say I got out and walked for a way where inevitably I would find a locked gate. I guess the lesson is never drive further than you would be comfortable backing out.

The Idaho panhandle is only about 50 miles across as the crow flies. The trouble lies with a big, north-south mountain range that’s right in the way and makes the roads dip in a great loop to get around it. I drove the big loop and ended up near Priest Lake in the same national forest.

where I will spend a few days.

Where I’m camped tonight I have no cell. While exploring on Honda this afternoon I found another area where there is signal and I will move there tomorrow. There is a dump and water at the Visitors Center only 2 miles from here so I will have all I need for a few days.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2015 at 3:24 pm and is filed under The Great Outdoors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.