Mill Creek Memories page five

“Little Joe” arrives

More equipment and man power was expected from the Salt Lake City home office of the company which was building the Lassen ski lift.

The day the truck was due the foreman told us local laborers to be handy to the parking lot since some materials were going to arrive which needed to be unloaded.

He also said that some new workers were going to accompany the materials and the word was that one of the new workers was Little Joe, “one of the strongest men you’ve ever seen.”

Well.

All of us had been working long hours with hand tools, digging and bashing earth and rock and we all felt pretty strong I think, but of course we were all very curious to see this new physical phenomenon.

When the trucks came in and the new men got out, none of them looked any different from the rest of us. The foreman introduced all of us and we shook hands all around. The new guys all seemed to be healthy and strong––but I never felt that Little Joe, who was one of the new gang, was any different from the rest. For one thing he was not so tall and not so weighty and he was only about eighteen years old.

Our first task was to unload some big flat cardboard boxes, the chairs for the lift, from the truck. We gathered beside the truck and Little Joe was the first in line. I was second.

There were two men on the truck and they slid the first box over to Joe. He took the sliding box onto his head and walked over toward the edge of the pavement where we had been told to stack the materials.

I got ready to take the second box.

The men on the truck lid it over to where I could reach it, but as soon as it started to come into my hands I realized that I was never going to put it on my head and walk away like Little Joe had. In fact I realized that I was going to be squashed like a bug under that package if I didn’t get some help mighty quick!

Some of the other guys had been watching and grabbed the thing and took the weight off me before I got hurt––but, boy did I ever gain a LOT of respect for Little Joe’s strength! It took two or three or even four men to carry every one of those boxes of steel chairlift seats, but every time Little Joe showed up in the liner of carriers, he took the whole thing all by himself!

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Mill Creek Memories page four

I Become a Medicine Man

The crew dug at the holes steadily—then we built some quick concrete forms and placed some bolt templates on top where they belonged and mixed and poured concrete in the easy-to-reach holes.

The whole work day we were surrounded by the most beautiful and fragrant high slopes of the great dormant volcano, Mount Lassen.

What a great place to work!

I even liked sniffing the breeze when the wind came down from The Sulfur Works––one of the noxious steaming hot springs a short distance up the valley from the old Lassen Chalet.

In just a few weeks we had all the foundations ready

The towers, heavy columns pre-manufactured to fit the foundation bolts and numbered for the different heights required by the mountain slope, were delivered to the parking lot and were going to be hoisted into place with the aid of a helicopter. The concrete for the hard to reach foundation holes was also going to be poured from a big bucket thing dangling from a cable attached to the helicopter.

And there’s a little personal story connected with the helicopter that I will put in here––just don’t make too much of it, OK?

One day the big boss asked us laborers to appear extra early the next morning because the helicopter was going to arrive that evening, land in the parking lot and be ready to tote and fetch the towers and the concrete in the morning. This was a very tricky and dangerous operation and everyone was curious and excited about it.

I, of course, was not even a little involved in the helicopter part of the program. My job was going to be to carry a hand-held “stop” sign up the park highway above the parking lot to stop any cars coming down when the helicopter was busy picking up materials in the parking lot.

Monkey simple.

When I arrived in the morning, they handed me the stop sign but there was a problem. The helicopter could not fly because a very dense fog had dropped into the valley—standing in the parking lot was like standing in the middle of a wet, dark cloud.

The foreman of the labor crew came over to me and said, “Tom we’re in trouble. This fog makes it impossible to fly the towers and that chopper is costing us about a thousand dollars a minute just sitting in the parking lot. I know you’re into mysterious Indian things, could you maybe do a sun dance or something to get rid of the fog?”

He was serious, so I told him I would give it a try.

I put down the stop sign and bummed a cigarette and some matches from one of the smokers since I was going to try what I imagined might be like an old Indian ceremony and for that I needed some tobacco––then I climbed through the fog up the mountainside to the top tower’s empty foundation hole.

I am not an Indian and don’t really know any sun or rain dances, but what the hey, yeah? Give it a try. I HAD read about ceremonies and deep down had a feeling that they should work…

So I reached the top tower’s foundation hole all by myself way up above the Chalet parking lot in the silent cold fog.

The big empty hole had a sheet of black plastic down ready for concrete to be dumped in.

I knew from reading Indian stuff that to help the ceremony work the shaman (me!) should make some sort of sacrifice. I hadn’t intended to make any magic that morning so I didn’t have much of anything to sacrifice, but I was wearing a sort of good luck charm a friend had given me on a plain chain around my neck––a little gold medallion memento from Hawaii with the state seal and motto on it. (“The Life of the Land is Perpetuated in Righteousness”)

What the heck.

I placed the “sacrifice” under a fold in the black plastic sheet––lit the cigarette and blew smoke in the four directions and asked the weather gods or whatever was in charge of the fog to bring out the sun so the chopper could fly. Then I hiked back down the mountain to the parking lot and you may not believe this but when I got to the tarmac the fog was lifting and the helicopter was revving up to fly.

When the big boss—who didn’t know about my “mission”––saw me, he shouted: “Hey slacker! You’re getting paid to work! Get your sign and run up that road and get busy!”

The foreman looked sort of funny at me but didn’t tell anyone about our conversation and that was how I became a very beginner medicine man on Mount Lassen.

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Mill Creek Memories page three

Years later--Tanya on Mount Lassen.

Building the Lassen Ski Lift

I drove the eight or so miles by the back road from Mill Creek to the town of Mineral and located the boss of the ski lift project.

I knew absolutely nothing about ski lifts or skiing, but I was in pretty good shape from tossing firewood so the big boss hired me as a laborer on the spot.

In the morning I joined the dozen or so other new hires up at the Lassen Chalet parking lot and we hiked down into the meadow and started digging.

What I soon found out about ski lifts is that they are just a row of towers which go up a mountainside at higher and higher elevations. There is a big drive wheel at the bottom called a bull wheel and another at the top tower and a traveling cable links them. Clamped to the cable every few feet are chairs which swing high in the air over the snow—since this was to be a chair ski lift.

I found out later there are also gondola things for carrying a lot of people at a time up a mountain and there are also simple “rope tows” with a moving rope strung between wheels which you grab and hang on to as the rope pulls you up the hill––then you let go at the top and slide back down.

In fact, the whole idea of downhill skiing, as I discovered, is to ride some kind of towing device to the upper part of a hill or mountain and then slide back down on your skis and then ride up again and slide down again all day long. No kidding. That’s what it’s all about and people spend thousands of dollars to do it wearing the latest style of skiing clothes and the latest style of skis! They also need expensive four-wheel drive vehicles to get them to the ski slopes and they need fine hotel rooms and restaurants and bars and so forth nearby. (Indeed, what fools we mortals be!) This expensive sport absolutely limits the participants to the idle rich and their servants. Well, what the heck! That’s pretty much life, isn’t it?

But I’m kind of getting ahead of myself because the Lassen ski lift hadn’t even been built yet!

What I had been hired to do was to help dig big holes to fill with concrete for bolt-setting foundations for the towers that carried the rows of wheels (shiv trains) that in turn carried the moving cable—one huge loop of steel cable––up the mountain!

We had shovels to dig with of course, and the ground in the valley was soft but as we went up the mountainside for the higher towers the digging got harder until we were finally digging through solid rock. For this job we switched to “rock bars”— six foot steel bars with a chisel point. You use this tool to bash at the rock and every few blows you get some chips to fly off.

We did this eight hours a day and when I got back to my camper the first night after using the rock bar, I went to eat a sandwich and found I couldn’t open or close my hand! My fingers were stuck in the rock bar grip position! Lucky I could still move my hand close to the bread until I slid a slice between my fingers and managed to eat that yummy poor man’s delight, peanut butter and jelly on white bread!

But there were some rocks we couldn’t dent and for these they had hired a dynamite expert—a kind of hippy looking guy. His tools were a heavy duty pneumatic rock drill—like the things they break concrete with on road work––and dynamite. He would drill a hole with this rock drill––a heavy steel pointed thing and the odd thing about his work was that he wore flip-flop rubber sandals while this dangerous drill was pounding away boring a hole in the solid rock right between his feet!

I asked him why he did it that way and he told me that by going almost barefoot he was twice as cautious with the drill. Maybe so.

I wore steel capped safety boots myself.

When he had his hole drilled, this technician warned us civilians away, stuffed dynamite into the hole he’d dug, shouted “Fire in the hole” and there was a bang and a lot of gravel sized bits of stone rained down on us for a few seconds. That broke the rock enough so we could go attack it again with our rock bars.

Once he shouted “Fire in the hole!” and there was no bang.

He came over where we were cowering behind some rocks and said “I hate it when this happens.” Then he had to go fish the dud dynamite charge out of the drilled hole and start all over again.

Well, he was getting paid more than the rest of us.

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Mill Creek Memories page two

Firewood and Fishing

I had arrived in Mill Creek in May from the coast expecting the winter to be over–– and it was at the altitude of the town of Mill Creek, but Mount Lassen still had lots of snow on its upper slopes so I couldn’t climb around on it like I wanted to. When I had discovered what a good place this little town of Mill Creek was, I decided to live here for a while even if there was not much work available.

Then I heard there was a very remote fishing camp maybe ten miles further into the wilds downstream from the town called “Hole in the Ground”.

My good old Ford pick-up made it down to the camp and I found it was a very lovely, quiet, free Forest Service camp with parking places, tables and fire pits right on Mill Creek. A fisherman was already there with his camper but he had his own camp and minded his own business. . I didn’t fish. I didn’t have a license or any tackle.

About the second morning I was there a tanker truck arrived and the driver started transferring nice, big trout from the opened top of the tank to the river with a long-handled fishing net. This was something new for me. There were more fish than I could imagine going into the river right at my feet. One big trout leapt out of the net and landed at the feet of the fisherman. He grabbed it with his bare hands and tossed it into the river with its buddies.

“Man, you had that fish! You caught it fair and square––why’d you throw it in the river?” I exclaimed.

“Aw, that’s no fun.” He said.

I stayed on a few more days. No one else showed up and every day the fisherman would give me a couple of trout for breakfast so he wouldn’t go over his limit.

So. You see, I imagined Hole in the Ground to be a perfect quiet fishing place.

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My firewood boss Harry kept a very neat firewood cutter’s camp. He was very proud of the neat cords of wood he carefully stacked before we loaded them into the old truck he rented to carry the firewood down to Chico. He also loved to fish and when he wasn’t taking care of his camp like a Boy Scout he was off fishing in the narrow deep streams of the meadows.

I was getting stronger and more agile tossing two split pieces of firewood at a time into the big truck and rolling the big “rounds” of cut wood to the pickup truck and hoisting them in.

I didn’t do much cutting because the chainsaws were pretty expensive and I never bought one––but there was more than enough other work

Harry told me we would take the Fourth of July off which was OK with me!

Then he asked me if I knew of any good fishing holes nearby where he could indulge his passion. I told him about The Hole in the Ground and offered to guide him there.

So the next morning, which was the Fourth of July, Harry picked me up at my camp in Mill Creek and I showed him the dirt road that led down to my quiet fishing hole.

But, Holy Mackerel, there must have been two hundred fishermen with their wives and children all over the camp––wall to wall trucks and campers and tents and smoky campfires smelling of hot-dogs––unbelievable!.

So Harry tossed his line in with all the rest and took it all with good humor. I wasn’t faking my astonishment!

But just after the fourth of July Harry told me that the area of trees his license allowed him to cut was about finished and he was packing his camp and heading back to Chico to his regular job as a bartender. I would have to find another job.

I wanted to stay in the Lassen area very much—I discovered that I really liked it!

But there was nothing much for me to do to earn money––even the humble subsistence level I needed.

I learned that there was a big construction project just starting for the Lassen Volcanic National Park late that summer. The Forest Service had signed a permit to allow a ski lift to be built on a high slope in the Park. Visions of wealth and employment excited the few people who actually lived in the nearby mountain towns scratching a living from the land in any way they could (state highway maintenance, gas station operator, school teacher, cafe waitress, bar owner, motel people, truckers and my people, the firewood trade scavengers).

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Mill Creek Memories

Mill Creek, CA an Introduction

I am going to tell you a few yarns about some experiences I had and some people I met in the mountain towns near Mount Lassen in northern California.

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More than a few years ago I wanted to work in the high mountains. I lived in California but planned to go to the highlands of Ecuador to find a suitable place to work on a project I had in mind––I'll tell you that story later, if I have the time––and I wanted to get accustomed to living and working at a high altitude.

A friend told me about Mill Creek, a pretty, tiny mountain town near Lassen National Park which she had discovered way, way off the beaten track––a town so small it didn't even have a center stripe painted down the paved street going through it to separate the lanes of traffic––and in California that means a VERY small town.

I was living in a "camper" at the time––a little portable house on the bed of an old Ford pick-up truck, so I could live pretty much wherever there was a road and I needed practically no money to survive. I was enjoying the freedom.

I found the town and it was as nice as my friend had described it: one general store with a cafe and gas pump and a post office and that was about it. There were thirty or so very old privately owned summer cottages in the village since this had been a deer hunter's paradise in my grandparent's day. That pioneer generation had wiped out most of the deer, of course, and had also eliminated most of the native fish and all of the native people (Ishi's tribe) and cut down the saleable trees. But the forest had made a comeback in the sixty or seventy years since this had been a flourishing hunting camp, there were a few new deer left for today's generation of sportsmen to shoot, fish were put in the river from state fish farms for today's fisherfolk to catch; and though the native people were extinct, Euro-American people had arrived in sufficient quantities that the "town" still rated the closet-sized post office and had not totally disappeared.

In the days I am talking about there was a free campground back in the trees and I was its only user except on hot holiday weekends when a few other campers from the blistering Sacramento River valley far below would come up to stay for a night or two.

I heard about a man called Harry who had a firewood cutting contract with the Forest Service over near Child’s Meadows––just off Highway 36. I found him and got the job–– hand loading firewood onto a two-and-a-half-ton truck. The pay was lower than the legal minimum, when I got paid at all, (Sometimes I got paid in firewood, which I could sell, or trade.) but it was fun and very educational

I love working outdoors and the men and their women who follow the firewood trade are curiosities to say the least.

For example, one of Harry’s sawyers had cut a window-sized hole in one of the tree trunks near Harry’s camp and he delighted to open his “window” to peer at us from behind the tree. The same guy loved to toss his empty beer cans around where we were working in the deep forest. I scolded him once about littering and he told me “I want people to know I’ve been working out here––that’s why I leave the cans!” To show there were no hard feelings he let me use his chain saw a bit so he could call me “Tom Sawyer”.

We were all dirt poor. One day the grandson of one of the old-time sawyers showed up with his new teenage bride to work with us since there was no work down in the valley (Sacramento, Chico, Red Bluff, Etc.)

When I came out of the woods later that day, I found that the new man had accidentally swung his hand too close to a running chain saw and cut off the ends of a couple of his fingers––and this was before he had even picked up a single piece of firewood! None of the other workers in the camp had enough gasoline in their trucks to carry him to the doctor in Chester so they wrapped his fingers in a handkerchief and he and his bride hitch-hiked out for help.

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