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| PAGOSA PAST: Father-Daughter Backpacking, Part One |
| Jerry Driesens | 3/23/09 |
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One of the most attractive prospects about a teaching career was having the summers off. Especially in Pagosa! If Joanie could manage to have a job that allowed her to have the summers off, we could spend time traveling and in our beautiful San Juan mountains. What a great place to raise a family! Unfortunately Joanie’s job was year-round. Furthermore, my teacher’s pay was not sufficient to just take the summers off, except for the first summer. The next two summers were spent building first our log home and then the Henry’s. But that was the only way to afford owning our own home.
By the time our daughters began arriving in 1977, Joanie was a stay-at-home mom, and by 1979, when our second one was born, I was selling real estate in the summers. Before long it seemed like all I did was work and it was like having two full time jobs by 1984, when I finally realized I just could no longer keep doing both and try to be a good husband and father. I was already making considerably more in real estate than I was teaching and coaching, so my decision, though agonizing, was ultimately easy to make, financially.
 The problem was that my busiest time was in the summer when my (now) three girls were out of school for the summer. While we had some great family vacations and holidays during the breaks from school in the fall, winter and spring, and we got in some day hikes to Crater Lake, Quartz Lake and Four Mile Falls with the whole family and friends and guests, I decided to just set aside a time when I could do a one-on-one backpack trip with each daughter in the summer, starting when they were about nine years old.
We started by taking overnight hikes to lakes like: Crater, Quartz, Fourmile, Granite and Hossick as well as hikes up-river from the hunters’ camp at the confluence of the Piedra River and First Fork. The times became more and more special and, in a way, sacred. I had some great adventures with each of my girls. As they grew, I started having them pick where we were to go.
Marrie wanted to climb to the tops of some of the mountains and our first attempt at bagging Pagosa Peak was a bit overly-ambitious. I decided we would ride our mountain bikes up Black Mountain Road to where the trail begins. We parked the Suburban inside the open gate and rode about a mile up the road before we realized we would not make it to where we hoped to camp. So we rode back down ( much easier) to the Suburban and loaded in our bikes and backpacks and drove up to a great spot to cook our supper and camp out. We broke camp and headed up what looked like the trail, but missed the blue spray-painted tree after first finding the spray-painted rock.
So instead of switch backing right and heading up, we dropped down, crossed Pagosa Creek and continued with no trail and ascended the ridge to the far left, northwest of the one the trail follows. So the first of many “sporty routes” was employed. (Dr. Harvey Butchart, math professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, who was the sponsor of the hiking club there, was already a legend in hiking and climbing in the Grand Canyon. For us, it was he who coined the phrase, “sporty route” for those looking for extra challenges. He was a mentor of mine, mainly through correspondence after we moved here from Flagstaff, but whenever I got off the main trail Joanie and the girls and my friends would ask if we were just taking a sportier route, or I would bluff my way out of admitting I was off trail (certainly not lost) by asserting that Dad just wanted to try a “sporty route” (An excellent biography of Dr. Butchart was written last year , entitled “Grand Obsession: Harvey Butchart and the Exploration of Grand Canyon”.)
We returned via the beaten path that serves as the main trail. Being the oldest, Marrie was often the first daughter to have been to many of the destinations. The eight mile hike out from Granite Lake just a day after we had hiked in proved to also have pushed it a bit, especially with the last two miles out being the uphill grind back to the Poison Park Trailhead. She was ten years old, if I remember correctly, and she had insisted on cooking our supper over the campfire while Dad kept fishing. We had gone to Crater Lake the year before and Marrie was up at the crack of dawn with me to fish. While I fished with flies and lures, I set her up on a rock ledge overlooking some deep water with a bobber and a night crawler and she ended up catching the biggest fish - a beautiful cutthroat just a whisker under 20”!
Once when Marrie and I had climbed Blackhead Peak, I decided to try to climb Nipple Mountain on our way back. Marrie was older and wiser by now and took one look at the loose conglomerate rock that makes the neck of Nipple and she said she’d read her book at the bottom if I was not to be deterred and she’d go for help if some loose rock gave way and sent me with it. It’s worse coming down than going up. I was relieved when I got back down that I hadn’t been able to talk her into going up it with me. I had taken Joanie and later all of us into some pretty “sporty routes” where sometimes Joanie cried and other times just placed herself and her children in God’s hands since her husband seemed oblivious to yet another danger.
Molly, the middle child and two years younger than Marrie, and, by far, the shyest one growing up, surprised us on one of the trips when she said she wanted me to take her to Hossick Lake. (She’d gone with me to Granite the year after Marrie and I had gone and she’d even caught a 3lb. brook trout there on a flyrod I had rigged up with a worm - while I caught cutthroats on copper Z-Rays.) She’d heard my stories about the cutthroats as long as my leg, the bighorn sheep, but she’d also heard from Joanie what a steep, difficult hike it was to Hossick, compared to the other locations. Joanie tried to talk her out of it, telling Molly that she wouldn’t do it again.
But Molly was determined and when I asked her why she wanted to go to Hossick when there were so many other nice hikes that wouldn’t be as hard, she got me alone and quietly said, “Because Marrie hasn’t been there, yet!” This caught me by surprise as Molly was pretty bashful and usually un-assertive as a little girl. (I just then realized she had taken on Granite the year before probably because Marrie had told her that it had been a pretty long and difficult round-trip hike.) We ended up getting a surprise lift as one of my friends, David Cook, was packing in a camp for the Labor Day weekend for his boss, Bob Lindner , (also a friend of mine), and some of his guests.
He saddled up a couple extra horses and put our backpacks in the panniers. Molly was very nervous about riding a horse, of which she’d done very little, but at nine years old, let her Dad talk her into it. We arrived at tree line where the last safe-from-lightning-camp was without having broken a sweat. I marveled at how much more I had been able to observe while riding a very well-trained mountain horse. I didn’t have to keep looking at the trail to avoid tripping over rocks and tree roots, skirting mud holes, etc...
Read Part Two... |
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