When we left our home that morning we didn’t expect bad weather. We’d been enjoying an early spring for a few weeks, with intermittent rainstorms. So we took off for a drive to Arcata, on the coast, not thinking all that much about precipitation.
Our route is the Klamath River Highway - also known as the Bigfoot Scenic Byway because it passes by Bluff Creek where the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot movie was filmed, and there are a lot of Bigfoot sightings in this region. You can see a bit of the highway on the left side of this river photo. You can click on that photo for a larger version of it.
Forty miles downriver there are two tall bridges. With my acrophobia… and bridge-phobia… I have actually stayed awake nights fretting about these darn bridges! But that was years ago. After I discovered EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) I learned to tap away my phobias, and now I’m learning to cross these bridges without slowing down to a chicken-crawl first. I’m doing pretty well at this!
Anyhow, not long after we cross the bridges we come to the Junction School, and then Somes Bar which is nothing more than a solitary store - currently called the Salmon River Outpost - and homes that are scattered into the hills nearby, none of them visible from the highway. We stopped there and I took advantage of their coffee bar… got myself a mocha. You know, our town of Happy Camp has ten times the businesses, people, activity, etc… but not one decent coffee house! A local woman has promised to create one but it has been a couple years in the thinking phase, so far. I recently noticed some restaurant equipment being unloaded from her truck and stored in the restaurant space, so maybe something will happen this summer.
So, back to my story - I stopped at the store in Somes Bar and then we took off down the Klamath River Highway, continuing toward Eureka, but we didn’t get very far. We were stopped at the Salmon River Road turnoff by a CalTrans employee who informed us that a landslide would prevent us from continuing down the highway.
Okay… “So is there another way around?” I asked him.
“Take the Ishi Pishi Road,” he said.
He continued to talk and my boyfriend chatted with him. I was anxious to turn around and get on my way but then realized that the man was probably bored and lonely with all that road guarding. I mean, there he was in the wilderness next to this landslide and there was nobody else around anywhere. So the guys chatted a while and eventually we turned around and drove back to the store. People outside there were looking at us. “Yeah, we got told,” I muttered… and I turned onto the Ishi Pishi Road which is on the other side of the store.
The map shows Ishi Pishi Road, which is just west of the closed Highway 96. Google tells me it is 6.9 miles, taking about sixteen minutes to drive.
We drove past a couple of hitch hikers (sorry guys but my boyfriend isn’t into picking them up) and over a bridge, then were on the road to Orleans. The road is one-lane, narrow, paved (thankfully,) but with no lines painted on. When you meet someone going the other way someone has to sidle up to the cliff and edge around - hopefully gracefully - and if you’re lucky there’s a very narrow turnout. Aside from that, there’s always the backing up option. Fortunately we didn’t have that experience and managed to get through just fine though my boyfriend was upset because I was driving. He’s a former professional truck driver and thinks he knows it all about driving! (He does, but believe me, sometimes I just don’t want to hear it!)
After a few miles on this road he was saying, “I don’t like it. I think we should turn back.”
I shuddered. I hadn’t driven more than forty miles just to turn around and go home. I wanted to go have some fun at the coast! I rarely get to go out of town - and living in the middle of a forest gets claustrophobic at times. A trip out of town is a very special event! I managed to convince him it was okay to keep going. I’d been on Ishi Pishi Road once before, about nine years ago.
“It isn’t all that long,” I told him.
Not long after we got onto the Ishi Pishi Road we were able to see the landslide on the other side of the river. WOW. That hillside came down and covered the entire road, and continued on down to the river. A very impressive mess! It happened two weeks before we got there, but nothing had been done to fix the problem. We passed a surveyor on Ishi Pishi Road. I don’t know how surveying helps… but apparently they’re being very cautious on how they’re going about correcting this problem.
The photo is by a CalTrans worker (fair use, government property!) … I found it at this article about the slide, which includes a video of the slide in progress!
After about twenty minutes (seemed like an hour) we finally got to the end of twisty, narrow Ishi Pishi Road. It curved around down the hillside into the very small town of Orleans, and we turned right to continue on our way to the coast. After Orleans we pass through Weitchpec, originally a Yurok village, and then Hoopa, a Native American reservation town. The next town is Willow Creek. In that town we went to visit a Bigfoot research and blogging friend, Steven, at his Bigfoot Books store a few miles east of town. It was the first time my boyfriend (and Bigfoot research partner) had met Steven so they talked for a long time while I looked for art books, then herb books, then yoga books… and I even got a Bigfoot book. I’ll put links to the books I bought at the end of this story.
After that we went to Arcata, ate dinner, and got ready to return. On the way back we stopped at the Blue Lake Casino from which I emerged about fifty dollars richer. Here’s my casino tip: twenty dollars, twenty minutes. If you don’t win in the first twenty minutes, get out. The longer you stay the more chi is expended from your energy stores, and the longer they have to send you subliminal “spend money” messages. And don’t spend more than twenty dollars. Also, if you win anything, leave immediately. If you win you think you’ll win more and then spend all your winnings trying. Don’t do it! Take the money and run!
Anyhow, I won, took my money, and was happy that it paid for my gasoline and dinner in Eureka. So we made our way back up the hill toward Willow Creek, noticing intermittent snow flurries. I’d seen them on the way down too. Nothing big or spectacular - just a few small flakes. Nothing to even slow down for.
In Willow Creek we stopped for gas and then took off down Highway 96, the Bigfoot Scenic Byway, heading for home. Perhaps I should mention that it is a three and one-half hour drive from Eureka to the town we live near, Happy Camp. In Hoopa my boyfriend took over the wheel, and I settled back for a pleasant drive home.
As he turned onto Ishi Pishi Road in Orleans, the snow started coming down again. Before long, it took on blizzard proportions, and there we were on the one-lane mountain road with no lines on it, at night, with drastically reduced visibility due to all the white stuff swirling around us. At that point I was glad that my boyfriend, the ex-truck driver, was driving, but still I decided it was time to pray. As we drove on, the snow got thicker and started to stick to the ground. As the non-driver I was instructed to keep an eye out for deer, and was reprimanded by the nervous driver when I wanted to listen to my SanDisk - Sansa Fuze to help me calm down. Okay, no music! Prayers… probably a better idea anyway!
We finally got to the end of the Ishi Pishi Road - I was so happy about that - and turned onto the Klamath River Highway - we still had another 40 miles of cliffs and twists and turns - but at least now there was a set of lines on the road to help guide us. There have been a lot of really terrible accidents on this road, even with better weather. If you go over the cliff side it is a long way down, so to be precise, I’d have to say I was as terrified as I’ve ever been in this life. I don’t particularly like the road on a good day; but on a day when you can barely see five feet in front of you because of the swirling oncoming large snowflakes reflecting in the headlights, it was very, very scary.
Well, as you can tell, I got home safely and there was only one stretch with snow covering over the lines on the highway. As we got closer to home there was less snow falling, and that helped a lot.
On the way home I didn’t want to mention it but once we felt safe again I asked, “You didn’t happen to look at the weather report before we left today, did you?” He sort of growled at me. Neither of us had expected snow because the weather recently had been so warm and spring-like.
I told him, “I think this happened for a reason - to teach me to trust you and God more.” After all, he’d had the intuition, when we were heading out, that Ishi Pishi Road wasn’t a great route and that we should turn back. In the future, I will definitely be listening for his intuitions, because apparently they are better than mine.
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Here, as promised, are the books I bought at Bigfoot Books in Willow Creek. It is a used bookstore and as you can see most of these are out of print but still available through Amazon.
Looks like I got a bargain on that Herb Bible! Thank-you, Steven! It is a beautiful book…
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