adventures in yolla bolly land
I just got back to civilization after a brief camping trip to the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Widerness and its neighborhood. We were camping with a pop-up tent trailer, a whole new style of camping to me. Hardly anyone drags a trailer up the rugged dirt roads to Yolla Bolly Land; in fact hardly anyone goes there at all. In three days, we say absolutely nobody outside of our group. While that’s mid-week, it’s also early June, the best time, overall, to visit the area. From July to September it’s frightfully hot and dry there. The Fall is the most visited time, as people go there to kill things. In the Winter months, the area is completely inaccessible.
The core of Yolla Bolly Land is a 150,000 acre wilderness; the surrounding area has great opportunities for car camping. One reason so few people visit the area is difficult access. One single-lane paved road approaches the northwest corner of the wilderness; the rest of the place must be accessed via long and bumpy dirt roads.
For this trip, we used the Indian Dick Road, a forty-some-odd mile trek from the town of Covelo, which is a pretty remote little town already. Since it was early June, and the mountains are not as high here as in other California wilderness areas, only the highest part of the Wilderness still had snow. We started encountering patches of snow on the Soldier Ridge Trail at about 6500 feet the Minnie Lake trail and the French Cove trail were very snowy and difficult to follow. The highest summits in the area barely touch 8000 feet. Most of the Wilderness is between 3000 and 5000 feet; in May it’s paradise, in August it’s frightfully hot and dry.
On to the pics:
I used PhotoShop to merge four frames to make this panorama. It was taken from the Soldier Ridge Trail looking southeast.
Shooting Stars, Dodecatheon hendersonii gowing in a rock crevice
Our camp. That’s Castle Peak in the distance
