Backcorners Of Nowhere
Every once in a while, rarely planned, never expected, and usually off the back trails further out than what most consider back trails, I’ll come across a surprise.
This pan, deep up a canyon in the Owyhee Mountains, was found hanging on the wall of an old miner’s cabin. The cabin was still mostly in good shape – not really habitable anymore, but worthy of shelter if caught in a storm.
I don’t know what I was thinking taking a vehicle up that “road” – brush cutting, rut filling, tree moving …
Well, yes I do (“I wonder what’s up here?“) … but I might have needed that cabin for shelter.
As far as I know, the pan is still there.
Over the past 45 years or so wandering in places a thinking person normally wouldn’t go, I’ve collected a few of these surprises – some I can prove such as this, some perhaps subject to an aging memory.
The few certain things I’ve learned of these findings is that 1) it’s no use taking someone with me with the purpose of finding “something”, 2) I will find nothing if that is my intent, and 3) it is not uncommon for me to not find “it” again if I try to return.
Roads less traveled, and as you note, often forgotten.
I doubt there is a single British mother who is willing to accept that her son has to die to defend Finland, Estonia, or Poland.
Certainly no American mothers are.
The time to defend Europe was when Germany first started importing Gastarbeitern from Turkey.
Why would anyone die to defend Europe from Russians when they weren’t even allowed to protest the invasion by Africans and Arabs?
If that is the metric, NATO is already dead.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14801897/British-mothers-accept-sons-die-defend-Finland-no-NATO-Chilling-warning-Putin-looks-test-Europe-stand-forces.html
Summer, 1971, I was driving down a barely negotiable path in the woods of Buckingham in my 1966 Mustang when off to the right I spotted “something” in the underbrush. I walked to it and parted the limbs of the dense shrubbery and it was a car. Peering at the red tail light lens I saw that it was a 1963 Corvair.
I drove 20 miles to our home and got my dad’s tow bar and went back to the Corvair. I hooked up to it and pulled it out of the shubbery so I could take a look at it.
I popped the hood and…whoa. It had a chrome turbocharger on it. On the sides of the front fenders and in the corner of the rear hood it said “Spyder”.
I went back home and got my dad and his trailer and truck and we went back and loaded the Corvair onto the trailer and took it home. Over the next few months we tore it down completely and rebuilt all of it back to like new condition. It was a red convertible with a white interior. The engine had a blown cylinder barrel. My sister in North Carolina still owns it but hasn’t driven it in years.
It looked like this: