Biscuits and Gravy
I couldn’t wait to pack up and get off of the cursed road. And ideally back onto a hiking trail, but it would be a while before I’d see one of those. I assumed that I was still ahead of Bugs and Moose, so I took a slower pace in hopes that they’d catch up to me.
It felt good to be finally heading west again after the long slog around Republic. The paved road opened up into a huge field, and after a while I turned around to see a tiny Moose and Bugs in the distance. I held back so that they could catch up. They had apparently been bold enough to scramble underneath some barbed wire and camp on private property on the Deliverance road the previous evening. We renewed our intentions to get biscuits and gravy at the “Bonaparte Lake Resort” and headed onward into a maze of cattle-trampled decommissioned forest roads.
We were all sufficiently hungry by the time we made it to the Bonaparte Lake restaurant. For Moose and I in particular, the conversation had become very biscuits-and-gravy-centric.
The resort was a ramshackle little campground with some cabins and an empty restaurant. After heading to the bathroom to wash my hands and face (turning the sink water brown), I sat down at a table with Bugs and Moose. We chatted with the waitress for a little while about the hike, and she gave us the scoop on that “private” property we had crossed the previous day – it wasn’t actually private, but the person living at the end of the road had claimed it.
Moose and I were devastated to hear that the restaurant was out of gravy. Our dreams were crushed, but the prospect of a breakfast burrito helped me get over it in about 30 seconds.
We ate with the ferocity of three PNT hikers, then sat around groaning for a while. Bugs and Moose had decided that they’d stay the night in the campground, while I was hoping to climb Mount Bonaparte and camp at the top. I needed a few hours to digest my meal first. So the three of us hung around their campsite and napped and read. I had started reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and I was totally wrapped up in Kimmerer’s vision of a world built by an interconnected web of reciprocity.
After a few hours of reading and dozing off, my burrito digestion had slowed down enough for me to continue hiking. I said goodbye to Bugs and Moose, knowing I’d see them again at least by the time I got to Oroville in two days, and headed forward through the campground to find the trail that would take me 3500 feet up the mountain.
My climb up Mount Bonaparte felt easy for a climb that big. I was carrying only a day and a half of food and about a liter of water, since I knew I could fill up at a spring near the top. The switchbacks were very forgiving, keeping the climb at a consistent 1/2 Steep (~500 feet of elevation per mile). There were occasional huckleberries and plenty of views of Lake Bonaparte to keep me occupied.
I reached the peak in the late evening. “Hey-o!” On top of the fire tower, a tall, wiry old man with a big mustache greeted me eagerly, waving both of his hands in my direction. Unlike most other neglected lookout towers in this region, Mount Bonaparte was still seasonally manned.
The lookout shouted down, “There’s a great tenting spot over that way” – he pointed behind him, on the other side of the tower - “… I’ll show you around more in the morning!” I barely managed to get out any words before he turned around and slammed the door.
There was a spot on the other side of the peak that was just barely big enough for my tent and perfectly sheltered from the wind by an amphitheater-shaped pile of boulders. I had some trouble getting my stakes into the rocky ground, but after a little creative rock-placement, I was able to get enough tension to set up my tent. It was a pleasantly-cool night at that elevation. I watched the sun set over the valley to the west while I ate a dinner of macaroni & cheese, then quickly got into my tent to fall asleep.
