Tag: Mineral King cabins

Community Life in Mineral King

Mineral King is a place for backpackers, campers, day hikers, day trippers, and cabin folks. Today’s post is about the cabin community. (Last summer I posted regularly about cabin life.)

There are cabin communities all over the mountains in this country, and most likely in other countries too. I’ve written in the past (2018?) about what makes them special: Cabin Thoughts, One; Cabin Thoughts, Two; Cabin Thoughts, Three, A Few More Cabin Thoughts, and Final Final Cabin Thoughts.

Today’s post is what happens on a busy weekend in our cabin community of Mineral King. There are several parts to the community: our immediate neighbors, those across the creek, the settlement one mile down the road (formerly known as “Faculty Flat”, now “West Mineral King” is the preferred name, and no, I didn’t ask for pronouns); Silver City (private property 4 miles down the road); and Cabin Cove (7 cabins about 5 miles down the road from us).

This is what happens on any given weekend—the closer to the end of summer, the more activities. We:

gather at someone’s cabin for “happy hour”, eat fun things, catch up with one another, and then are too full for dinner
eat dinner together
(Trail Guy and The Farmer, not me unless The Farmer isn’t around) help with various repairs. (The cabins are OLD.)
hike together (hike: carrying pack with lunch and water)
walk together (no pack, no lunch)
give one another rides up and down the hill
bring supplies for one another when coming up the hill
share books
lend knitting needles
let people use our telephone (when we had one) and borrow the neighbor’s phone now
clean up the platform for the annual “Music in the Mountains” event
prune in one another’s yards (okay, that’s just me. . .)
use a hav-a-hart trap to catch bushy-tailed woodrats (definitely Trail Guy, NOT me)
explore historic sites
lend tools
repair water line breaks
go through the junk we discover in our respective cabins, sometimes trading items of interest
share missing recipe ingredients

We stay in touch throughout the year, because our friendships are solid, not simply seasonal.

Cabin Life, Chapter Ten

Friends

Almost everyone with a cabin stops by our place to say hello. Some don’t pay attention to the fact that the front door is closed with a Do Not Disturb sign on the knob. (Trail Guy is known for his naps, but not apparently well-enough known.)

Cabin friendships develop over generations, summer after summer, year after year. Some of our cabin neighbors have become our closest friends. We look out for each other, and communicate throughout the year, particularly during crises such as wildfires, floods, collapsed cabins, snow slides, sinkholes, and washed out roads.

This neighbor thrives on greeting the public as they pass by. I think he might be bored this year.

Here are unidentified friends and neighbors. (If you hate finding your picture here, email me and I will delete it.)

Ouch. Lots of friends shown here who are now gone. Better enjoy the ones remaining, because time is short.

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Cabin Life, Chapter Nine

Events

Cabin life is very social. There are lots of meetings and annual events.

Some years our particular neighborhood holds a Labor Day get-together.

This was the year we used our neighbor’s front yard because it was bigger. He wasn’t there, and may not even know we did this.

The Mineral King Preservation Society used to hold a picnic in our neighborhood. It has since moved to the Ranger Station, and this year it was held in Visalia. Weird, I know.

One year Trail Guy and I were the speakers. That was also quite weird.

And there is an annual cabin owner’s meeting.

One year the superintendent of Sequoia National Park spoke to us. We miss Woody.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the annual concert by Mankin Creek, sponsored by the Mineral King Preservation Society. Here are a few more peeks at it.

I have many more photos of these various annual events, but some of them have photos of friends who have died and it makes me too sad to see them.

We really love our friends and neighbors in our cabin community.

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Cabin Life, Chapter Seven

Phones

In the past, we have had a telephone in our cabin. A few close neighbors also have them. The section across the creek chose to not have Huge & Rude lay lines way back when, and now it isn’t possible.

Last summer it took about six calls to Huge & Rude to get the phone hooked up after the winter. Finding someone at that company who manages landlines in California was almost impossible. Then, they were completely stymied by the lack of a real address. I finally learned that we have an “AHN”, which stands for Alternate House Number. Eventually we got the phone reignited. (wrong word, but all that is coming to me right now.)

The price goes up every year, and once again, I decided to not pay $54/month for the 7-8 months that we aren’t there. Besides, when too many people get our number, I have to change it. On top of that, there is no answering machine (no electricity, remember?), so unless we happen to be in the cabin when someone calls, it isn’t a very reliable method of communicating. (People are used to INSTANT responses these days.)

This year it took three calls, and then I was assured that our phone would be reignited, with a new number, of course. (This was after Huge & Rude called me to say that the address on our work order was inadequate. . . sigh.)

Shortly after that reassurance, a local Huge & Rude service guy pulled into our driveway at home down the hill. (The local service guys are terrific.) He had a work order, but the address didn’t make sense. He came to tell me that he knows the phone is for Mineral King, that Huge & Rude doesn’t want small rural communities any more (as if we didn’t figure that out from the lack of service), and that he is required to drive up to the cabin. However, his truck is too big for the messed-up road. He gave me the cell phone numbers of all three local service guys and said to call when the big truck can get up the road.

COME ON! JUST FLIP A SWITCH IN AN OFFICE THE WAY YOU HAVE ALWAYS DONE IT!

Nope, can’t.

So, we plugged our phone into our neighbor’s phone jack because his phone sounds as if bacon is frying inside. And now we walk over there to make our calls.

NO, THERE IS NO CELL SERVICE IN MINERAL KING!

Trash Service

This year there is none. Haul it yourself. Do NOT use the Park Services can. It is forbidden. We used to have a dumpster for cabin trash, and the service truck came once a week. However, they are a bit like the huge and rude phone company in not wanting rural communities. In recent years, we rented a giant roll-off dumpster. And before that, Trail Guy hauled everyone’s garbage from Mineral King to Silver City in his Botmobile. Yep, moved the bags by hand into his pick-em-up truck, drove 3 miles down the bumpy road, and then flung them into Silver City’s roll-off. When we cabin folks got our own dumpster, he climbed in and rearranged the bags to make more room, so that it only had to be emptied about 3 or 4 times a summer. This is why I sometimes sent out an email to cabin folks begging them to double-bag so there is no leaky-leaky. In addition, there were no accommodations for recycling so if that was important to cabin folks, they needed to either stop buying so much packaged stuff or haul it home to their own recycling container.

You can see why everyone in Mineral King loves Trail Guy and brings him treats*.

*(Red wine [cabernet], cashews, pistachios, beef jerky. . .in case you are interested, or feeling guilty, grateful, or generous)

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Cabin Life, Chapter Six

Utilities: Water

There is no water company in Mineral King. Trail Guy and the Farmer keep water flowing to our neighborhood, with occasional help from other neighbors. I will skip the details, but let these photos tell you how scary it is this year.

We listen to hear it humming in our pipes, and when it gets quiet, we take a hike. “We”? Trail Guy takes a hike, and I stay at the cabin with a walkie-talkie to follow instructions about opening and closing various valves.

Hot water

Propane water heaters are the most normal part of cabin life’s necessities. Some people have tried to use the on-demand style, and after one winter, those things are toast.

Sometimes the regular ones are also toast.

Trail Guy helps many neighbors with their water heaters when he can, and sometimes I go along, because sometimes other people’s bathrooms are kind of interesting.

I have no idea.

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Cabin Life, Chapter Four

Gardening

What do we do at the cabin?

Sometimes I garden.

Gardening at a mountain cabin? What are you talking about??

When I first married into the cabin, I admired some bearded iris across the creek at another cabin.

Then, I transplanted some from our real house to the cabin.

We have had one bloom; it was in July, 2017. (Only took me 15 minutes to find that date. . . the photo was so unremarkable that it got deleted awhile ago.)

A neighbor has a lush front yard, and she graciously allows me to transplant things, which sometimes survive.

A trick is to keep the transplants watered, and to mark them so that people don’t just assume it is basic forest floor, free for unstructured trampling.

We have lots of currant bushes in the area, and they get full of dead branches. My theory about this is that the bushes will thrive and grow if the old stuff is cleared away. Sometimes I wonder if, when I pull out the dead stuff, the shrub is thinking, “HEY! I was eating that!”

It is possible that I have too much thinking time.

When the fire crews were clearing brush in an arbitrary manner during the fall of 2021, they made these very neat rows of their prunings. Random hacking, organized stacking. They won’t be returning to haul these piles away, so I am now using them when I do my own clearing.

Sometimes I rake, sometimes I use the large magnet on a pole to gather nails in a nearby driveway. (That’s another story, a long one.)

And sometimes I wander around, wishing that I knew when and how to transplant things from God’s garden.

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Making a Cabin Scene

Happy Birthday, Shirley!!

Making a cabin scene is different from just making a scene.

A cabin owner requested a painting of her cabin as a gift for her husband. (He only looks at the blog when it is about Mineral King AND she forwards the link to him, so I’m not ruining any surprises here.) She wants it to include a view that normally doesn’t show with the cabin, and requested a square format.

Because this is a little difficult, all this mind-reading, designing, and putting together things that aren’t normally together, I didn’t make a scene but began with sketches.

If you recognize this cabin, SHHHHH, IT IS A SURPRISE!!

She asked for square, so I showed her two squares plus a 6×18″ and this cabin painting; she agreed with me about this size and shape working well for her idea.

I thought I was out of this size of canvas, so I ordered some more. After they arrived and I was putting them away, I saw that I already had some that size. Someone around here could use an assistant, or perhaps a better administrator. Oh well. . . they won’t go to waste.

Yeppers, it fits, so get some paint on this canvas!

They all start ugly. No need to be afraid for me or the painting or the customer or the husband. No one will need to make a scene. (But wait! Is this creative??)

Starting with what I know, I put paint on Farewell Gap in the distance.

The trees are next. They are just a mass of greens with some variation in the values (ArtSpeak for lights and darks).

A risk of this sort of photo-combining is that the 2 photos might have the light coming from 2 different sources. Would the customer or the viewer notice? I might be able to cheat, but it might bug me forever. So I began reworking the color on the mountains, because it is easier than figuring out how the cabin shadows could be reversed. I pushed more paint around until my fingers got cold and my efforts felt ineffective. This is far enough for now.

Realizing the problem of conflicting light sources almost caused me to make a scene, but that would have only served to upset Tucker and Scout.

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Cabin Thoughts, Part 3

Mineral King cabin folks come from cities, suburbs, small towns and out in the country; we live in mansions, estates, apartments, and even a few normal houses. We are artists, bankers, equipment operators, janitors, teachers, farmers, administrative assistants, engineers, retirees, dental hygienists, sheriffs, lawyers, doctors, day care workers, musicians, optometrists, veterinary assistants, physical therapists, moms, Park employees, physician’s assistants, and those are just the first ones that come to mind. We come from California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Virginia, New York, Hawaii, Florida, South Dakota, and Egypt. (Probably more places that I can’t remember. . .)

Our Mineral King cabins, AKA “small, poorly constructed huts in the woods”, are great equalizers.

Every one of us, regardless of our backgrounds, livelihoods, economic, educational or political status, is thrilled to have a small, poorly constructed hut in the woods. Every cabin has a barely adequate kitchen, a laughably tiny (or no) bathroom, maybe one or two or even no bedrooms. Every single cabin user has to figure out how to deal with unreliable water, peculiar propane appliances, old stuff that may or may not work, and the definite lack of a maintenance department, hardware or grocery store. There is a terrible road to get there, rodents, spiders and other wildlife that may or may not be appreciated, and all sorts of unexpected situations. (Who left this chair and what happened to my flashlight?? Who forgot the tonic water? Does anyone have any birthday candles? What do you mean Skin-So-Soft isn’t mosquito repellent? Are you kidding that I can’t blow-dry my hair?)

Every single cabin that is owned by multiple families has its conflicts, whether decorating, cleaning, maintaining, or scheduling. The cabins without partnerships have to bear the expenses, decisions, maintenance and cleaning without benefit of sharing the load.

Those who have complicated lives in fancy places might view a cabin as a mixed blessing: a family tradition, a repository of memories, and a bit of an inconvenience, but a treasured shabby shack in the mountains.

Those who have simpler lives in simpler places might also view a cabin as a mixed blessing: a family tradition, a repository of memories, and a huge treat, a treasured place of one’s own in the mountains.

In my 32 38 years of cabin ownership, I’ve observed cabin folks’ conversation topics go from “How can we save these cabins” to “How have you been?” We have fought together, helped one another, hiked together, learned one another’s family trees, and through it all we have built friendships weekend upon weekend, year after year after decade after decade. And I am just a newcomer. . .

A small, poorly-constructed, primitive, one-story hut in the woods where everyday life is distant and we gather to laugh with family and play board games while a fire keeps us warm. (If you have a giant log mansion on a lake somewhere, then you will have to edit this description to fit your idea of what constitutes “cabin”.)

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Mineral King in Winter

Retired Trail Guy and a friend went to Mineral King in Winter. This week. Yes, winter is really happening this year!

Nice light on this cabin. People ask “How much snow?” The answer is “Depends on where you are.” Snow piles up or doesn’t pile up in different depths in different places. The best way to see how much is to check the Mineral King webcam. In the 2nd photo, taken toward Timber Gap, the striped stick is 10′ tall, and every stripe is 1′. Click here to open the Mineral King webcam in another window.

This is The Trackster. It is more reliable than a snowmobile. This is not Retired Trail Guy. It is Retired Mailman.

Retired Mailman is very tall, and he shoveled off this part of the roof.

Then he photographed Trail Guy, AKA Shoveler-on-the-Roof. Our cabin is over 100 years old, and it has survived many heavy winters. Still, it takes a load off our minds to take a load off its roof.