~ night. clouds massed together and around sunset some rain. now the sky is mostly clear and i am still fever-stoned, physically tired. i made a little progress on the window on wall six today, but had trouble focusing as i always seem to when i've got a cold.”
[Russell Towle's journal]
“9/28/77 the canyon. tonight it is full of clouds and raining lightly now and again. i returned from grass valley today, wednesday, after a couple of days of shopping and making the last two windows, the pentagonal ones of the sleeping loft. they have been a struggle. all the other windows and the door are hung, and i hung one of the pents this afternoon. so the cabin is closed in. more than a year after i started. and still far from finished. the wood stove is going in soon. the piano tomorrow.”
[Russell Towle's journal]
“9/28/86 Morning: the sun actually shines, a day ahead of schedule! However, it shines on a purely provisional basis, with clouds and fog boiling around the canyon. God. The rain we've had: inches and inches, for days and days. Yesterday I visited Steve and Gail [...] and had dinner there, watched tv, and then headed to home through the downpour, to home with a splitting headache, to home with no firewood and no fire, to home to lie in bed and suffer and shiver and sweat and finally to puke ingloriously out my sleeping loft window, oh agony, oh headache with whimpering pain, oh dreadful loneliness, to be here puking alone at night with dripping noises everywhere, horrible thoughts caterwauling, placing hot palms on naked shivering thighs to warm them, finally realizing that the checkerboard chills and fevers were the unmistakable heralds of a genuine catharsis, fumbling in the dark for the window latch, a whole new dripping world outside, a high-altitude puke, puke arcing downward a full sixteen vertical feet before splattering over native grasses.”
[Russell Towle's journal]
“9/28/87 land payment due, but no hope in sight…
Yesterday, took Bill and Carla up to Salmon Lake. Bill had to go down to SF afterwards, big hearing about mountain lions, the hunting thereof; and speaking of hunting, deer season must be upon us, we saw literally dozens of hunters, all with their four-wheel-drive trucks, their rifles, their aura of coming from the suburbs of San Jose or Sacramento. Fortunately, they seem incapable of straying very far from their 4WDs, so once we got out on the trail, we left the hunters behind.
There were some mallard hens at Salmon, sitting four in a row on a floating log.”
[Russell Towle's journal]
“9/28/88 The mornings are cool, even cold, these days, making the arrival of fall seem like the Arrival of Fall. Fall, I can tell you, dear diary, fall brings canyon wrens to my cabin; birds of the cliff negotiate precarious overhangs around my eaves, they cling desperately to my trim, they chirp and cheep and laugh out their cascadingly brilliant excuse for a song.
[...]”
[Russell Towle's journal]
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 09:18:18 -0800
To: North_Fork_Trails
From: Russell Towle
Subject: No Trespassing, Gold Run
Hi all,
Dean Decker of the Folsom office of the BLM has begun looking in to the situation on Garrett Road in Gold Run. He sent these two messages, yesterday and today:
(yesterday)
>Russell ->
>I'm working on the situation out on Garrett Road. I talked with the
>landowner today and ran some approximate property lines. When I have talked
>with Deane and Jim, and we have outlined a course of action, I will let you
>know. Thanks for the heads up.
>
>Regards,
>
>Dean D.
(today)
>Russell ->
>I just talked with Deane about the Garrett Road situation. We're going to
>do a survey to establish the property line, and then figure out where we
>want to go from there. He wanted me to let you know.
>
>Dean D.
So that's where that stands.
Cheers,
Russell Towle
Date: Wed Sep 28 17:23:38 2005
To: Ron_Gould, Catherine_O‘Riley
From: Russell Towle
Subject: China Trail
X-Attachments: :Macintosh HD :18:China_South.JPG:
Hi Ron, Catherine,
I bombed back out to Sawtooth and found the uppermost part of the China Trail. A map is attached with my guess as to its approximate line, plus locations where blazes were seen, and, pathetically, even an old TNF signpost lying on its side up where the trail hits the Old Sawtooth Road, near Point 5094.
From the river going up, years ago, I remember being a little downstream from China North when I picked up the intact trailbed, which all too soon hit a log deck, way low towards the river. Like maybe the 3400' contour.
See the blue line from the New Sawtooth Road, up a ways? That's also got a blaze or two. That's my GPS track before the trees got too thick. About where the trail crosses from SPI Section 25 into TNF Section 30 (with a corner of Bob's 160 near that point), the logging finally lets up and you can see the trailbed in places, and plenty of blazes. At the section line are some special triple blazes, three marks running up and down oak trunks on both sides of the line.
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