So said a profound Mr. Spock in "Let that be your Last Battlefield," and so too says Pit Boss after completing, at long last, a Trifecta for 2011. Rituals like the Pit Trifecta reassure us and comfort us, letting us pretend that today, which starts with hot coffee just like any other day, is not going to be too different from yesterday, letting us pretend that 2011 is just the same as 2001 and all the things we love and enjoy are going to remain the same for us until we never, ever die.
Now that I am just about "old," I am well aware of how true that statement is. I didn't even need to drive up what used to be the bumpy, muddy old dirt middle of the Hagen Flat road, getting myself mentally ready to settle into my favorite old renegade camp next to the abandoned mine entrance, and instead see this:
Yep -- right there where the famous Pit River Bar used to be, there is now a big brown "Fee Area" sign. Just at the moment, there's no fee and no one else camping there, so on Saturday night it was just me and the spanking brand new iron fire rings and sturdy new picnic tables, plus the familiar and sweet sound the river makes going through that part of the canyon. But soon, will it be full of boisterous families and big RV's with their generators running all night, and picnic plates and cigarette smoke blowing in the breeze?
I wonder. I have been down this trail many times. It used to be very hard to describe to people how to find the access and get down to the river. That problem is "solved." It also used to be some of the toughest, most physically challenging wading in a river famous for being difficult, and Pit Boss has (yes it is true) taken a swim or two down there. And now, with the increased flows, is it going to be easier? Hm. Might want to add a third little cartoon showing little kids getting swept downstream in the current to drown under a strainer? I'm just saying.
The road was graded smooth and driving in the canyon was way too easy, and it looks like they are going to pave it. As far as I could tell, it's safe to ignore the "Road Closed" signs on Pit 5 and head on up all the way to #3 (I did, of course, catching trout in each reach and making it an official Trifecta). It occurred to me that they're just trying to do on Hagen Flat Road what they did on the North Fork of the Feather, where there are plenty of nice clean campgrounds and access areas.
There's a reason why I never ran for Feather Boss, though. The Pit is (was) my kind of place: steep, wild, overgrown and difficult enough that few people wanted to fish there despite a fine, fine population of wild trout. I liked it that there were no trail signs nor campgrounds nor rangers, and if the price you pay for that is to wake up on the morning of Opening Day to the sound of shotgun blasts and an idiot yelling "Yeah! Yeah!" (and laughing at how stupid the guy sounded) or driving late into a dark Pit 4 renegade camp and finding a largish drinking party of Burney dropouts, led by a thin bespectacled man holding a tiny dog and wearing nothing but a grass skirt (and laughing even harder -- Mike Hadj will remember both these crackups), well, that was the price and I was happy to pay it.
Boy oh boy has it changed. A little piece of my heart goes brittle and breaks off when I see two cars parked by my "secret" access point on #5 (PB always drove his truck back off the main road where it couldn't be seen), or when I see those little cartoon fishers on a sign where you used to see nothing but pines and poison oak. But then again, every time I get a little love from my old friends, still swimming fine under the increased flows, a healing process takes place:
