Creek Camp
Spring Camping on National Forest land during lockdown. Finding the snow line. Low Bridge!
Creek Camp
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Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast recorded on May 6, 2020. How’s it going? Thanks a lot for tuning into this episode, I’m catching up on sun, national forest land right now about cold Creek in an area, kind of outside of where I’m living in Oregon. And it’s gone pretty well, we’re having a good day, I’m just here by myself. So I’m doing a solo camping trip. It’s the first solo night out I’ve done this year, and I’m excited to be doing it. I think it’s gonna be kind of cool. It’s been fun. So far too. It’s been,
it’s been pretty mellow. I’m out here at my campsite, I got my recording gear, rigged up and I’m at the tailgate of my truck, and made a fire earlier in the fire rank. And it’s a pretty clear night, pretty mellow weather seems kind of cold up here. It’s sort of a mountain. And I think it’s close-ish to the snow level. But still a few. It’s still a bit above me, I drove up to it earlier. So earlier, when I was coming in, I left at about noon today. And I took off and drove to town up into the forest and then up kind of on this meandering Forest Service road. And you think right now that you know, maybe a lot of stuff would be empty or or you’re not in a lot of use. But really, when I got out here, I noticed a good bit of traffic, it’s a nice day, it’s May, it’s may 6. So I bet people are kind of getting out and and just kind of given the environment that we’re in right now where people don’t get to, or you know, that are just kind of stuck at home or they didn’t they’re not at work or something, they’re probably the for the first time, you know, a lot of free time for a lot of these people do. So it seems like this area here. As soon as I got to the region that you could camp, it was full of campers, I was noticing that when I was coming up. So there’s an area where I think you have to go at 17 miles up the road before you hit the area where you can begin just camping on the side of the road. And I think that’s that’s probably the spot where the national forest land begins. And before that, I think you’re in a region of BLM land that structured out below there as you get kind of closer down toward the highway. And so this further out, made it through the BLM land, that’s I guess there’s no camping, I think you can do like a lot of day-use area stuff out there a couple campgrounds a past just sort of like Forest Service campgrounds, or BLM campgrounds but sort of a more organized, pull out with the bathroom, those were closed, or you know, there’s like I think one of them at least I saw the picnic area had remained open for day you stuff that you know, you just kind of walked down to the river or something. There was a number of people out by the lake earlier down in the area, I was lower down on the mountain side. And then as I kind of had come up here into the hills, most of this road had been paved. So it’s a pretty commonly used road. And I think I think it goes pretty well, I think it goes all the way through. So if it were clear, you could get from here, or from the side that I was on, I guess it would be kind of the South, the southwest side to the northeast side of the corner of the forest and kind of pop out on the other side of the highway. And when I was driving through earlier, I’d gone just a bit further than where I am now. And I traveled up uphill a bit more and it kind of started getting windy. And then I started noticing a little bit of snow in the shade your spots the the north facing slopes and stuff. And then after a little bit further, it was pretty crazy. It was it was probably a couple It must have been a couple 100 downed trees that had come come down through the road. And so the truck had come through so far. And just cut out a small route, you know, just cut out maybe eight feet of the tree there. So you could get a vehicle through investment more than that. But it was just enough to kind of squeeze a truck through, but really the the posts of the logs are still just kind of sticking out strewn across, like toothpicks. What was that like pick up sticks game that you could play? It was kind of like that when they were just kind of like all stacked upon each other. We were just kind of laid out over each other all the way up this road. And I go over or go under a couple low bridges to you know, we have to like skirt around to the side that you know the tree was still just hung all the way across the road or hadn’t been cut down. I think it was too high. I’m not even sure if it was a forest service truck that did some of this seems like it must have been given the effort. But it just seems like they just started or they haven’t really got around to finishing the work. I don’t know maybe maybe the snow had just melted up at that high of an elevation but as I gotten just a little bit further up the way I saw, I saw like the road was just packed out in snow and there was a couple tire tracks that had gone in about four feet and then backed out and twisted around. And then I guess come back the other way so it seemed like I’d seen a couple cars come from that way and I guess they just turned around before I did you know but it was good. I travel all the way up there and checked out a couple spots out man it was there was a spot where there’s there’s this man I I would hate to have to be the person or the engineering crew that was putting in bridges out in these really rural areas. I look at some of these engineering projects, you know, just like steep, steep cliff sides, really. And then they have to reinforce this wall.
And then build like a bridge out over it too. But there’s this area that I was passing, and I must have been a couple of years ago, or whatever it was, but they built a new bridge sense. But the old bridge, the bridge that used to be there for years, I guess had been washed out in a snowstorm or a flood out. And it’s only, you know, 100 yards, down the creek way there. And you just see this, this giant button, not a very large, probably 75 footbridge structure, they’re supposed to cut cut across this creek is just kind of laying out over the rocks downriver. They didn’t go well, hey, there’s a bridge is washed out over there. So it’s a trip. But I’ve seen a few of those things out here in some of the spots of the big rural areas where things get washed out. And it takes a couple couple years for them to kind of reestablish whatever was over there. So I don’t know. But it was cool, I took a took a couple photos of it. I’ve been trying to take some photos of this Creek area here. And it’s cool, there’s a lot of a lot of nice river rock and stuff at the base of it and a lot of fresh snowmelt too. So the water looks really really green, or you know, just kind of that pure kind of Emerald and
aqua blue look that you can get to some of this mountain water that’s up here in the Cascades really pretty really fresh,
really crisp kind of kind of area. I noticed though this region as opposed to others, is maybe a little drier in its it’s kind of forested climate, how is that see I’m in the area that should be pretty mossy and stuff. So maybe I’m not sure what I’m talking about is interesting. There’s just different regions of the environment as you kind of go through areas Oregon, but even though this is a pretty forested area, some of these areas real near here are real lush and wet and or they just have you know, kind of a lot, a lot going on in that manner. This is really a little bit more arid of an area, but it’s a nice forest area, it’s it’s a big area to I think just a ways up, there’s a wilderness area and a couple trailheads that’d be cool, but I bet they’re kind of snowed in now given the elevations. So we’ll see if all my plans come together, but as it was, for the most part, it was to travel out and to try and get some some photo stuff done some photo work, I’m trying to do more on the side of, you know, just kind of like creating stuff that I’m really interested in, you know, like the photos that I really want to get to, I’m going to try and put those together and and kind of put those out is you know, a little publishing pieces and stuff in there. But that’s really my main focus is trying to work on the the images and the art stuff that it really wants you right now and not Man, what a great time to so I just you know, with a lot of things kind of shut down. It’s really unfortunate for a lot of people that have a lot of their primary activities kind of shut down. But as it is, you know, a lot of the stuff I want to do is just related to self publishing, there’s really no one telling me what I can’t do, or you know what I have to stop doing. And so I really appreciate the the kind of flexibility and man if there’s just there’s just a lot of opportunity right now, which is kind of what I’m excited about, you know, it’s it’s sort of a reset for a lot of people to kind of come back in and figure out what they were doing before and what kind of stuff they want to be doing. And I still want to be doing the same things, just a lot of a lot of media creation stuff. And a lot of, you know, photography, publishing, but what’s cool about now is you just it kind of shakes things out a little bit, you get to you get to kind of focus on it if you think that’s what you need to focus on with your time because man, things can change real fast. Things that you think we’re really stable, maybe won’t be the way the earth is, you know, the way the world is the way society is. might seem real strong, but maybe things can kind of change up on you real fast too. So it’s it’s been maybe a little bit of a lesson for a lot of people. Oh, people aren’t, aren’t too worried or too, too afraid. individually. There’s a lot of a lot of circumstances where maybe that’s more appropriate, but here in the Oregon area, it’s nice that I apparently the the stats for the virus stuff are going down I think there’s no new cases reported was I think a recent headline, I was looking at the county stats that I’m in so it’s been holding steady at 39 cases reported and two deaths in the in the county I’m and that was from early in April that had been kind of kind of set so looks good for our rural area. And I’m hoping that it’s going that way for many of the other county areas that exist out there in the United States too. But as it is, yeah, getting out and trying to work around what I’m what I’m learning from the US Fish and Wildlife Department. So I went to the Oregon website for the Oregon fish and wildlife. And that’s trying to understand a little bit about what was going on with the regulations right now. And what was clear was open. I think in the last podcast that I mentioned that things are more open. And really, in a lot of ways, they are it’s really cool. In Oregon, there’s a lot of flexibility. And probably in most states there’s there’s still a lot of flexibility. Even in lockdown an essential activity is you know, is outdoor activity or is still qualified as it so you can’t go to trailhead, you can’t go to campgrounds, again, go to parks, or national parks, or state parks, right, but you can go or state land, right? I don’t know. But you can go to BLM land, you can go to national forest land, you can go to a number of these trail areas. And what’s fortunate about a lot of the area in the western states is most of these western states, it’s like 50% public lands. So there’s still a lot of regions that are that are publicly accessible, a lot of opportunity to be by yourself, or you know, there’s, there’s not gonna be a lot of crowds around as it is. So not a lot of risk out there, which is cool. And given Yeah, that’s a lot of the stuff that I want to be be trying to get out. It’s a great time of year to be doing it, we’re coming into the pocket of the springtime here in May. I think we’re still coming through like a few more of the last rainstorms that are well, I don’t know, it’s this area, this is region of the world kind of gets a lot of that through June, it seems.
I’m hoping we can avoid that. But we got a pretty nice spring so far. Oh, but I hope it turns around a little bit, or kind of kicks in kicks in a little bit more, but we’ve had a few rainstorms just last couple weeks, and it’s kind of a dampening the interest I’ve had and running out and trying to camp and stuff some, as I’m sure as it starts getting nicer, probably everybody’s going to be itching to get outside more and more, especially the folks that are that have been kind of cooped up in apartment areas or more densely populated regions of of urban centers, but it’s great being out here, in a big campsite area, I got a nice view, I got to drive around forever out here to to find a good spot to camp. So there’s, there’s plenty of spots, there’s also like I was saying a good crowd too, you know, so just about every every one of these areas. And as a firing, it has someone camping out it, you know, all the way up the creek, there’s a lot of spots like that. So that’s really not my favorite kind of environment for this circumstance, you know, I’m not really doing like, I don’t know, ultimate camping experience kind of trips right now, but, but I am trying to get to some locations that are good to take some photographs of. And so if I need to, like you know, just camp out for, you know, in whatever location for a couple hours and then wake up real early and take off and go to the spot that I need to go. That’s pretty functional. But even still, I really like to have some more space and get to kind of set up the camp the way I want to. And that’s really the great benefit of trying to go to an area like BLM land or national forest land where you can really kind of do that and you have a few more your own rules that you can make and follow like you know, I set up a fire here and a fire ring. And I gathered my wood out here and I’ve got no one around me really there’s there’s some folks down the road here. There’s a junction, and then you can kind of take another another road off and head down the hills uphill right now, you can head down the hillside toward the creek. And there’s I think a pole out over there where there’s a there’s a group of probably five or six it seems like five or six-four by four trucks. Some young guys probably my age are a little younger probably out travel around with the time off that they have to, but it looks fun. Yeah, taking off for about four and around.
I heard him rallying around out here before sunset. It was funny. Doing some donuts. The yeah but I just just before I started this podcast, there was a there’s a guy and like a white
like a white Sierra that had cruised up now as a ram. I’m pretty sure yeah, yeah, cruised up the main road here and then yeah, just like pulled off onto the road that I’m camping on. I came back here a couple 100 couple 100 meters and swung into the big area I’m camping out in and and then it rode that kind of cruises by and so took off. It’s a remote one though there’s not enough destroyed dead ends. And dead ends just two minutes up this road or something I went up there first when I was checking it out seeing what was around here, seeing if it opened up anymore, further up the way but really just kind of pulls up to like a ravine, that’s the straw that’s been pulled out by a creek and then it kind of follows a sort of steep contour up into some sort of thick remote on prepared logging road sort of stuff up there. And I’m still I’m still kind of taking it easy. So you know, I don’t need to get into that right now. I think I’m fine. So I cruise back down here to this, this nice open spot with the view and got I got a wide-open view to my South Sea seems pretty south. Yeah, it’s pretty south and it goes off a bit, and then you can see like a ridge that’s up on top of the mountain. Out in the distance. It’s kind of cool, you know, just kind of this this kind of these rolling cascade hills that are out there and a lot of forested land and be up at the top of it. You can kind of See this outcrop a rock. And as that kind of draws down this, this kind of Creek collects and then comes down to the main Creek over here. Cool area. It’s nice and it’s really pretty. I think right now. I think I see the moonlight coming up. It’s cast and light onto the trees up in front of me I see this more headlights. Nada, it’s the moon. Well, I think I see Venus out here. I think I see my fire going low. So that’s good news, I waited till just about dark, and then using up all my firewood that I gathered. That’s cool. It’s not a big deal. It’s Yeah, there’s this area, I think the spot that I’m in specifically was like, I think I’ve been logged out. In fact, as I’m looking up the hill, I see like that was locked out at some time. And this area that I’m at was was is flat, it was logged and then flattened out back out when they’re putting this road in. However it is. So there’s a big, there’s a big pile just just down here of whether it comes through some years ago and cleared out a bunch of brush and stacked it up in a pile over there. And so I just got walked over there and pulled out some some dry sticks they’ve been they’ve just been dried out over there for years. So they’re seasoned and ready to go. And they they pretty small. Probably probably like about I don’t know, a little bit thicker around than your thumb and no bigger than, you know, the thickness of a wrist or something around as a stick. So I just gathered up a bunch of those. And I’m throwing them onto the fire here.
I used some old dried up Fern earlier that’s trying to get the fire started. I just had like crappy sticks, and some of them are still kind of dewy and stuff. Just kind of from from sitting around. And you know, it rained a bunch yesterday, I think it rained on me earlier when I was driving around to so that wood wasn’t wet and it’s dried out pretty well. But it just isn’t small enough. And I got a gun through I was learning this, this tactic called feather sticks. Do you guys heard of that it’s like a bushcrafting term, I hate that word; I prefer like camping or hunting or something like that. But in the world of bushcrafting, which I’m sure you can YouTube, there’s, this is actually a really brilliant idea. And a lot of that stuff is great to have generating the skills that you’d need to run to manage yourself in the outdoors. And think kind of the thinking behind it is the more that you know about how to work with your environment, the less gear you need to carry with you and and really the more apt you are to make proper choices in a short period of time that will help you out. So that’s that’s really helpful. So you know, just kinda like having fire building skills or knowing what to do and how to set up camp or how to run a tarp or how to get water, all that sort of stuff. Anyway, in this case, you take some of these sticks that I’m talking about some of these drier ones, you take your knife, your sturdy bushcraft knife, that people still like to talk about anything, you take around 24 inches of that stick, and kind of break them down at 24 inches or so. And then we’re supposed to do is take that knife and sort of what would it be like kind of like peeling a potato or something or like you know, if you got to like kind of peel a carrot, what do you want to do is kind of start at the top. And then you want to peel into it, you kind of cut in with the knife just a little bit and then run a slice that down all the way down to the the end of the bar. But you don’t you don’t slice off that flake of wood that you’ve been pulling up, you can make it pretty thin, too. It’s called feather sticks for a reason, right. So you try and kind of make it like a thin strip of wood that’s kind of pulled up from it. And the wood will just kind of naturally curl upon itself. As you chop on it, it takes a lot of getting used to you kind of have to get to get to get the hang of trying to get those feather pieces down, you have to hold it onto the stick itself. So you cut down all the way to the last like two inches or so of the wood and then you leave it. And so what happens is I used to cut, you kind of rotate the wood and you cut down, rotate the wood and cut down. And so you get after doing that for a while. It’s just a bunch of these real thin flakes of wood that are all gathered up at the top end of this stick, and then you have a nice dry piece of kindling, that sort of work down next to it. And so what you do is people that a lot of bushcrafting and camping stuff is just doing a lot of preparation and a lot of work that sort of seems like man should roll lighter. Or you know, jetabroad some newspapers or something that would have done more. But if you’re in a bushcraft and yeah, it’s one of those things you can do if you have nothing, nothing around. But yeah, you make these feathers sticks, and they’re good fire starting material if you get the right wood that’s that’s drying, if you can kind of run down and you get these plumes of these this kind of saw or Masada is but these little like plumes of wood flakes and they’ll they’ll burn up real quick when you get when you get a fire going on them. But what I did for this one, oh the other fire tip. What was the one I heard? Cotton balls and Vaseline. here that’s that’s like the fire starter ticket because it’s pretty, pretty neutral. You can use the Vaseline for a couple different things and the cotton balls too but that petroleum jelly. That petroleum jelly that makes up the Vaseline will rock a fire and the cotton too. So yeah, you just take a cotton swab from the bathroom, Vaseline you put that in like a Ziploc bag, and then you pack That into one of the pockets of your backpack. And you can get a fire going with a lot of stuff, or you can get the base of a fire gun with a lot of stuff like that would work great even with the gun was like a flint Flint rod. I can’t remember what the other word is for it. But those Flint rods that you strike and then you run a spray sparks onto instead you can do that I always bring a lighter a couple lighters with a gun in my pocket right now. But those are really easy fire starter tools where you can light that you got a good flame going for a sustained amount of time running out the petroleum jelly and the cotton and then you can stack smaller twigs and sticks and stuff on it, and then run bigger branches on that really quickly. And that that helps out a lot. In my case, I didn’t know that I had a couple couple napkins from lunch. And I had some Fern that I spotted over here, and it had died out. And so there’s these these dried out fronds of Fern leaves over I don’t know about 50 feet over here under the side of the road.
So I went over there with my knife, and I cut down a couple handfuls of those, I came back over to the fire I laid out a better the smaller sticks at the base. And then I stacked in a bunch of the dried Fern is a bad there. And then I put some of the strips of paper towel that I had balled up in a section there and then I stacked up kind of a little fork like a little lean-to four of some of the smaller sticks and then had some of the bigger sticks are ready to go but lit up the the what was it the paper towel and a couple in like two spots is what I tried to lift paper towel in two spots with the lighter. And then real quickly, I just kind of held over the ferns was dried ferns and they lit up real fast here. So that was a great fire started piece. And that cuts you know cuts a big flame really quickly. And then I put that over it. And then that kind of got the lower ferns sort of burn and and some of the sticks go in and then I threw on those smaller twigs over. And then that cut through the bigger sticks on there. So dropped a couple logs on there. I was kind of scavenging them from some of the other firings that I was passing along the way, even though I’d gone out. What was it a couple, I don’t know, it’s probably a month or so ago now, and I collected a good bit of firewood up in some of the areas outside of where I was working at. And yeah, I’d kind of drive around and if I see like some some downed, dried out wood on the road, I’d throw it in the back of the truck and I brought it home and I cut it up and then I stacked it up. And so some of its guys seasoning out now we’ve got a little fire pit at home that we’re kind of we’re kind of using it with but I was gonna bring some of that some of the twigs and some of the kindling that I had and then I forgot about it and didn’t bring any firewood with me which is fine to know. You know, it’s cool. Really almost anytime I’ve gone out camping in the past I’ve never brought firewood with me even probably at times I should have or you know places that you’re not supposed to scavenge firewood or that it’s been so used that there’s just no firewood in any capacity left to scavenge. batch Where was that? is in Wyoming? Yeah, I was in Wyoming, we were traveling, we were camped out at a spot. And cabbages go through there. We were in September. So I’m sure that he has been in constant use from, you know, April until the end, right. You know, it’s just been constant use. And it’s been like that for the last 100 years. Or how long, you know, we’re not the first but in that in that area out there, there just been nothing available to burn. So all the all those flammable resources has been collected by other other kindling hunters in the past. And it’s kind of interesting to see how that goes. So we kind of had to be resourceful, and we had to kind of figure out how to gather enough stuff. But we did pretty well you know, like, we kind of go to like pine needles and pine cones, sometimes those those were pretty well are often pretty dry, and will burn well enough, they’re not going to be a sustaining fire, they’re not going to really like get up embers go into the degree that you can really cook on an effective way but, but you can’t cook on it, I mean, you can get some stuff going and in some other ways you can get you know enough of a fire gun that you can you can get a log on. So that’s that’s normally what I would have is you know, you have like one or two good logs that can kind of keep things kicking for the evening. But to get that going, you need to you need to have some smaller stuff. And normally that day, you just don’t find where you show up because you can’t be here there’s gonna be sticks around, so you try and gather that stuff up. But man, if it’s a busy area, that stuff will have been scavenged shoot, but that’s not my problem now. So I’m, I’m loaded up on some firewood and I got to get better coals go and that I can get this stuff set rockin with. But it’s cool being out here in the canopy, sitting out of this campsite, run into fire for a little bit. That’s kind of nice. I was trying to do some writing stuff. I got my journal open over here, and I’m trying to kind of sketch out some of the ideas that I want to do for some publishing stuff. I’ll get into that some some future podcasts are always always talking about it too soon. And I’m like, maybe that ideal change. But But yeah, I’m trying to sketch out some new stuff for what I want to do through the through the rest of the spring and the summer and stuff but probably a good bit more of this kind of thing. It’d be kind of fun. I’m looking forward to doing a bit more of this stuff. What was the other thing I had, I gotta turn my headlamp on?
Oh, yeah, my phone is definitely out now. You Stoke it,
I think I’m gonna have to run down to that area, or that, you know, that’s this, this was at that setup, bunch of dried out sticks that are kind of down the way for me, when I have to walk down there, read my headlamp, try to figure out if I can, if I can pull some firewood up and get this thing going again. But also, I might not have to it’s, it’s late enough, I could probably kick just kick out whatever embers I have here to keep me warm for a bit and then stack myself up in the truck, try and sleep it off for a couple hours. And I’m hoping to get up early in the morning. And get back out of here and try and do a couple couple morning based photography things if I’m able to on the drive, and I tried to scout out a couple locations, sort of by our lakes side down here to try to check out so there’s sort of this, this Creek area and then that ultimately ends up running into I think it’s a reservoir really, but this, this, this reservoir area down the way and that had some some stuff that I wanted to try and work out. And along with this creek to this creek is pretty cool. So there’s a few pull outs here that I want to try and do some some under the water. Rock stuff are you know, kind of I guess just sort of like working with flowing water. And then also working with some still water. So yeah, I was hoping to do a couple, a couple photography endeavors down there before it got too late in the morning. And if I’m just kind of hanging out camp, and maybe that’ll be the case, but also not in a super hurry. Or at least a Subaru to get completely back what what’s beautiful about this camp setup is I don’t I don’t have anything pulled out now. It’s awesome. I just have it all in this canopy. It’s all in the truck, which is kind of great. It’s sort of returning to what I was doing originally in the Camry way back, you know, when we kind of figured out that that is great to have, you know, your tat and your other camp stuff when you’re running backpacks or run into a real campsite. But in certain in some and search and in many situations, having a car that you can have set up to crash out in is a great thing and just saves a ton of time and ton of kind of confusion or frustration about how to set stuff up or what’s going to make a good campsite or what’s going to be effective or not. So in this case, yeah, I just feel I got got my sleeping bag got my my cooler and stuff set up here in the back of the truck bed canopy. And then yeah, it’s it’s pretty similar to maybe probably the best ad set up. And the four runner back in the day when I was camping out living out of that thing for a while. So yeah, it’s cool, kind of kind of returning to some of the stuff that I liked a lot. I think some of the last times I was camping out by myself. Well, I camp out by myself, you’re in there and we do photo stuff. But really a lot of it’s just with Marina and I when we’re traveling around together, do photo photo trips. But I remember I was kind of going back to it while longer one that I did back in I think it was 2012 when I took off, or I don’t know, it was probably three weeks or something like that. And I was just kind of slowly kind of turn through some regions of Oregon,
like Crater Lake and through some of those, I guess like the robe, and Klamath national forest areas and stuff. Yeah, it’s kind of cruising through there and go into a number of different spots. I think I spent like, four days ever by the Umpqua hot springs. And I think that’s when they were still open. And maybe maybe now it’s changed. But I think that they’ve been closed for a few years now to overnight camp. And because of the amount of abuse that occurred out there, just abuse to the land, and abuse to whatever kind of social contract had been unstructured. But I think people have kind of turned that to a pretty freaky party spot after a bit there. So they had like that a dumpster for you know, public, public use of refuse, but it was always and often overflowed. And just just, I think they only picked it up like once a week or once every two weeks. But man, that thing would just be overflowed with trash, and trash stacked around and trash stacked at the campsite and broken glass of the campsite and broken glass at the hot springs. And they just said, Hey, no more, no more overnight stuff out here. So super, that kind of management has to go into, but that’s the tough thing about some of these spots, these individual places that are really cool. Just kind of, I guess kind of getting too much attention by a certain segment of the general public that just doesn’t have a respect for the the use of the public land out here. So it’s frustration sometimes when when you lose some of the access to some of these these cool spots, you know, some of these draws like oh, yeah, I do want to go to that hot spring that’s a you know, just an old-timey open place. It’s cool areas just been rides, it’s hot water coming into the ground. It hasn’t just happened. So it’s really cool that you can kind of go to a place like that, but the Cuz it’s a draw, because it’s a piece of attention that that would be sort of a site to go to, then it ends up ultimately just getting shut down. That’s kind of a frustration sometimes. But it was cool. Yeah, back in the day in 2012. I camped out there for like, four, four days or something like that. And then I travel around to the day, go to a couple different spots, go to some different waterfall waterfall areas around there, do some photograph. Once you do photography, a token he falls Watson falls, I think was over there. Those are beautiful waterfalls in that area. And then I go back to the hot springs campgrounds area where I had a camp set up. And I think it was Yeah, sleeping in the Camry in the back of the camera. And then I had some stuff set up outside of it, I take a hike out at night, and I got to the hot springs and stuff and hang out there for a while and then cruise back to my car. Yeah, it’s a good time, kind of just being out there by yourself thinking about stuff happen, people, sometimes they you know, but really, you’re just kind of there by yourself, or there’s not a lot of other, you know, public around and stuff. That’s a weird thing dealing with the public or what is internet dealing with some other people when you’re out in the woods, it’s always kind of freaky, even here, you know, like, what back right before I started this thing, I was gonna start it. And then I heard a truck. And then like, I was saying that truck guy came up, pulled up, went up this road here and then swung around and came back a couple minutes later. But even that, you know, it’s an innocent trip or just someone looking around. But it’s still weird. It’s like, who’s this guy at nine o’clock at night that’s driving by me and a truck happened earlier to I think some of those guys that are down low are they one of them came up and was I think just kind of check out this area up here didn’t know I was up here, but came up this road. And then like kind of swung or like, hooked up in the parking lot. Or the the area that I’m in here, where I’m camped where the road is wide and he flipped around and then took off and stuff cuz I’m up here, I guess. But it’s just like, Hey, dude, I know you don’t mean anything. And I guess this is the only thing that can’t happen. But what’s going on one other guy out here where I have no cell service. Man, yeah, there’s some characters out here to some time. So. So yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. It’s not a park, it’s not really well managed. When you’re out here in the woods. And man, sometimes people aren’t really well managed. So
you just kind of it’s, it’s cool to have to be sharp on what, what, what’s going around what people are around what’s going on stuff. So but it’s find out here. I’ve never really had a bad interaction. But it’s always just sometimes maybe tense is sort of what you’d say you never communicate really. And maybe sometimes it’s just paranoia. I’m sure people are fine and nice and stuff. But there is sort of a code out there. out in Eastern Oregon, I remember when I was a kid, you got to do some camping trips out there. And, and you think a small town of 30,000 people really isn’t, isn’t a populace. But even in that, you’re kind of enculturated to a regular set of systems that are sort of similar to what what a city is or what a suburban area is. And so that’s sort of what I grew up in. But once you get out pretty fine to you know, some of that rangeland stuff, or in some some of that area where it’s just public land. And there’s not many people around, there’s sort of an old high desert wave that you get, it’s like old Ranger way, but is that when two trucks are driving by each other and opposite directions, you kind of give a little hand up, you don’t really move it, you just kind of lifted up off the steering wheel, like a salute. And then you put it back down. And it’s just sort of saying like, Hey, I’m a good guy out there. So yeah, I may I guess, I suppose to instill trust that even though that’s the only other person that you’ve seen in a day, they’re not after you, you know, you’re safe. You’re you’re on the same team or something. So I don’t know what it was really about. But maybe just old high desert politeness, I suppose. So yeah, my plans are I’m going to I’m going to cooped up here and camp out and then cruise out to find some stuff to photograph in the morning. I’m hoping to do hoping to cite some wildlife out here. I brought the binoculars and maybe I’ll get get a chance to see some stuff or maybe see some sign if something’s out here, but but not too sure. I think I’m not gonna get off the road very far in this circumstance. So best I might see some birds or I don’t know, two people. That’s my life. But yeah, I’m gonna head down to the lake in the morning early and try and maybe get some photographs down there. I’m trying to do some stuff around water on this trip water and some color and stuff, but really, it’s just kind of materializing. However, I wanted to I’m not really trying to hold myself to seriously structured any one specific thing because really ultimately, like any of those limiting or what would be like kind of those confining limitations that you’d set on yourself to do photography. They’re just not really in line with any The projects that I’m interested in really working on, you know, so really interested in just trying to make photographs that sort of represent myself the best. And I’m trying to kind of figure that out in a good way to, you know, a lot of people kind of make pictures to what would it be, I don’t know, fit, fit the need of work or fit the need of a style that they’ve seen sort of a thing, you know, trying to like, oh, okay, I need to match the style and kind of work with it. But really what I’m trying to do now, I think, pasts are coming through onto the other side of that the 10 year mark of taking some of the work that I do on photography pretty seriously. And so with that, I’m kind of trying to move into Well, what what is Billy want to do with this, you know, what is the thing that, that my interest is drawn toward, instead of trying to make some kind of
some kind of what I think should work sort of thing, I really want to try and go to just what I am interested in, I think that that position of interest is really going to be where I’m going to make the best work that I can, instead of trying to figure out, you know, what other people think I should do, or, or trying to follow the directions of people that really haven’t thought about these things as hard as I have, which is certainly the circumstance that probably any creative person has found themselves in for years now, you know, trying to follow the direction of someone who’s, who’s your boss, or your director, or your project manager, who really hasn’t ever spent any time actually participating in the, the actual process of the art that you do, you know, and I bet that that’s the circumstance probably as old as time. But people kind of move through it. And it’s sort of a signup process, what would you call it, it’s a phase, it’s a phase. It’s a phase, it’s kind of just, you know, how it is for a while, and then and then someday, you’re the old guy telling people what to do, and things you don’t understand. So I bet it’s just kind of the what the lifecycle, you know, part of the lifecycle. So good times, but my fire is now pretty completely out, see the embers burn in there. But I think that’s gonna be where I call it for this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. I appreciate you guys for listening, SAS, and people tune in to the last one. So that’s cool. I want to try and build out a few more of these and having fun recording mobily and recording up in the studio in the loft at home. That’s been a lot of fun, too. So hoping to try and get some more of these podcasts out on my website. That’s Billy Newman photo calm. And I’ve done a rebuild on that one looking a bit cleaner. Links are going to actual websites now you know, any of that stuff that was kinda like, Oh, that’s a dead link, or Oh, that’s not
filled out or
this isn’t. This isn’t where it should be. Those kinds of things have been sort of rearranged and, you know, kind of edited down and changed some of the text out and stuff. So I’m trying to make it fresh. Got a lot of time for it. You know, man, this COVID stuff. It’s like Alright, well, I’ll rewrite my website code. How about how about that? So I did that. And then yeah, now I got a jam. I got to go out, taketake some photos and stuff. So I’m happy to be out here. taking some pictures. These are just regular ones. I got to go through a bunch of 360 ones too. That’ll be cool. But yeah, good times. I do a photo stuff camping out by myself. Thanks for keeping me company. Have a good one.