Sheepshead Rock Stew

2002 Wildfire Ravaged

The pavement ends two miles west of Decker, Colorado. Highway 211 is a dirt one lane road starts out bumpy and dusty as it cuts a harrowing path along a wicked steep hillside into a region of Pike National Forest that depending upon your destination, of which there are many, could take you to Goose Creek Trailhead.

Once you roll about a mile up the dirt one lane road a broader granite based coarse sand and pebble byway follows the contours of a series of hills and gulches (ignoring the cutoff for Goose Creek Trailhead) and instead take the south fork that cuts a ten-mile path yonder west to Lost Valley Ranch. The road is cursed, consisting most of the way of washboard. For eight miles I could make at best 10 miles per hour. Our primitive campground features the best view in the world of Sheepshead Rock. The passable bumpy road is by most accounts a cure for keeping at bay the insincere and unmotivated.

Sheepshead Campground View

You’ll need patience to roll the length of hell on four-wheel drive earth. With the pandemic affecting our social life the ideal setting would be blessed if it weren’t an easy drive so that we could put all the world’s people a safe distance behind us. Never did expect to be all alone, our self-delusion was that we might just luck out and locate a campsite that wasn’t too full. As our washboard fortune provided for three days, we shared a campground of about 10 acres in size with five other people seeking much the same solitude as we were hoping to find.

Rare Earth by Bottle

Rare chilled French wine from Provence, Cotes de Rhone, and Cahors was provisioned to be shared late afternoon’s along with shade and an almost tolerable group of cedar gnats. The pests nibbled a bit at our bare ankles and to our everlasting gratitude disappeared with breeze and finally at sundown. The pesky gnats were not so awful. I mean I can be just as annoying if not even more according to the volunteers that have been trying to love me these many long years.

No Two Fates the Same

Wine drinking is according to my wife not a right but is rather a privilege earned by getting out of your bunk and spend your day hiking. The steeper the climb, the further you hike, the longer you are giving Mother Nature a shot at reviving your soul, the more likely she will be to grant volunteer’s most challenging partner a lapse in time to enjoy a glass of wine. For the life of me I cannot locate written down in any kind of human inspired operating manual an official codification of this wife wisdom. To my knowledge there is no written law, covenant, or rule. Common sense comes closest to the mark.

Headlong Plunge into the Sheep of the Thing

Now, having polled other potentially sedentary tyrannized by testosterone types it turns out that their partners know the same truth and in every fiber of their being know this rule to be an enforceable by punishment of jawboning.  This is a cosmic immutable truth of camping grounds and hiking trails wherever love and an abundance of hormones are lost or found.

Modern Day Skillet Cooker

Suppers were a one pot affair. Scratch made beans, brown rice, kale, and corn was our main dish. Heart healthy coleslaw was the side dish. Customary to our table we set sriracha and soy sauces out with hummus, olives, and pepperoncini’s. After we have watermelon.

Searching among all the married and near married men I know the answers to these eternal conundrums are much the same, while the quarrelsome details vary from one table to the next this sparring between equals is pretty much how it’s been and always will be for as long as anyone seeking to further a durable bond can get their stubborn mind and fit to be tied temperament around. You will need approximately one million national forest acres of land to give this glass of wine and soul of humanity enough room to breathe.