Pacific Creat Trail - Days 122-123 - Burney

It was hilarious to find a Bonanza Casino shirt in the laundry clothes bins. We used to play $3 blackjack there until late late and pay for $5.99 steak and eggs with comps from losing our asses or winnings.

We had high hopes for the relaxation potential of the pool at the Burney Mountain Guest Ranch for weeks leading up to arriving that didn’t come to fruition :/

A thunderstorm rolled in and our relaxing afternoon by the pool turned into scrambling for a place to shelter for the night, which turned into a (thankfully, long unoccupied) barn stall.

Oh well, back to trail and on to Burney Falls.

These were brand new blue shoes a few before.

A single tree encapsulates all of American history and then some. We are not important. Our stuff is not important.

If you want to feel something, go look up how vast old growth forests used to be across the western United States 160 years ago. In northern Nevada and California, forest ecosystems that existed well before human history were clear cut and destroyed in a single decade to facilitate mining and greed.

We pretend like the relatively recently regrown forests (well, the ones that aren’t scorched) we have today are the same thing because trees. If you’ve had the pleasure of walking through one of the very few acres of old growth forest remaining, you know it’s not even close.

The FDR Great Depression Era Civilian Conservation Corps was responsible for building the infrastructure that facilitated access to your favorite places in America. We don’t fund these efforts anymore. We fund cops, bombs, rent seeking land owners, and corruption instead. It’s not like your average American gets out of the car anyway.

We gratefully dodged a big thunderstorm under the pergola at Burney Falls.