Eldorado National Forest

Yeah, kind of slips through the cracks too.

Well, I remember hearing from folks who I talked to about the Caldor fire, which happened the following year in the National Forest, the El Dorado National Forest.

And there was general consensus that even the logs that were being, the areas that had been, that were under active, you know, logging, salvaging, cutting, thinning, Um, they were laying along the roads, but there were no sawmills to take them to because many of the sawmills had been closed down.

That was the case in 2020, huh? Yeah,

Yeah.

Bassi Falls is in El Dorado National Forest, Crystal Basin, and the Forest Service specifically describes the forest hiking and camping areas as bear, as a bear habitat.

Yeah.

The broader Sierra Nevada holds roughly 40% of California's black bears.

And everybody knew their neighbors and helped each other out.

So really a very beautiful location just surrounded by El Dorado National Forest lands.

So when the Caldor Fire reached the community, what happened?

Well, the fire, as you noted, started on the 14th of August, five years ago.

It was Diane Hawks, Matt Eyster, John Arns from RTF, and myself.

And we went to Dustin on the El Dorado National Forest side with adopt-a-trail issues anyway, and we presented doing exactly what the RTF did.

And basically building the weatherproof outhouses with an actual porta potty inside and then building a way of pumping them out.

Yeah.

will say, I think out of everybody on all of our trails that we have up in the Sierras, the Sierra Nevadas here, the kind of the extreme rock crawling trails, the rock crawling trails we have, Highlanders do such an amazing job.

At their adopted trail.

And I think that they've, they've created a really, really good relationship with El Dorado National Forest through the work they do on their adopted trail.

Yeah.

So, um, if anybody out there wants to donate toilet paper or 20 bucks to go towards the bathrooms at Barrett Lake, um, which are 100% community funded by the Off Road community.

They're not, um, funded, up-kept at all by El Dorado County, um, or sorry, El Dorado National Forest.

So, um, if anybody, if you're going out there and going wheeling at Barrett Lake and you use those bathrooms, you should donate something towards them.

[laughs]