Story Time: For about 20 years, as all my kids were growing up I would take them camping in this canyon that I had been camping at since I was 1 year old. It’s a beautiful canyon with a wonderful river. Feeding that river is a super cold mountain creek (it’s actually a river, just called a creek for some reason). Along that cold mountain creek is an old trail that gold miners used to have claims on. My grandfather had a gold claim up there and my father still has several ounces of gold nuggets from that claim.
Anyway, when the kids I would camp, we would always go hiking up that dangerous, narrow and sometimes slippery trail. There are parts where you could fall off and slide down 100 feet to the river if you were not careful. When the kids were really little we would have them all attached on a rope line just in case.
We would like for a couple of hours to get to Lefty’s place, which was another miner who was a friend of my grandpa’s. They still talk about Lefty in the town just down the river. We go to Lefty’s and not my grandpa’s claim because Lefty built his house out of loose rocks so half the walls still are somewhat there. Grandpa’s claim is totally gone.
Halfway up the trail we would stop at the highest point in the trail, with a 300 foot cliff overlooking the river below. On that cliff were two twisted pine trees with their trunks curved up so that you could lean back on them over the cliff. The kids always loved doing that (and giving me a heart attack).
That point we dubbed Salami point because when we stopped there I would always bring a baguette, a hard salami, and a block of pungent cheese (sometimes sharp cheddar, or a bleu cheese). We would all sit there and I would carve out hunks of meat cheese and baguette and we would munch on the best picnic up in the fresh air of the mountains.