and down old Blewitt Pass, which then compared unfavorably to our current old McKenzie Pass. Guard rails were unknown, switchbacks innumerable, and the drops off the shoulder mercifully unseen in the dark. To make matters worse, my first trip coincided with the appearance of my older brother's learner's driving permit. My father was giving him a hard and forced lesson on "Compulsive
Truck Passing In The Dark And On Turns", and after the second near miss, I asked to be allowed to retire to the back of the open pickup bed so I didn't have to watch my impending demise. Laying back there in a sleeping bag, trying to remember what few remnants of religious training I still retained, I could still interpret from the jostling and the steady slow acceleration when we were on another suicide mission to pass another truck. Or I could just listen to the yelling in the front seat.
Once one reached Loomis, WA., one then had an option. The wise men bunked out at the base of the mountain and waited for daylight before hitting the track. Nighttime passages were the stuff of whispered legends. Uncle Fred came down off the mountain and back up once in the dark on a booze run, which explained severally why he did it, why he thought he could do it, and possibly why he survived it. In the morning we downed a last breakfast of pancakes at the local diner and then went looking for the road, which was an unmarked track heading off across several pastures and through fence styles straight at the base of looming Chopaka mountain. One could, from a distance, pick out several miles of the thin scar of a track traversing obliquely right to left up the side of the solid granite escarpment, switching back once from the left across the face again to the right edge, and the second killer (literally) switchback to the left again to climb out of sight over the edge of the abrupt
face. The first three miles was "it", the rest of the 15 miles to the campsite was, so to speak, downhill, an unimproved two wheel track that occasionally crossed dry riverbeds where one could high center, and in one stretch even climbed straight up through the boulder strewn dry creek channel.
At the base of the mountain we stopped for the ritual of putting the rig into four wheel drive. In those days it took two people about 15 minutes, and at least two back ups to get the gears to mesh. The driver hauled and yanked at the four wheel drive shifter and feathered the clutch until it finally slammed into place, then repeated the whole process with the lo range lever, while the outside man tried to flip the old Warn hubs. I felt so guilty last year test driving a Toyota with the 4 wheel button on top of the gear shift that I couldn't bring myself to buy it.
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