Tuttle Creek Campground
Looking south:
Looking north:
New Stone Foundation for Trailer!
My wooden Santa Fe travel trailer, built in the late 1960s, is literally falling apart. While I was driving up the access road to Tuttle Creek Campground, I had to slag it over high, angled speed bumps that caused extreme side-to-side lurching of my rusted-springs-and-no-shocks trailer, which busted loose its last splintering fragments of stability, and the bottom fell out the backend and dragged its aluminum-alloy skirt in the dirt up a guttered fifty yards of dirt road to what will be its final campsite.
Dry rot had splintered out the buttress-like armature that holds the side wall up over the wheel well, and so the wall was slowly sagging down outside the tire to the ground. My stove was attached to this wall, not resting on the floor as you would suppose, and is now bulging out the side as the wall slips down. The stove top tilts, so my pots and pans kinda roll off the burners a bit.
Ramshackled! But it still keeps me dry and warm and out of the wind in the late storms of April this year, and it is home and comfy in a very beautiful area. The down-slope gusts from the Sierras shake it like a terrier shakes a rag doll, but so far it hasn't stumbled off its pins, its stabilizers.
I have shored its corners up with piles of stones, but when it leaves this site (and it has to leave Tuttle by the end of October) it will ride out on a flatbed. Where this flatbed is coming from I do not yet know, but rumor has it that a non-profit in Ridgecrest will haul away old trailers to fix up for low-income housing. One local said just leave it on a side street with a "FREE" sign, or call a rancher who will pick it up for bunk housing during roundup.
So I must be buying another trailer this year -- am looking for an up-to-date fiberglass model with a genuine 3-way refrigerator, indoor plumbing, and maybe even an awning. But this little beach shack on tires has been my home for four years and it will be hard to let it go.
Dry rot had splintered out the buttress-like armature that holds the side wall up over the wheel well, and so the wall was slowly sagging down outside the tire to the ground. My stove was attached to this wall, not resting on the floor as you would suppose, and is now bulging out the side as the wall slips down. The stove top tilts, so my pots and pans kinda roll off the burners a bit.
Ramshackled! But it still keeps me dry and warm and out of the wind in the late storms of April this year, and it is home and comfy in a very beautiful area. The down-slope gusts from the Sierras shake it like a terrier shakes a rag doll, but so far it hasn't stumbled off its pins, its stabilizers.
I have shored its corners up with piles of stones, but when it leaves this site (and it has to leave Tuttle by the end of October) it will ride out on a flatbed. Where this flatbed is coming from I do not yet know, but rumor has it that a non-profit in Ridgecrest will haul away old trailers to fix up for low-income housing. One local said just leave it on a side street with a "FREE" sign, or call a rancher who will pick it up for bunk housing during roundup.
So I must be buying another trailer this year -- am looking for an up-to-date fiberglass model with a genuine 3-way refrigerator, indoor plumbing, and maybe even an awning. But this little beach shack on tires has been my home for four years and it will be hard to let it go.
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