The Naha is one of my favorite places on Earth and I try to go there several times each year.
Here it is mid-May and I had not been there yet.
I left my slip at 6 AM on Sunday morning, Mother's Day, and headed to the Naha.
I arrived there at about 9 AM. I've been running pretty slowly lately in order to save fuel.
There was only 1 small skiff there, so I had no problem finding room to tie up.
After securing the boat I made a lunch to take with me and packed my day pack for a hike up to Orton Ranch. It is a little over a mile I think up to the ranch. It was owned for many decades by the Baptist Church, but last year it was purchased by KIC, Ketchikan Indian Corporation. I was eager to see if the trail had been maintained at all, and if KIC had done any work on the grounds and the buildings up at the ranch site.
In prior years, before I got officially old, I could make it up to Orton Ranch in about 45 minutes. Now with being old and all, and the trail being in such poor condition I estimated it would take me considerably longer to get up there.
Just a little way up the trail there was a spot that used to be just a sheer rock face that you had to sort of boost yourself over. Sometime while I was gone, living in Gig Harbor, someone must have brought a concrete cutting saw up here and cut that face into steps. It's much easier to get over it now.
A little further up the trail you come to Roosevelt Lagoon. There is a sign there telling about Trumpeter Swans to be seen on the lagoon. That is the same sign that was there when I first came here in the summer of 1978. I'll bet I've been here over 100 times and I've yet to see a swan on the lagoon.
I saw a couple of these along the trail. I'm not certain what they are but I suspect it is some kind of bird house.
These plants are called "Devil's Club," and they are found mostly near creeks and rivers and streams. If you reach out and grab one while busting through the brush, you will certainly carry some of the thorns home with you.
This site looks like the demise of either an eagle or perhaps a large raven. Eagles seem to prefer carrion, already dead prey, but they are definitely predators. I once saw an eagle take out a sea gull on the fly.
I took a photo of this bridge only because it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the structures along the trail. It looks brand new. All the other board walks and bridges are in a state of serious deterioration. But for some reason this particular bridge looks like it was built yesterday.
Last year when I walked this trail there was a group of USFS people on the trail. I chatted with them, and they said they were assessing the trail in order to prepare for necessary repairs. The repairs have clearly not yet been made, however there are survey stakes all along the trail. This gives me hope that perhaps soon, maybe even this season, they will begin making repairs and improvements to the trail.
I did not see any bears or deer on this trip, however there was certainly a lot of "bear sign" along the trail.
At this time of year, the bears are out of hibernation, and their primary source of protein, salmon, are not in the rivers yet. There are also no berries on the bushes at this time of year. So, they scrounge for whatever food they can find. One thing they like to do is to dig up the skunk cabbage and eat the roots. The poor skunk cabbage, the deer eat the leaves, and the bears eat the roots.
As I said, the trail is in terrible condition. There is one spot where someone has taken roughhewn slabs of a tree and placed them down where the boards are supposed to be. It looks a little dicey but was actually pretty solid when I carefully stepped over them.
I took frequent rest stops both on the way up to the ranch, and on the way back to the boat. I had a little visitor on one of my stops.
There were several areas of the trail where trees had been blown down in a storm and had wiped out part of the boardwalk. On some of them it was very difficult for me to get over or around them. I'm not young, strong, or agile anymore.
Here are some shots of the grounds and buildings at Orton Ranch.
When you first emerge from the trees this is what you see of the ranch. The sign which is unreadable in the photo identifies it as Orton Ranch and owned by the Baptist Church. KIC has not changed the sign yet.
This is Dunham Hall, which is the main dining hall and meeting place for the facility. This is the only building on the grounds that has hot water. I've been here for Cub Scout trips and for church retreats and this is where all the people can gather and have a meal or a meeting.
There are several bunk houses on the property, with 2 being to the right of Dunham Hall and another one to the left. The camp can hold a lot of people as these bunkhouses are large. They have running water and real toilets, and large wood stoves for heat.
This is the caretaker's cabin, or at least it used to be. I don't think they even have a caretaker now. I used to go up there so frequently in the past that I got to know the original caretaker Jerry pretty well. The camp has a big generator, but they don't run it all the time, even when there are people on site. Jerry used to have an intricate set of wires and ropes and pulleys set up so that he could start and stop the generator, which is in another small building, without having to leave his cabin.
When I was going up there, we just had a big open fire pit in front of Dunham Hall where everyone gathered in the evenings for a big bonfire. Now they have a real nice, covered area where they can have a nice fire even in the pouring rain.
Man was I beat when I finally made it back to the boat about 3 PM. This getting old stuff is no fun. I don't think I'm going to be able to go back up that trail until it has been repaired. Some of those obstacles along the way almost made me abandon my plan and turn around.
It was such a nice, sunny day that there were a few others on the trail today. There were 2 young women with dogs that passed me along the trail. They had fishing gear and I saw them fishing in front of the ranch grounds. There were 3 young men that came from upriver and had a lot of fishing gear. They stopped to rest in the fire pit covered area. And in the evening after dinner but before dark a couple of small boats came in and some people and kids walked up the trail for a short time before returning to the boats.
That evening there was a mist floating just above the surface of the water. I suspect it came about due to the unusually warm day and the cooling that came with the evening.
Eventually I was alone at the dock for the evening.
There was a beautiful Naha Bay sunset that evening.
The only other event that I would like to note for this posting is something that happened the next day. When we have these warm sunny days there is frequently a fairly brisk NW wind that kicks up during the day. Often it calms down as it gets closer to dark, so my plan for Monday was to hang out in various places, fish when or where that I could, and try to make it back to the harbor just before dark about 8 PM.
It was too windy to fish very much, so I went up into Clover Pass and just shut down the engines to drift for a while and kill some time. I was reading a good book on my Kindle app on my iPad. Every few minutes I would look up and check my location using Clover Island as a reference point. I thought I was drifting NE up into the middle of Clover Pass.
Because of the way the boat was sitting my back was to the shore. I was actually drifting more to the SE, which was directly towards shore. I guess I was just so engrossed in my book that I did not notice that I was drifting closer and closer to shore.
By the time I realized how close to shore I had gotten I was in about 19' of water. In another minute or two I would have been on the rocks.
Here is a shot of my track on the GPS chartplotter that shows how close to shore I got. I dodged a bullet on this one and will pay much more attention to my location in the future.
I decided to head up into the little cove inside Rosa Reef and anchor there until after dinner. It is very protected in a NW breeze. But when I got there, there were already a couple of boats anchored in there and it is a pretty small little cove, so I decided to just head in and take my chances with the wind.
I got in the stall without incident at 3:30 PM, logging 46 miles on this trip.
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