I would like to take a little extra time and wordage for this week’s discussion around the campfire,… not only because of the content of the discussion, but also because of the extra personal meaning it carries by virtue of the story’s geographical location and the characters about whom the story is told. The crackling campfire in this discussion was started and burned in the very same back country fire pit of previous camp fires which I personally sat around and enjoyed the warmth and camaraderie of my elk hunting partners almost fifty years ago. It was here in the back country of Central Idaho that a grand “new experience” occurred for a young couple, that created with its occurrence a great life lesson from which we can all gain significant knowledge and understanding about people and about life.

Keep in mind that things are not always what they seem or appear to be. Regardless of who you are or what you think you know, we all “fall short of the mark” in many areas of our lives. It is only when we are personally willing to admit that just maybe we do not know everything in life, that we are then ready (and hopefully willing) to submit to another person or higher authority who can and is willing to help us: (1) experience new blessings and (2) gain greater knowledge than we presently possess.

It has been said that the best way to cross a mine field is to follow somebody. Whenever you are at a disadvantage or know that you are in over your head or you do not feel adequately prepared or ready for a new effort or adventure in life, you are always better off to hire or engage a tour guide of sorts to aid you in getting through the maze of entanglements that lie before you. Your hired guide should be one who has been there and successfully done that very thing that you are doing or attempting to do.

Once you are certain that your guide, i.e. your mentor, is well qualified and more than capable of taking you into new territory in which you have never before been involved,…all you need do is to relax and follow the specific instructions of your guide. Obviously there will be a certain amount of trust involved between you and your guide,….but to successfully cross the obstacles, that lay in front of you,…you must submit to your guide’s instructions and follow his or her leadership. Doing so will make the difference between successfully completing your mission and receiving the benefits and rewards for doing it, or….failing to complete the job and not receiving your desired rewards. You choose.

A recent event just occurred in my life regarding these very points I am discussing with you. Rather than me telling you the story, permit me to allow the major participant to tell it to you in her own words.

May I present to you Mrs. Camela L. from Spokane, Washington and her husband, Rich, and daughter, Lydia. Camela, will you please share your story with the readers and listeners?

Only as a point of information, permit me to add that I neither knew or had any idea that these people feared heights, were afraid of back country roads and isolated remote geographical locations. Nor did I know or even suspect that they were frightened at anytime during this entire journey as related in their story……Camela, please pick up the story:

“Have you ever gone to a place that you really wanted to go, knowing all along that it was going to be way far out of your personal physical comfort zone? Recently, my husband, eight-year-old daughter, and I went on such a great adventure into the untamed mountainous wilderness area of central Idaho, more specifically into the huge area of wild forests surrounded by the Lochsa and North Fork of the Clearwater Rivers. We were accompanied on this trip by our personal long-time friend, Mr. Dave Severn, who served as our tour guide, as we had never been in such a remote and wild country before.

My father passed away in April of this year. His body was cremated, and I was given his remains, his ashes, to be buried or scattered as I chose fit. I was well aware that my dad was a great outdoorsman very much like Dave. It was my desire to spread my father’s remains at some isolated, heart-of-the-forest area that I knew Dave would know about. Consequently, I asked Dave for some friendly advice on where might be a good place to spread my father’s ashes.

You see, Dave and I have known each other for years and he has had a great impact on my life and the life of my entire family. Rich and I met him and his wife, Jan, at our church and slowly became friends and later on business associates. They introduced us to the private Christian School, The Oaks Academy, here in Spokane Valley, where our daughter has attended now going on to her third year. We were so excited about this school, its entire classical Christian curriculum, and its entire staff that we sold our north end home and moved across town to Spokane Valley just to be closer to the school and get more involved with our child’s education.

We lost Jan three years ago this week on September 11, 2011 to dreaded ovarian cancer. Since her passing, we have watched and observed Dave go through the grieving process. All during this healing process, we have become very close personal friends with him. I even personally consider him a father. He so reminds me of the father who raised me, my maternal grandfather. He is ever so present and comfortable in his own skin, but always attentive and loving in a gracious way. So when it came to getting out of my comfort zone with someone,…I knew I could trust this man called Dave. Little did I know how much I was going to have to trust him.

My Heavenly Father and Dave led me out of my comfort zone very quickly. You see the morning Dave arrived at our home to pick us up to head into the back country, it was pouring down rain with thunder and lightening crashing all around us all the while we loaded our gear into his truck. We “quickly loaded” our equipment and immediately departed which should have given me some obvious personal insight into the quickness of his decision making and the speed and pace of our travel for the rest of our journey.

I have only ridden in a vehicle with Dave a few times all of which were within the city limits of Spokane where there are paved roads, posted speed limits, and other related traffic control systems and devices. But, very soon we were traveling on back country dirt and/or gravel roads, where there are no posted speed limits, no guardrails,, and no other cars or trucks,…as in you are out there all by yourself….are you beginning to get the picture?

And Dave, being totally IN his comfort zone; driving his own truck, with 10 ply heavy duty, deeply treaded, off-road tires traveling on dirt roads he had previously driven hundreds of times, was very much in his element. The good news was that since we were going so fast, I thought our trip would be completed much sooner as compared to later, but God and Dave soon proved me incorrect. The fact is that there is no internet or cell phone service in the back country of Idaho. Consequently I once again had to be patient and trust that Dave actually knew where he was going and that God was not going to strike us with a bolt of lightening or wash us off the mud-filled mountain roads.

We finally arrived at our destination, the Lochsa Lodge, located at the Powell Ranger Station of the U.S. Forest Service near LoLo Pass on the Idaho-Montana border. We shut off the truck engine at 10:00 pm. Again this was not what I expected as I had calculated our trip to be somewhere around 6 hours. Actually it was an eight hour trip.

So here we now found ourselves in a very dark place, in a very dark forest, in some very dark mountains,…but…with a very confident, and comforting tour guide. The facts are that over the past 50 years, Dave has been to this Lochsa Lodge many many times, and this is, in fact, one of his most favorite places on the earth. However, all that I could see were big huge trucks, lots and lots of motorcycle bikers and pitch black darkness all over the area. It was eerie and a little scary. Dave had told us many stories of how the transplanted imported Canadian grey wolves had been relocated into the area and how they had totally taken over control of all the other wildlife. He shared with us how there is hardly any big game hunting in and around the area anymore due to the dominance of the foreign (Canadian) grey predator. He related how the people of the area are already beginning to worry about their own personal safety as with the increased wolf population comes growing concern about human safety. All I could think about was how much I love the light and how God promises we believers that new joy comes in the morning. Oh how I was looking forward to a good night’s rest and the coming sunrise!

Upon waking in our beautiful log cabin with my wonderful husband and sweet little girl, I was excited to see this famous place where the Corps of Discovery, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, had once tread over 210 years before. When we opened the cabin door and the panorama opened before our eyes, it was indeed all that Dave had said that it would be and then some more. There stood a huge cedar tree natural park with bare ground under the giant trees. There were several very quaint log cabins cozily sheltering their inhabitants from the crisp and cold morning mountain air. The adjacent Lochsa River splashed and danced over rocks, logs, and bushes as it cascaded down the riverbed. And lastly there stood the big beautiful hewn log Lochsa Lodge. Everything was pristine. It was all very breath-taking. We could smell the bacon frying and the fresh huckleberry pancakes cooking on the chef’s griddle…the very things that Dave had so fondly spoken about to us on several previous occasions.

So we quickly dressed and went directly to the breakfast area inside the Lodge. Flames from the freshly stirred outdoor log fire licked up into the air from the fire pit at the edge of the wooden deck that extended away from the eating area of the Lodge. We quickly occupied a nice table and chairs outside the Lodge on the deck in the cool morning air. From our deck location, we could hear the sounds of life gurgling and sloshing up the terrain from the Lochsa River. Wow! Now I could clearly see why Dave loved this place so much. I was beginning to feel more and more comfortable in this newly discovered zone of my life.

How quickly things can and do change in our life. Dave and I had spoken of this adventure many times before and he had given me many options as to where to place my father’s remains, but I am not one to be too much into details of such matters and so I had to trust my own heart that I would truly know the right place of rest once I had actually discovered it. Once I found the final place I would just somehow know. Plus, I had never been to any of the places he was telling me about so the words he used didn’t have any real meaning to me.

 

Our quest began by taking us to a very remote meadow adjacent to a south side tributary of the Lochsa River know as “Colt Killed Creek.” From there we crossed the Lochsa river to the north bank and took a very steep and rough road on a near vertical climb to a special place very high on top of a most rugged mountain ridge line known as “Indian Post Office.” Thence we traveled west on the old Lolo Trail and past a huge barren rock butte called “The Ashpile” and finally onto to a massive granite rock outcropping with a one thousand foot vertical drop on its south face all the way down into the Lochsa River canyon. This solid rock outcrop is called “The Devil’s Chair.” From there we took two separate punishing back roads to be able to complete our journey. The first road was interrupted by a totally impassable washed out bridge. This obstacle forced us to backtrack almost 20 miles of rugged mountain primitive road. The second road took us through a long meandering twisting single lane, rut-filled pathway down the canyon side 12 miles and finally onto the paved road in the very bottom of the Lochsa River canyon. My mind and thoughts raced back to that morning when we began our day’s journey. I had no idea that it was literally going to be so rough and tough and punishing to our bodies and would last so terribly long. At least I had a front row seat, as my husband was more than happy to give up his seat up front next to Dave after yesterday’s little mountain ride.

It was only after the first ten minutes of this day’s journey that we even saw only one other car and only a total of 6 other people,…4 on motorcycles, and 2 on four wheelers. The terrain was breathtakingly beautiful and amazingly steep. Again I was completely out of my own comfort zone. We were rapidly ascending roads that reached up to 6,690 feet of elevation all the while traveling on these treacherous roads at Severn speed. My poor husband is deathly afraid of heights, but he never said a word about his fears to Dave. Eventually I traded my front seat to Rich and went to the backseat with my daughter who showed absolutely no fear or trepidation. She displayed hardly any complaining or displeasure. This day’s journey lasted over 100 miles under these conditions and took almost 7 hours to complete. We went to and through several places so remote that very few other human beings have ever seen or gone through them….and I never need to go through them again. But if you ever get a chance to go, don’t pass it up. It truly was a trip of a lifetime!

After all day driving through the remote back-country tracks and trails, we finally found the paved highway paralleling the Lochsa River! I was certainly relieved and so was my family. I am not sure that Dave was quite ready for total pavement. Our next stop was at the mouth of a small creek emptying into the Lochsa River in the bottom of the river canyon under “Indian Post Office” above on the Lolo Trail. This sounded much more like my kind of place. It was just a few miles down a paved road from the Lodge. We arrived at this amazingly beautiful place all engulfed with huge natural growth Cedar trees alongside a beautiful bubbling creek. It was the site of Dave’s old elk hunting camp that he used in his younger days while he was in college. It was so peaceful. I immediately felt inside my heart that my dad would love it here as a final resting place.

My tour guide gave me lots of space and time to make my decision, and he also gave me lots of choices as to where to let my father rest. For this consideration on his part, I was very grateful for the journey and the adventure.

The journey with Dave was really amazing. He never knew I was so far out of my comfort zone until after we returned to Spokane and my story came out in a discussion in our Sunday School Class the following Sunday morning. I would have not made this trip with anyone that I did not totally trust. My husband would not have allowed his family to be put in a place that he felt so uncomfortable, except that we knew our tour guide’s love for us, his experience and abilities in the wilderness, and his closeness and relationship with his Heavenly Father. We were indeed in trusted hands and we were blessed because we were in submission to (God’s) and (Dave’s) authority.

We truly did fall in love with this part of our great country, just like Dave did so many years ago,…so much so that we are headed back to the Lochsa Lodge for another adventure,…but this time at a much slower speed.”….

How’s about someone throwing another log on that campfire? And look at the shadows dancing in the cedar trees. Is there one more marsh mellow available? I’d like another one, please….toasted golden brown.

Almost fifty years has come and gone since I, as a young 20 year-old man, sat around a similar campfire in this same fire pit, reliving the excitement of shooting my first bull elk a very short distance from where I am now sitting. Time stops for no man or woman. As I gaze ahead into the future, I can see the day forty years from today when Grandma Lydia brings her yet-to-conceived grandchildren back to this very same special fire pit,… rekindles a good fire,… and after having visited the site of her own maternal grandfather’s remains,… relives and retells her grandchildren about the events of today and how she was there as an eight-year-old little girl,… when their great grandmother, Camela, and great grandfather, Rich, spread her own grandfather’s ashes in this special spot in the late afternoon on August 16, 2014.

Family legacies can only be truly established and passed on when the receivers of them actually know who their benefactors are or were,… and what they did for the future family members who bear their same name.

There can only be a successor after there is first a success.

Go and do your own part first,…become successful. Once you do your part,…all the other parts easily fall into place. Follow your own competent personal guide, obey his instructions and keep on keeping on until you have accomplished your own success.

 

Peace And Love to All of You………..Poppa Bear