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She frowned and almost spat when she spoke; clearly I had inadvertently wandered into sensitive territory, and she was probably tired of the question. How could I not ask? All available space on the restaurant walls was covered in cast iron pans with people's names neatly painted in red and white; there was a sign over a doorway that declared this to be the world's largest privately owned collection of cast iron cookware. One pan proudly held the name of Doug McConnell, host of TV's Bay Area Backroads.


My friends and I had just emerged from a week-long backpacking trip in the Marble Mountain Wilderness in far northern California, and we were in desperate need of some real food. There wasn't much to choose from in the little town of Orleans, so we ended up at a place that simply said "Cafe" outside. A local who had told us where to find food said, "We just call it the greasy spoon."


“We keep writing Guinness trying to get in the book,” she said pouring the brown stuff that was standing in for coffee that morning, “but apparently they don’t have a category for it.” She paused, thinking dark thoughts about the Guinness Book of World Records editorial staff. “So we’re just waitin’ – what else can we do?” she grumbled.

We changed the subject, "I see you have a stage - do you get bands coming through here?"

"Oh yeah," she said, brightening her mood, "mostly local bands. Sometimes we'll have bands come in from Forks of Salmon."

Forks of Salmon is now without any doubt my favorite town name. Also, any band out there looking for a good name, please consider Forks of Salmon.

To those that don't know California well, it's a land of surfers, movie stars, hybrid driving liberals, and patchouli-soaked pot-smoking hippies. But California is huge, and the more you explore it, the more it defies any simple stereotypes. I was trying to explain this to some friends in London, telling them that even San Francisco isn't at all what most people expect — ironically they had been to San Francisco with their parents and the first thing they saw when they walked out of their hotel was a guy walking down the street in assless chaps. Okay, admittedly San Francisco will have the very occasional assless chaps guy, but the cultural terrain changes dramatically as you travel around the state. Here we were, many hours from anywhere, in a dark, cast-iron-clad greasy spoon where the lumberjacky locals who looked like they had been plucked from the cast of extras on Northern Exposure argued over their card game at the corner table, and bands came in from Forks of Salmon. The road we were driving down was marked "The Bigfoot Scenic Byway" and we had passed an Adopt-A-Highway sign that read "In memory of Critter" and a full-sized billboard reading "Produce the Birth Certificate!" We were no longer in assless chaps territory.


This was exactly what we were shooting for when we planned this trip. We weren't looking for the world's largest privately owned collection of cast iron cookware per se, but we were intent on finding a remote and quiet corner of California for a backpacking trip. To me, backpacking is all about solitude, so when you plan a trip in the summer high season in California you have to choose your trail carefully. Popular trails in the central Sierra can get miserably busy, and there's nothing worse than a traffic jam on a wilderness trail. I knew we had picked well when I told people that I was going backpacking for a week in the Marble Mountains and I got multiple looks of confusion, one persone that thought I was headed to Vermont, and two people that thought I was going to Danang, Vietnam. While a trip to Vietnam sounds pretty good, these Marble Mountains are a section of the Klamath Range just south of the Oregon border, smack dab in Bigfoot's living room.



Luckily we were out of the burn zone by the time we hit Cuddihy Lakes, and we were treated to the green meadows, forests, and rock-walled lakes we had hoped for, and the wildflowers were still putting on a show despite being a bit late in the season.