Box Canyon Dam

On Tuesday I went to the Old Ladies Luncheon. They tried calling it the Senior Sisters Luncheon but that was too much like Senior Citizens and with all of our old minds we just get confused. So no more euphemisms. There were a few spies in the group (women under 70)

and I'm sure they had their eyes opened. We generally can't communicate very well anymore, and we sleep through most of what goes on, but boy can we eat!

A few minutes ago I had a friend from Yreka call and she had not heard that Parley died and so I told her about the last few months of his life. It was so amazing to me as I look back on it.

Wait! Don't go away. You were thinking "If she is going to talk about how her husband died, I have better things to do." I really want you to stay with me on this. It was such a great time in our lives and it makes me happy thinking about it.

Parley and I knew that he was not going too live much longer and we talked about all the things he wanted me to do after he was gone and we talked about what he would be doing on the other side and we especially talked about being together again. One of the last things that he told me was "Don't wait too long."

See?That wasn't so bad.

When we had not been married too long he had an experience that he liked to talk about.

He had a friend, a fellow fly-fisherman named Joe Montgomery, and they discovered that when a dam was put into the main river that came down out of the Eddy mountains the river below the dam was pretty inaccessible but the fishing there was fantastic. Below Box Canyon Dam was this narrow part of the river with edges four or six feet wide that immediately went straight up about three hundred feet. No one else had found this area and every day after work they would park by the dam and climb down the sheer walls of the canyon and bring home however many rainbow trout were allowed and they were all at least 18 inches long. it was truly a fisherman's paradise. The Los Angeles Times had a picture of the two of them holding this string between them, and 10 or 15 of these huge trout hanging from the string:


One day Parley had to work late and the sun was going down as they hiked down to the river. The fishing was so unbelievable that when it got dark they had trouble calling a halt to the fishing. By the time they started out of the canyon it was totally dark. They started up the wall of the canyon going on their hands and knees and feet with Parley in the lead, and they got fairly near the top, when they came to an overhang. There was no going further up and they knew they would never make it back down and it was a sheer drop of at least 200 feet. They both realized their lives were in great danger.

After praying about it Parley told Joe to come up to where he was and he would hold on to what he could reach and Joe was to climb up Parley and see if by standing on Parley's shoulders he could reach above the overhang. Joe found that from that height he could just about reach the top of the cliff and he was able to scramble out. He went to get the sheriff and together they got a rope down to Parley and he was able to climb out.

An interesting part of that story was that Joe told Parley that a few nights before their adventure, Joe had had a dream and had seen them hanging onto that sheer wall and that in the dream he knew that it would be because of Parley's faith that they would be able to get out.

Joe's wife told us of Joe telling her of the dream two nights before it happened.

No. That did not end their fishing trips but they were careful about coming home when they could still see.

In my next blog I will enclose the great white bread recipe.