Norm Rohn and I, hopefully with the blessings of the before named groups, in February made what the National Park Service calls a "direct reduction" of desert deer. Norm made some delicious jerkey out of some but we put the choicest cuts into the freezer for the traditional weekend in April.
On Thursday that week Norm and I drove out to Great Falls Basin with all our BBQ equipment to make ready the site for its many weekend visitors. For two days we labored like Hercules in the stables of King Aegeas cleaning up beer cans, bottles, diapers, scrap and debris to make the area environmentally pristine (nearly). We dug the BBQ pit, six feet by six feet and square, lined it with stones and waited Friday night for our climbing friends. Steve Langley, driving down from the San Francisco Bay area, was first. Emil Pfieler from Oxnard drove in with half a cord of seasoned firewood to furnish coals to toast. the tasty tidbits. Then, as darkness closed in, people began to wander in, stumbling in on foot, cursing and muttering that their cars were stuck in deep sand somewhere one or two miles back. Norm and Emil in their 4WDs each pulled out and towed cars for more than 3 hours, bringing in at least 10 to 12 cars until we had more than 145 people on hand by 1:00 a.m. when we let the coals die down.
Saturday morning Emil went out another time and pulled in Bob Emerick and a couple of others. Thirty commemorative 5th Annual Argus Peak tee shirts were distributed. Meanwhile, we wrapped the 6 or 7 roasts and put them on the bed of coals. Then we covered the meat with a sheet of tin and Eric Schumacher performed his annual task of covering the BBQ with sand, sealing in the heat.
About 8:00 a.m. 143 people began the 11 mile round trip, 14500' gain hike up along the rocky cleft enclosing the 5 waterfalls collectively known as Great Falls, across the awesome granite grandeur of Great Falls Basin and up the south ridge to the summit of Argus Peak. Forty one made the summit and Marlin Clark, for the 5th year, acted as trail sweep and brought the final hikers in to camp just after dark.