Harlen Adams In His Own Words

Under the Wing of Aset

Bidwell Park: Chico's Crown Jewel

I’m wedgedstuck!midway down a rimrock chimney overlooking the fish ladders above Salmon Hole on Big Chico Creek and thinking back on a conversation I had two weeks ago with Bidwell Park Ranger Bob Donohue.

“Ten years ago you could go up there and not see anybody,” he said during a discussion of the changes that have occurred in the park over the last decade. “That doesn’t happen anymore.” I hate crowds, but todayas I eye two circling turkey vultures who are eyeing me back like the steam table at an all-you-can-eat buffetI’m hoping Ranger Bob was right.

He was righttechnically. On the three-mile hike from the Horseshoe Lake parking lot, I’d seen three other people: a lone angler laying whiplash casts across the muddy water with a bass lure and two mountain bikers fixing a flat near the power lines. But for the last half-hour, it had been me and the buzzards.

The paucity of people is probably due to the Sunday-Monday road closure in Upper Park, one of the many new policy changes enacted by the city park commission in the last ten years. The prospect of a walk or bike ride in the baking heat has thinned the ranks of hikers and bikers on this, the first truly hot summer day of the season. I’d almost turned around myself when I saw the locked gate.

There have been many changes in the ten years since last I scrambled through this basalt fracture, the portal to a network of narrow ledges leading to the quiet, shady pools above the fish ladders. When I was an undergraduate at Chico State, the pools were a favorite retreat because they were almost always vacant. The labor involved in carrying in a twelve-pack seemed to keep revelers away.

In addition to the changes that have occurred in Bidwell Park since I graduated in 1988a park-wide ban on alcohol and the weekend road closure to name twothere are more personal changes on my mind. Two prominent ones associated with approaching middle age have a bearing on my predicament.

One is the gut around my middle that has me suspended six feet from the chimney bottom. I used to drop though the crack like a pea through a stovepipe, but now I’m hanging like a chockstone on the fat built up over five Alaskan winters. The second is the legacy of a car accident seven years ago, a stainless steel pin in my hip that won’t let me twist my leg and foot onto the only apparent foothold.

Simply stated, the situation is this: Down is impossible under the laws of Newtonian physicsthe crack gets narrower, and I do not. Up offers hope, but so far I have found nothing with which to lever up my bulk. Left, where the crack appears to widen enough to accommodate my girth, is the best bet.

Mild claustrophobia has my heart pounding. Calm down; use your head. There’s got to be a way out of here. If not, surely someone will come along when it cools down this evening. The crack, after all, is only a few dozen yards off the Yahi Trail.

To my left, the chimney opens onto the canyon. Despite my less than panoramic view, I can see my friends, the vultures, sitting across the creek on a 100-foot tall, tilted basalt slab my buddies and I named the Hogsback. Their extended wings resemble Dracula’s cape as he leaps from the castle window. Their naked, red heads shimmer obscenely in heat waves rising off the rocks.

The choice of roosts could be coincidence. But of all the rocks in the vicinity, theirs is the only one that affords a view into the crack that holds me like a vice.

Observation: Damned, big, ugly birds. Made as I probe the surface of the rock, inches from my face, for hand or toe-holdsomethingI may have missed.

Bidwell Park figures prominently in my memories of college life, as it has for Chico State alums for more than a century. Nineteenth-century photos from the archives of University Special Collections show students from Chico Normal School, as the precursor of the University was called, spreading picnic blankets among the stately oaks and delicate wildflowers of Upper Park.

Several decades after straw boaters and hourglass corsets went out of style, Chico State students were still heading to “The Park” to dive from the rocks at Bear Hole or swim through Salmon Hole’s underwater tunnels. Beating the summer heat with an evening swim at One Mile or Five Mile, as well as biking, running, or horseback-riding through Lower Park, or simply sunbathing, are time-honored traditions.

At a glance, Bidwell Park can seem as timeless as the memories it holds for thousands. Spreading oaks and sycamores still shade Lower Park. Chico Creek still flows past Upper Park’s glistening basalt boulders. Glimpses of deer and other wildlife still greet early morning hikers. But a closer looks tells another story. The wear and tear of overuse continues to take its toll.

Damage to the park has been occurring for yearserosion, invasions of exotic species, the disappearance of native onesbut problems are accelerating along with Chico’s population growth. More people are using Bidwell Park for recreation, loving it to death, so to speak. Some problems, such as the decline in spring- run Chinook salmon, are the result of, among other things, too-little-too-late resource management.

During a ten-year absence from Chico, I thought often of Bidwell Park and found myself wondering how it was faring. Changes in management strategies were underway before I left. Efforts at traffic control started when part of South Park Drive became a one-way street in the mid-’80s. By ’88, erosion stemming from an explosion in mountain biking was becoming apparent, as were conflicts between various user groups. For more than a decade, nearby residential developmentssome considered detrimental to the parkloomed.

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