Last post, we looked at a few cabin exterior details. Today, we will snoop inside a few cabins.
I feel less free taking interior photos of other people’s cabins than I do taking exterior shots. But, I manage to sneak in a few shots here and there.
Most people are very curious about other people’s cabins, and always interested in seeing the interiors.
All of the cabins in Mineral King are visible to the public, but this doesn’t mean the owners are known. We have cabin numbers and names, but the names aren’t always indicative of the occupants. Because this is the World Wide Web, I have tried to shield my own cabin from too much exposure. Likewise, I won’t be giving away any names here, just showing you a few of the exterior details in today’s post.
Clearly, I have a thing for chairs, doors and windows.
Most cabin folks are patriotic. It is a regular practice to put out an American flag when one’s cabin is occupied. I can think of only one cabin without a flag at all, along with three cabins that only fly a California flag. (WHY??)
It would be tempting to segue into an entire post about patriotism, or the lack of it. I will restrain myself.
Instead, just enjoy these displays.(You may stand if you’d like, or even place your hand over your heart.)
Glory, hallelujah!
We have looked at propane refrigerators and woodstoves for cooking. Many cabins have propane stoves with ovens, or perhaps a combination of wood/propane. Our oven would take half the forest, all day, and cook us right out of the kitchen while we tended to something inside, rotating every 5 or 10 minutes, and occasionally blowing ashes off the food.
How do I know this? Experience.
(Wow, do we ever miss Ted something fierce. . . sigh.)
I have learned to make English muffins on the stove top.
And, Trail Guy barbecues most of our dinners. Our favorite menu item is pizza on the Weber kettle barbecue.
Amazing what comes out of our one-butt kitchen without electricty.
Almost everyone with a cabin stops by our place to say hello. Some don’t pay attention to the fact that the front door is closed with a Do Not Disturb sign on the knob. (Trail Guy is known for his naps, but not apparently well-enough known.)
Cabin friendships develop over generations, summer after summer, year after year. Some of our cabin neighbors have become our closest friends. We look out for each other, and communicate throughout the year, particularly during crises such as wildfires, floods, collapsed cabins, snow slides, sinkholes, and washed out roads.
This neighbor thrives on greeting the public as they pass by. I think he might be bored this year.
Here are unidentified friends and neighbors. (If you hate finding your picture here, email me and I will delete it.)
Ouch. Lots of friends shown here who are now gone. Better enjoy the ones remaining, because time is short.
Cabin life is very social. There are lots of meetings and annual events.
Some years our particular neighborhood holds a Labor Day get-together. 
This was the year we used our neighbor’s front yard because it was bigger. He wasn’t there, and may not even know we did this.
The Mineral King Preservation Society used to hold a picnic in our neighborhood. It has since moved to the Ranger Station, and this year it was held in Visalia. Weird, I know.
One year Trail Guy and I were the speakers. That was also quite weird.
And there is an annual cabin owner’s meeting.
One year the superintendent of Sequoia National Park spoke to us. We miss Woody.
In an earlier post, I mentioned the annual concert by Mankin Creek, sponsored by the Mineral King Preservation Society. Here are a few more peeks at it.
I have many more photos of these various annual events, but some of them have photos of friends who have died and it makes me too sad to see them.
We really love our friends and neighbors in our cabin community.
The question remains: What do you do in a place without electricity, cell phones, internet, or even landlines?
Choice #1 is we go hiking. However, that is not something I want to talk about this year, since Mineral King is not open to the public.
We have talked about puttering and gardening. Now let’s look at a few other ways we keep ourselves occupied in the Land of No Electricity. These are random photos, gathered over the course of many years.
My neighbor sewed new curtains for her cabin on an old treadle machine. Another neighbor brought up her electric sewing machine, set it up on her deck with her generator running, and she made quilts.
Many years the Mineral King Preservation Society sponsors Mankin Creek for an evening concert in August. Not this year.
I knit. A lot.
My 5-year-old neighbor calls it “needling”, and she told me I should make her a sweater.
So I did. She picked the colors she liked best from the group above.(The colors look dull in this photo but in real life it is beautiful.)
My Hiking Buddy brought up a project to finish. It had something to do with a baby shower, or maybe a wedding shower. It was fun to help her (and not have to actually attend the shower).
Almost every cabin has lots of books. One neighbor brings 10 books for an 8-day stay, and last year she ran out of reading material. Good thing we had some books to share. I usually bring a box of books up and down the hill every time so there is a pile to choose from. 
A friend that I have referred to in the past as The Girl used to bring Mancala to the cabin and make me play with her. She usually won. I loved the marbles and was fascinated to see that m&ms matched them (or maybe it was Skittles). I’m not much of a game player.
Many many many hours of Yahtzee.
Some people like to fish.
Some people like to commune with wayward and obstinate stock.
And hike. Hike with neighbors, hike alone, hike with one’s spouse or family. But we aren’t talking about that this year.
In the past, we have had a telephone in our cabin. A few close neighbors also have them. The section across the creek chose to not have Huge & Rude lay lines way back when, and now it isn’t possible.
Last summer it took about six calls to Huge & Rude to get the phone hooked up after the winter. Finding someone at that company who manages landlines in California was almost impossible. Then, they were completely stymied by the lack of a real address. I finally learned that we have an “AHN”, which stands for Alternate House Number. Eventually we got the phone reignited. (wrong word, but all that is coming to me right now.)
The price goes up every year, and once again, I decided to not pay $54/month for the 7-8 months that we aren’t there. Besides, when too many people get our number, I have to change it. On top of that, there is no answering machine (no electricity, remember?), so unless we happen to be in the cabin when someone calls, it isn’t a very reliable method of communicating. (People are used to INSTANT responses these days.)
This year it took three calls, and then I was assured that our phone would be reignited, with a new number, of course. (This was after Huge & Rude called me to say that the address on our work order was inadequate. . . sigh.)
Shortly after that reassurance, a local Huge & Rude service guy pulled into our driveway at home down the hill. (The local service guys are terrific.) He had a work order, but the address didn’t make sense. He came to tell me that he knows the phone is for Mineral King, that Huge & Rude doesn’t want small rural communities any more (as if we didn’t figure that out from the lack of service), and that he is required to drive up to the cabin. However, his truck is too big for the messed-up road. He gave me the cell phone numbers of all three local service guys and said to call when the big truck can get up the road.
COME ON! JUST FLIP A SWITCH IN AN OFFICE THE WAY YOU HAVE ALWAYS DONE IT!
Nope, can’t.
So, we plugged our phone into our neighbor’s phone jack because his phone sounds as if bacon is frying inside. And now we walk over there to make our calls.
NO, THERE IS NO CELL SERVICE IN MINERAL KING!
This year there is none. Haul it yourself. Do NOT use the Park Services can. It is forbidden. We used to have a dumpster for cabin trash, and the service truck came once a week. However, they are a bit like the huge and rude phone company in not wanting rural communities. In recent years, we rented a giant roll-off dumpster. And before that, Trail Guy hauled everyone’s garbage from Mineral King to Silver City in his Botmobile. 
Yep, moved the bags by hand into his pick-em-up truck, drove 3 miles down the bumpy road, and then flung them into Silver City’s roll-off. 
When we cabin folks got our own dumpster, he climbed in and rearranged the bags to make more room, so that it only had to be emptied about 3 or 4 times a summer. This is why I sometimes sent out an email to cabin folks begging them to double-bag so there is no leaky-leaky. In addition, there were no accommodations for recycling so if that was important to cabin folks, they needed to either stop buying so much packaged stuff or haul it home to their own recycling container.
You can see why everyone in Mineral King loves Trail Guy and brings him treats*.
*(Red wine [cabernet], cashews, pistachios, beef jerky. . .in case you are interested, or feeling guilty, grateful, or generous)
There is no water company in Mineral King. Trail Guy and the Farmer keep water flowing to our neighborhood, with occasional help from other neighbors. I will skip the details, but let these photos tell you how scary it is this year.
We listen to hear it humming in our pipes, and when it gets quiet, we take a hike. “We”? Trail Guy takes a hike, and I stay at the cabin with a walkie-talkie to follow instructions about opening and closing various valves.
Propane water heaters are the most normal part of cabin life’s necessities. Some people have tried to use the on-demand style, and after one winter, those things are toast.
Sometimes the regular ones are also toast. 
Trail Guy helps many neighbors with their water heaters when he can, and sometimes I go along, because sometimes other people’s bathrooms are kind of interesting. 
I have no idea.
Since there is no electricity in Mineral King (unless one uses a generator or is some sort of a solar genius), you might be wondering about some basics of life.
Let’s start with cooking. Lots of cabins have propane stoves, a few have propane/wood stoves, and we have a wood stove without a propane section. We also have small propane burner for quicker cooking when we don’t want to wait for the fire or heat the place.
Good thing I like to split wood. (Trail Guy makes it easy by providing smaller chunks for me.)
What about refrigerators? They come in propane. Ours isn’t top-notch (does that surprise you??) and in warmer temperatures it becomes more of an icebox with a good freezer on top. So, we supplement with ice made in our freezer (or a neighbor’s) and sometimes we supplement with snow.
(HEY, SHUT THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR!!)
Those propane refrigerators have lots of troubles, beginning with the fact that the easy strike start-up device ALWAYS breaks first, and then it takes a gymnast to reach around the back with a match while someone else holds in the button, usually with a tool because it is really hard to push the button.
But that’s okay, because life is slower at the cabin.
Wait! What about light??
Again, propane.
Almost everything requires matches, and “Strike Anywhere” matches have become rare. (We call them “1 in 3s” because it takes 3 matches to get one that will actually light.) Lots of people use those plastic things that resemble curling irons with hard-to-press switches; I think they are called “lighters”, but the handle is longer than smokers’ types. And I bet they have a tiny internal propane canister. But plastic, ugh. So cheap, so unreliable, and so disposable, probably made in China. Sigh.