Skip to content

Community Life in Mineral King

Mineral King is a place for backpackers, campers, day hikers, day trippers, and cabin folks. Today’s post is about the cabin community. (Last summer I posted regularly about cabin life.)

There are cabin communities all over the mountains in this country, and most likely in other countries too. I’ve written in the past (2018?) about what makes them special: Cabin Thoughts, One; Cabin Thoughts, Two; Cabin Thoughts, Three, A Few More Cabin Thoughts, and Final Final Cabin Thoughts.

Today’s post is what happens on a busy weekend in our cabin community of Mineral King. There are several parts to the community: our immediate neighbors, those across the creek, the settlement one mile down the road (formerly known as “Faculty Flat”, now “West Mineral King” is the preferred name, and no, I didn’t ask for pronouns); Silver City (private property 4 miles down the road); and Cabin Cove (7 cabins about 5 miles down the road from us).

This is what happens on any given weekend—the closer to the end of summer, the more activities. We:

  1. gather at someone’s cabin for “happy hour”, eat fun things, catch up with one another, and then are too full for dinner
  2. eat dinner together
  3. (Trail Guy and The Farmer, not me unless The Farmer isn’t around) help with various repairs. (The cabins are OLD.)
  4. hike together (hike: carrying pack with lunch and water)
  5. walk together (no pack, no lunch)
  6. give one another rides up and down the hill
  7. bring supplies for one another when coming up the hill
  8. share books
  9. lend knitting needles
  10. let people use our telephone (when we had one) and borrow the neighbor’s phone now
  11. clean up the platform for the annual “Music in the Mountains” event
  12. prune in one another’s yards (okay, that’s just me. . .)
  13. use a hav-a-hart trap to catch bushy-tailed woodrats (definitely Trail Guy, NOT me)
  14. explore historic sites
  15. lend tools
  16. repair water line breaks
  17. go through the junk we discover in our respective cabins, sometimes trading items of interest
  18. share missing recipe ingredients

We stay in touch throughout the year, because our friendships are solid, not simply seasonal.

4 Comments

  1. Excellent list! I would add:
    – chop and stack wood for a future fire.
    – discuss menu options to make the best use of available groceries
    – start fire, chat by fire, poke fire, safely extinguish fire. Discuss when next fire is planned and whom is arriving up the hill to be invited to share it.
    – round of cards or two before lights out

    • Mari, all those apply to us—thank you! We don’t seem to play cards (or any games unless I force Yahtze on our neighbors), but we do have a pack or two just in case.

  2. I could add a few more (helping neighbors to light their finicky refrigerator and/or water heater), but we’ve done just about everything on your list. It is what makes the Mineral King community so special!

    • And now your cabin has a new fridge installed, with the old one on its way to the landfill.

Comments are closed for this article!