Memories of Dad at Beehive Basin

"Bear Meadow"

On the Friday of Father's Day weekend, we hiked the length of Yellow Mule Trail to "bear meadow."  We call it that because Julie and I saw a bear there a few years ago.  Five days after we were there with Jay, Sasha and their puppy JoJo, Julie and I saw both a black bear and cinnamon colored bear there.

As we doubled back with the kids that Friday, Julie spotted a female moose staring at us across a clearing, and trust me when I say that it seemed much closer than my photos make it seem.

Yellow Mule Trail

Sasha and Jay wanted to go horseback riding that afternoon, but none of the local stables had reservations available.

I found openings for a two-hour ride available the next morning at 320 Ranch, which Disney uses for lodging on their Yellowstone/Big Sky tours.  It turned out to be a great ride.  They encountered a large heard of elk on the hilltop where the horse trail led.

Julie and I took JoJo for a walk while Jay kept his promise to take Sasha horseback riding on Saturday morning.  Being young and energetic, they wanted to take full advantage of their last afternoon in Big Sky with an afternoon hike on Beehive Basin Trail, which for Julie and me would be a full day's commitment most of the time, leaving in the morning and bringing a light lunch with us.

In early summer, there is usually snow to be encountered near the top of Beehive, and on this afternoon, we found quite a bit of white powder, enough to stop us from making it all the way to the Basin, although Sasha and Jay, with JoJo in a backpack, made it further than Julie and me.  I'd planned to follow them as far as they went, but I'd failed to leave our shared water bottle with Julie when she decided to stop under some trees after rain began to fall, so after learning this on the phone after we had already hiked quite a ways past the rock pile we had set as our stated goal, I decided I better double back and found her at that rock pile, which had a beautiful view.

With it being the Friday of Father's Day weekend, I naturally thought about my own father while hiking with my son.

I will always remember Dad as a hard-working man.  He actually began working at a dairy when he was 7 years-old.  After serving in the Army, which is when he met Mom, he went to barber school and later beauty school on the GI Bill.  He gave up drinking and saved enough money to start his own beauty salon.


I have clear memories of being two or three years old, sitting on a black and white tile checkerboard floor of a vacant retail space as he and Mom built pink-and-gray wood-grained panel partitions with frosted glass on top.

It didn't seem like a risky venture to me, because I knew my dad could do anything.  He could carry me on his shoulders or lift me up to set me on a veteran's memorial in Seal Beach, where we lived in a salmon pink apartment building.  If I saw a rusty pop gun at an auction, he could buy it for me as easy as snapping his fingers.


Dad made a success of his beauty salon, and our family soon had enough money to buy a house in Westminster, a few miles up 2nd Street from the upscale part of Belmont Shores where he chose to build that salon.

A couple of years later, Dad decided to build a playhouse for Darlene in the corner of our yard.  I distinctly remember him picking up a huge concrete incinerator which came with our tract house back in the 1950's, possibly because trash pickup hadn't become a regular service in that neck of the suburbs.  I think back on that and can't help wondering how much it weighed, because it seemed huge to me at the time.

Dad built that playhouse with his carpenter friend Dan Scribner, who crafted elaborate custom cupboards inside.  It had a natural wood interior throughout, while the outside was painted white with turquoise trim (Darlene's favorite color).

With a wooden shake-shingle roof and raised foundation, the little cottage was quality work from top to bottom.  Of course, that house also served as a fort for my friends and me when we played cowboys or Zorro.

My favorite memory there was having a sleepover with my friends Mark and Jamie Abel.  We bit Kraft marshmallows in half, eating the top and throwing the bottom up so they would stick to the roof.  When one fell on our heads, that was hilarious, something that lost something in translation when I explained it to my usually cheerful Mom the next morning as she cleaned off the sugary remnants.

Dad also contracted to build a light blue fish pond.  Because it was summer when completed, Darlene and I used it as a swimming pool initially, but when school returned it became a Japanese Koi pond.  After raising fish for a couple of years, Dad and Mom realized the filtration system wasn't sufficient to stop unbridled algae growth that resulted it it being less than the zen pond they imagined, so they filled it in with dirt and made it into a beautiful garden.




In addition to annual strawberry crops, there were two dwarf peach trees that provided delicious fruit for Mom's wonderful peach cobblers.

Dad built a bird aviary to raise African Love Birds, and then another one for quail, and more aviaries for more birds over they years.  He later added incubators inside our garage to hatch eggs, allowing us to observe the miracle of birth, though I was often too busy playing Monopoly or baseball with friends to actually share and appreciate his passion fully.

Dad also raised Guinea pigs and rabbits in cages in the backyard for a while before deciding they were just too messy and multiplied too fast, with presumably not enough of a ready market to which he could sell the offspring.

Inside our house, we had multiple aquariums with tropical fish, which often fascinated my friends even if I just took them for granted after the initial excitement.


He obviously loved all animals, encouraging Darlene's attachment to her cat Blackie, with whom she won the pet show in Belmont Shores.  Dad proudly displayed clippings of from the newspaper about their victory in his salon.

We also had some hamsters inside, and a couple of desert turtles roamed around our yard.  My favorite pets were a parrot named Hoy, which Dad inherited from one of his customers, and a black Labrador Retriever mutt named Alvin, who was quite a character.


Dad has long since passed away, but I still think about him daily, which I guess is a form of immortality.

Only now do I understand that in choosing to become a father, Dad opted to not take entirely different routes where he could have used that now disposable income for other things he enjoyed, or perhaps taken another career path entirely.

When we think about having children ourselves, we don't generally go through a big pro and con list.  I know for me, deciding to become a father was more of an instinct, something I must do.  For some, it is more accidental than anything.

Perhaps it's silly to make a rational list of reasons why we should go down one path and not another for any transformational experience.  As pointed out in a philosophy class I took this week, when something is a truly transformational experience, as becoming a father certainly proves to be for most of us, then we are not the same person after we have gone through it.


Using advanced medical scanning equipment, scientists can actually see different brain connections and increased activity levels taking place in the minds of parents versus non-parents.  We literally are transformed by having children.

As you may be able to tell from the examples above --- and I could list many more --- my dad never feared transformational experiences.  He was willing to take chances to see what might happen, always optimistically expecting the best.

As Dad told me several times, he had started working as a boy to contribute to his family's income, and he never feared working.  He figured that if something didn't work out, then he would just have to work harder to get back to where he had been.  By now, his spirit has moved onto other projects.