SFTR Winter Survivors Encampment 2022

Rendezvous was a great success!

While our camp numbers were down, we had a great deal of guests coming in and supporting our event, by buying raffle tickets!

The weather mostly kept folks at home and I can understand that! Primitive camping in -12 * weather is pretty hard and makes you rethink, what hell am I doing!

Our hard work over the months, gave us a great shooting range, trail walk, firewood pile and council fire.

A great time of knife & tomahawk throwing was had, and the shooters this year, made out like bandits! I purchased 9lbs of powder for additional sizes and 2 days before the rendezvous closed up, we were out! Prizes were laid out on the blanket after each event, and everyone went home happy mountain men!

The first 2 days, we had a fire ban. It was super dry, hadn't had any real snow in the valley. It was rough, but those with wood stoves in their tents lived very comfortably despite the extreme cold at night. The days, were not bad as the sun shine warmed you up as you did your daily life. Day 3, we awoke to a fresh layer of 5" of snow and the fire ban was lifted! Nothing lifts your spirit more than having a nice toasty camp fire to sit next to and relax on a cold day!

We introduced a few new targets which will now be regulars at both our summer and winter rendezvous. We're introducing a dozen more this year! Blasts from the past and new!

A HUGE THANK YOU!! To Muzzle-Loaders.com for their great donations of prizes and the 50cal Flintlock we used as the main raffle prize.

A great deal of folks bought tickets and left us with a comfortable chunk of change for next year! All funds are used strictly for rendezvous prizes, upkeep and advertisement.

I was elected to run the Rendezvous again next year, and I will do so! I plan on buying a lot more powder and percussion caps for prizes, along with some other odds and ends.

We hope the weather is a little better next year as it really limited our pistol shoots. If its super windy, its a big safety concern of mine, having folks out there loading muzzleloaders with frozen hands and terrible wind distractions. We still had a ton of shoots going on and some new shooters, which was a huge welcome!

Next year... It can only get better!

Looks like a great time and I'm sure you all had a real blast. (Pardon the pun) proud of you all.

Uffda did you look at their faces ...  

Must have "been a hard day's night".    

Heck yea. Imagine our faces or facial expressions if we at our rare huddling around the fire sipping a cup of buffalo bile.

We were at our current age huddling...

Uffda,

Did you ever make the trip up Storm Mountain CO to the old hunting cabin used by the local trappers in the 1850's and 60's. This picture was taken by Stan Honour on the last trip we made just before it burned down in the last big fire.

That's where we got the wood stove from after the cabin burned in the early 1980's.

If that stove was in that cabin, I'm glad I wasn't the one who packed it up there! I once read of a guy who packed a small piano into a remote cabin in Alaska in the 1940's, on his back! His wife wanted one and that was the only way he could get it to her. IIRC he carried that thing 20+ miles. I imagine it was a small spinet but still! Nothing like a Yamaha keyboard!

~Kees~

Winter Hawk wrote:If that stove was in that cabin, I'm glad I wasn't the one who packed it up there!  I once read of a guy who packed a small piano into a remote cabin in Alaska in the 1940's, on his back!  His wife wanted one and that was the only way he could get it to her.  IIRC he carried that thing 20+ miles.

~Kees~

When we found the cabin 20 miles into Roosevelt National Park along with this stove (taken apart) someone was getting ready to haul it out. Lucky we had horses and packed that stove out in two trips and didn't get caught. Whoever was going to take that stove was probably upset when they came back and it was gone.

Once we had it at my place we cleaned it up in the barn and reassembled it in the store on hand formed adobe bricks from Bent's Old Fort. Got the brick's several years before getting the stove, paid like $2 bucks a piece for the bricks when Bent's was being rebuild in the mid '70s. That old girl (stove) had some history attached to her skirts. The adobe bricks made a 4-foot by 8-foot space on the floor for the stove and wood box to sit on (good insulation to keep the wood floor from getting too hot).

I was only up to Storm Mountain once (ruff dirt steep road) about 1983. I didn't see the cabin, but another friend told me about it on a bear hunt he was on in the late seventies.
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Uffda, Trapper, and a few of the Buckhorn club members would hike into the cabin every spring for a workday. Then stay overnight in bear country, good times.

Buck