17 years ago, Jenny and I spent a weekend with a family of a Benicia Firefighter. He had only met us a couple of days earlier and invited us to stay with them at Yosemite on the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. We didn’t know you had to book or anything. That weekend was a highlight of our ’92 trip so we needed to catch up with Dave and Lynn Botz.

In 17 years, their kids Cara and Chris have grown up and moved to Washington State and Dave (although still working as a Benicia Firefighter) have moved to Foresthill about 170 km away.

It was an uneventful drive until we got to the Auburn Ravine Bridge. The bridge was closed and there were cop cruisers all over it. A phone call to Dave and he said that the bridge was a popular bridge for jumpers – both BASE and others. As were we on the phone, the jumper was in cuffs and we were on our way.

The weather was certainly warmer than Benicia. Their house was great and we had a good afternoon catching up with the kids throwing some horseshoes as well. We lost track of the time and soon it was 8:00 pm and we had at least a 2 hour trip home in the holiday traffic.

On the way home, we took the old Auburn-Foresthill Road to look at the Ravine Bridge from the river base. Grabbed a geocache as well (GC19J44 – Species: Heteromeles arbutifolia). When we got there, once again there we lights of police cruisers on it as well as a helicoptor idling at the bottom waiting and quite a crowd as well.