01/15/2026
When backpacking, I try to avoid crowds. The few people I do meet, however, often turn out to be memorable. This was true on the 1,300-mile hike I took across Oregon in 1985. My goal then was to begin research for my guidebooks. But my journal wound up revolving around the people I met.
After the trip, my journal was published as “Listening for Coyote.” One of the high points of that story was my encounter with Len Ramp and Betty McCaleb on the edge of southwest Oregon’s Kalmiopsis Wilderness, which comprises nearly 180,000 acres west and northwest of Cave Junction.
Here’s how I wrote up that encounter in my journal:
Len Ramp is a lean bantam of a man, with dark eyes and a trim black moustache. A dozen pockets in his red canvas vest bulge mysteriously. A geologist’s pick, the tool of his trade, hangs from a loop on his belt.
He shakes my hand with a firm grip and gives a signal to the driver of the pickup. The pickup growls back up the dusty road. Finally, Len speaks.
“He’ll meet us 10 miles up the road, at the edge of the Kalmiopsis. You didn’t want to toss your pack in the truck, did you?”
I look at the dust cloud left by the truck. How could I have failed to think of it myself? The pack’s straps have worn searing red grooves into my shoulders. But now I just shake my head.
“I didn’t think you would. Anybody backpacking all the way across Oregon's not likely to cut corners. Well?” Len flashes another smile. “Ready?”
He leads the way up the road at an amazingly brisk pace. I don’t want to criticize — after all, he’s taken a day off from his office work in Grants Pass to hike and talk with me — so I jolt my pack along, trying to keep up.
While I try to pretend this semi-jogging is my normal gait, Len does most of the talking. He says he usually runs 5 miles before breakfast, but he didn’t today, knowing he’d get in some hiking with me. He is 59, and each summer he competes in marathons. In the winter, he climbs the peaks of the Cascade Range and skis down.
“Had a close call climbing a glacier on Shasta,” he says. “Fell through the snow into a deep crevasse. Only survived because I’d strapped my skis crosswise on my backpack. Bridged the crevasse right near the top.”
Len Ramp paused at a gold miner’s cabin to sell a geologic map he researched about the Kalmiopsis.
“You hike a lot in the Kalmiopsis?” I ask.
He smiles again. “I mapped it for the state. Walked every stream, trail, road and ridge for 200 square miles. Learned the land like the palm of my hand.”
After half a dozen miles of fast hiking, we cross a high, swaying footbridge over the turbulent green-pooled Illinois River.
Len says, “We better stop in to see Betty before heading up to the wilderness.”
“Who?”
“Betty McCaleb. She and her husband bought a hardscrabble ranch out here in the ’20s, wound up prospecting for a living. The husband died years ago, but Betty stayed on.”
A suspension footbridge across the Illinois River leads to the McCaleb Ranch on the edge of the wilderness.
An ancient, unpainted plank mining cabin sags against the hillside ahead. Len knocks on its sagging screen door. There is a long pause. I look at him questioningly, but he just shakes his head.
Minutes pass before a faint voice croaks from within. “I’m coming!”
Finally, a very old, shrunken woman stares at me through the wavy glass of the porch door. Strands of gray hair descend about her heavily freckled face. Then she sees the geologist, and her face lights up. “Well, Len! Come on in!”
Inside, the house gives me a strong feeling of vertigo. The dining room slopes woozily toward a treadle sewing machine in a corner. The window is cocked at a different angle. The door frames hump or sag to match the rickety doors. Mrs. McCaleb hobbles ahead into the living room, which slants so radically it seems about to launch itself, doilied sofa and all, through a threadbare curtain into the garden.
Len smiles at the elderly woman, and then surprises me with a fearsome shout: “How are you doing?”
When she doesn’t flinch, I realize she is hard of hearing. She also appears to be at least 85 and apparently lives alone, so Len’s question is well-chosen.
“Well now, Len, I’m all right,” she says, “but since you’re here, maybe you could help me cut my toenail.”
“Your toenail?” Len yells.
Mrs. McCaleb lowers herself into a swivel rocker. The coffee table beside her is littered with clippers, scissors and pliers.
“Well, yes. I dropped a wrench on my big toe, but instead of the toenail falling off, it did this.”
She takes off her slipper and reveals a yellow hornlike appendage sprouting straight up out of her toe. From the look of it, the toe is undergoing a metamorphosis into a rhinoceros. “It’s getting hard to do all the ranch chores when it hurts so.”
Len swallows hard. “I’m a geologist, Betty!” he shouts.
“No matter. See what you can do. Just don’t use that hammer of yours on it.”
So Len and …
When backpacking, I try to avoid crowds. The few people I do meet, however, often turn out to be memorable. This was true on the 1,300-mile hike I took across Oregon in 1985. My goal then was to begin research for my guidebooks. But my journal wound up revolving around the people I met. After […]
