Sunday, January 6, 2008 - Gum Springs Campground, Winnfield LA
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Roadside Googling
When I came upon a sign for the Gum Springs Recreation Area I stopped by the entrance and Googled it to see if it might be a good place to stop, that not being immediately obvious from the road. ForestCamping.com describes the primitive camping available here.
That was enough to persuade me to pull in and check it out. Yes indeed, it's a nice quiet little campground, just right for me, so here I am, the lone camper, in little pine forested campground developed by the CCC back in its day. At $1.50 for the night (after my 50% Golden Age Passport discount) not hard to take either. This might be a good spot to catch up on some maintenance without disturbing the neighbors.
Night camp
Gum Springs Campground - Winnfield LA
- This is a primitive campground with no water or electric hookups at the sites and no dump station.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here but I don't remember how strong the signal is.
- Get Kisatchie National Forest camping info
- Find other references to Gum Springs
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather
- Get a Kisatchie National Forest map
- Get a Google map
Beware of Hypnotic Media
To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.