Pickle juice in the gravy and Camping in the 1950

Dad tells the story of the guy who put pickle juice in the gravy in this letter. I am writing in July and reading about Dad's walking and sleeping and roughing it in the Oregon mtns helps me to understand his ease with camping in the Rockies in the 1950s. He was use to just being out there, no fancy blow up mattresses or tents. When we were kids we would go on these camping trips all over Colorado. Dad would work one saturday and then take off the next and also take off a Monday, so we could stay two nights. A lot of the places we stayed were primitive. We were car camping but there were no paved roads or out houses. The water we drank came from the streams and it tasted so cold and so good. If we went hiking we would take canteens and we could stop and fill them up with water, water which was not polluted then. We had the Desoto and Dad made a box to put a lot of stuff up on top. but the tent poles were too long and were tied on the roof separately. We had a huge old canvas army tent with a hinged pole along the ridge and two supporting wooden poles at the ends. It took all five of us to get the tent up, then we had a snap in floor and sleeping bags made out gunny sacks that mom had sewn together. I liked being at the far end of the tent. In the morning I would unsnap the floor and roll out and go sit on a rock by a stream (there was always a stream), early meditation experience. We were awfully lucky to have seen the country we did before the developers and tourists came in droves.