Long before Mike Allen was flying geology crews across the Alaskan wilderness, the outdoors was already the Allen family's second home. Every summer, the mountains called — and the family answered. The evidence lives in dozens of black-and-white snapshots: canvas wall tents pitched beneath towering Sierra Nevada pines, improvised camp kitchens fragrant with woodsmoke, rocky riverbanks where even the smallest children were handed a fishing pole almost before they could walk. It was a life lived deliberately close to the wild, and it shaped everyone who came along for the ride.
The camps themselves were substantial affairs. Canvas wall tents staked firmly to the earth, tarpaulins rigged as shade canopies, folding cots dragged out into patches of dappled sunlight — these were not overnight excursions but extended stays in the forest. A back-of-photo caption in the family archive places Roy Allen specifically at Sequoia National Park, and the towering trees visible across multiple photographs — some with trunks wide enough to drive through — are entirely consistent with the great sequoia groves of California's Sierra Nevada.
The camps moved with the generations. What began as an adventure of adults in wide-brimmed hats gradually became a full family production — complete with children in tow from infancy onward. One photograph shows a smiling infant bathing in a round white enamel wash basin set directly on the campground dirt, a vintage automobile and canvas tent visible in the background. Another shows a baby of perhaps six to nine months propped on a striped camping cot outdoors, blinking in the dappled forest light. The mountains, it seems, were no reason to interrupt the ordinary rhythms of a young family's life.
As the children grew, the campsite became their playground. Photographs from what appears to be the late 1930s through the early 1950s show toddlers and young children exploring tent entrances with wide-eyed curiosity, arranging toy trains and cars in the pine needles, and dragging a red Radio Flyer wagon between the trees. A California license plate — number 290206 — is clearly visible on a small enclosed camping trailer in one photograph, confirming the family's travels within the state, likely to the forested parks of the Sierra Nevada or the coastal redwood groves.
The western mountain roads themselves were part of the adventure. One remarkable photograph shows a vintage automobile — its front license plate reading B87 497 — threading a narrow mountain pass beside a sheer wall of packed snow, a child leaning out the passenger window. A canvas-topped utility truck follows close behind. The scene speaks to mountain travel in an era when the passes were not always certain, and getting to camp was itself an expedition. A separate image shows the same spirit of the open road: the family posed before an early-1950s Chevrolet sedan, a canvas desert water bag hanging from the front bumper — a practical necessity for crossing the arid stretches of the American Southwest.
But if camping was the ritual, fishing was the religion. The archive's back-of-photo captions tell us plainly that Roy Allen and his son Mike fished the Kern River together, and one handwritten annotation on a photograph identifies a catch at Kings River, California. The inscription reads: '2¼ lb. Brown Trout / Kings River / -49.' The child holding that fish — a toddler barely tall enough to lift it — appears to be around two to three years old, suggesting the next generation was introduced to the sport almost as soon as it could stand on a riverbank.
The image of a toddler triumphant over a fish recurs across the archive with striking frequency — proof that this was not a one-time photograph opportunity, but a deeply ingrained family practice. In one photograph, a very young child identified in handwritten ink as 'Michael' stands shirtless on a sandy riverbank, a thin fishing pole in both hands and what appears to be a small catch on the wet sand before him. The bottom edge of that print carries a partially legible inscription suggesting a year in the early 1940s. Alongside the Kings River image, these annotations anchor the fishing tradition firmly to real rivers, real seasons, and real children learning the craft.
The archive's back-of-photo caption for one image reads simply: 'Roy and his son Mike on the Kern River.' It is a spare description of something clearly profound — a father and son standing together on the banks of one of the Sierra's great rivers, a tradition in progress. The Kern flows south out of the high Sierra, cold and fast over granite cobble, prime trout water. That Roy brought Mike to it, and that Mike in turn appears again and again in photographs holding fish almost from infancy, speaks to the passing of something more than technique: it was a way of being in the world, handed down.
The rivers also offered simpler pleasures. Photographs show children wading in shallow rocky creeks, lying prone in the current, crouching in the shallows grinning at whoever held the camera. One image shows three children seated together on a great flat boulder beside a mountain stream — older and younger, arms around each other — the creek tumbling over granite in the sunlit background. The Sierra Nevada in summer, for this family, was not a destination so much as a state of being.
By the time the children were old enough to hold a rod without help, fishing had become an occasion that required a proper setting — and a proper audience. Photographs from what appear to be the late 1940s and 1950s show boys displaying their catches at home: standing barefoot in the yard of a white clapboard house, holding fish nearly as long as their torsos, their expressions caught between pride and the effort of holding such a weight. The fish come home with the family; the family comes home from the fish.
The fishing tradition extended well into adulthood. One color photograph — warmer in palette, suggesting a later era, likely the 1950s through early 1970s — shows a man standing on a rocky riverbank with white water rushing behind him, a freshly caught fish held high in one hand, a wicker creel strapped at his waist and a net in the other hand. Another color image, shot in the same warm consumer-film tones, shows a figure in a wide-brimmed hat standing in a pine-forest camp, arms spread wide to display an entire stringer of small trout. These photographs carry the look and feel of the same mountains, the same rivers, the same family instinct — just a generation or two further along.
The back-of-photo caption 'Roy and his son Mike on the Kern River' may be only four words of family fact, but the dozens of photographs surrounding it fill in what those words leave unsaid: the canvas tents staked into the Sierra soil, the enamel washbasin serving as a baby's bathtub under the pines, the toddler staggering under the weight of a two-and-a-quarter-pound brown trout on the Kings River in 1949, the road winding up through snowbanks to the high passes, and always the mountains, always the trees, always the water running cold and clear over the granite. For the Allen family, the western wilds were not a vacation from life. They were life itself.
Chapter III · All Photos · 41 images
