MILEPOSTS #1037

By Ken Brafman, Image from Walter S. Young Collection

TITLE: PART ONE: HELTER SHELTER – A CABIN: There’s a bond that many mountain dwellers share. It’s often a sentimental one, and is a bond that usually stands for family and good times. When development pioneers like Charles S. Mann built cabins close to 100 years ago, they were almost always sold as vacation homes. Families enjoyed the convenience of having ‘ready-made’ accommodations, without the fuss. Rather than spending hours packing the car with a tent, bulky gear, cooking utensils, and so on, a cabin made it possible to throw some provisions in the car and at the end of the drive up the hill, be comfortable, just relax and have fun. Many of us in the San Bernardino Mountains live in vintage cabins. The oldest ones are well over 100 years old. This week’s image is a real 1939 photo of the interior living area of ‘Helter Shelter,’ a cabin in the Cedar Glen area. Following 20 years of camping adventures, capped off by a camping trip to North Shore in 1936, the decision was made in 1937 by C.R. and Betty Helter to buy a family haven in the area they’d grown to love. The price was $2400, and one of the four docks in the cove below them was thrown in at no charge. Jane Gwinn Goodall digitized the cabin’s two-volume family guest book, which contains an amazing 80+ years of cabin memories. From the start, their large family sought to share Helter Shelter with friends and relatives, all of whom seem to have left messages in the book upon completing their stay. Prominent in the album is this poem: Ode to Helter Shelter: Blest be this spot where cheerful guests retire, to pause from toil, and burn their evening fire. Blest be this abode, where want and pain repair, and every stranger finds a ready chair.

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