BRIDGEPORT, Calif. — Through an encampment of white canvas tents and tepees strode groups of rough-looking men dressed in buckskin and furs. Accompanying them were sturdy women sporting bonnets and ankle-length cotton dresses. From the other side of a nearby pine forest, rifle shots that sounded like cannon fire reverberated off the sage-covered hillside.

At a mountain-man rendezvous, they walk the walk and talk the talk of one of the most colorful periods of American frontier history. At least they do until the weekend is over and they have to go back to work.

"Basically, all we're doing is playing dress-up, trying to relive what our forefathers went through," said Tom Squires, range master for the Bridgeport Mountain Man Rendezvous held last weekend in the Eastern Sierra foothills of northern Mono County. "This event is just for enjoyment and recreation more than anything else."

Enjoyment, recreation and escape.

"It gets me out of the 20th Century for a while," said buckskin-clad, fur-hatted John Hudick, 54, an electrical engineer from Santa Cruz County. "Basically, we try to keep with the theme of the pre-1840s."

Mountain-man rendezvous have developed into something of a subculture. They are patterned after the original mountain-man rendezvous of the 1820s and '30s, in which American and French-Canadian fur trappers gathered once a year with traders and Indians along the west slope of the Rockies to swap furs for supplies. The original rendezvous were raucous affairs at which trappers blew off a year's worth of steam with boozing, brawling and womanizing before heading back into the harsh, lonely mountains.

Their modern-day counterparts are considerably more modest, dispensing with most of the uncivilized behavior in favor of black-powder rifle contests, knife- and tomahawk-throwing matches and good-natured joshing. In typical mountain-man drollery, a list of rules handed out to rendezvous visitors included the commandment: "No hollering, fighting, eye gouging or ear biting after 11 p.m."

"You'll hear some hooting and hollering out here at night, but what you see at these things is really a family-oriented kind of thing," said Jake Jacobsen, the Mono County undersheriff and one of the organizers of the second annual Bridgeport event. "You'll see a lot of wives involved, kids involved."

A mountain-man rendezvous circuit has evolved, with events held frequently throughout California and other Western states.