Leaving Green's Peak (Wed.-Thurs.)

We had our last campfire here at this beautiful camping spot Tuesday night.  Jeff and Sherry are the fire bugs.  In fact, Joe named Sherry "poker face," because she is usually poking at the fire, in competition with Jeff who is always in charge of it, while Joe and Danny just relax and watch the action.

 

We all missed a little excitement during the night.  Danny heard a noise, thought the cows might have turned over Jeff's smoker, so he went dashing out of his 5th Wheel in his underwear to wage war.  The cows were in camp and had, in fact, turned over a table by the campfire (it wasn't close enough to fall in, and the fire was out anyway, luckily), but he chased the cows out of camp.  He went head to head with a bull, picked up a stick to scare the bull off, but the bull just turned and challenged Danny, so Danny turned tail and headed back into his camper.  Unfortunately, we all missed his heroics, and no pictures of this epic event were taken.  We should have forced him into a re-enactment, but that was our last night here, and Danny didn't want to take any bulls home with him.

So Wednesday we got started packing things up.  We went for one last, short ride before we loaded the quads. We got to one steep hill that Jeff thought he needed to tackle, but Joe and I opted out of that (basically, me).  So we went on ahead, thinking the rest of them were going on over the hill, and that the road would reconnect. Well, when they realized we hadn't come up, they came back down the hill to try to catch up with us.  But we were trying to catch up with them, thinking they were ahead of us on the other side of the hill.  So we all rode fast, trying to catch up with each other, but we never did.  We beat them back to camp by about 10 minutes.  However, when we came out of the woods, we could see that a thunderstorm was heading our way, so we hustled back and finished loading. Just about noon, we were all ready to head out, with Jeff in the lead, Brenda following with their boat, then Danny and Sherry's 3-piece rig, followed by Joe in the RV and lastly, me in the truck pulling our box trailer.  Joe said I looked like a real truck driver.





 

 And we got out just in time.  The clouds were rolling in, and before we got to the main road (which took 20 minutes to go 4.9 miles), it started to sprinkle.


We were all sorry to leave our beautiful, green meadow behind. We really enjoyed our time here.  And I'm sure Danny was sorry to leave all his new friends behind (the bulls).


And we were really glad we didn't let the little camper parked here keep us from using this campsite because no one ever showed up at it, and we have been here 6 days.  So there it sat, all by itself, with the awning out, nestled back in these trees.  But our site probably worked better for us anyway, since we had so many units to deal with.

We drove through rain on our one-hour drive over to the Big Lake Campground.  Saw one elk, and some piles of hail along the road, which we apparently just missed.  We all got situated, which took some doing for the Pauliks and Schritchfields, since they had 7 units to try to fit into their double site (that's not counting Danny and Sherry's Razr, Jeff's Arctic Cat, or Brenda's quad).  But with some maneuvering, they got it all off the road, and onto their site.



Wednesday morning Brenda discovered that she had packed too light and only had brought 2 pair of jeans, so Thursday she went back to Springerville to the laundry.  Jeff wasn't feeling well, so he took the day off.  Danny, Sherry, Joe and I went for a ride but didn't scare up any elk or deer.  We drove back to Crescent Lake, and then we stopped at the dam at Big Lake.  There's is a lot of algae growing in the lake and it is reported that the fishing isn't very good.  Joe found a rock to sit on while Danny and Sherry walked on down to the spillway.  At 9000+ ft., it doesn't take much walking for us to be winded.

On our way back to camp, Joe noticed that the Visitor Center was open so we turned around and swung in there.  They have a nice display of a 300-year old tree, and of the hooves of the local wildlife.  They also had a sign about the little brown plastic tags they are putting on the pine trees to prevent the bark beetles from damaging them.  We haven't notice any of these tags yet, but we will start watching for them. 

After dinner, we went for an EWVD in Danny's fine, new truck.  We found a small herd of elk shortly after we left camp, I counted 6.

We drove all the way out to Reservation Lake, and Danny with all his fancy lights on the front of the truck spotted another small herd of elk in the dark.  I think there were 8 of them.  We also saw an owl, so it was a successful trip.

It's been raining here several times a day, and also during the night.  Temperature has been 51 when I got up these two mornings here, and into the 70s during the day.  We haven't gotten hailed on yet, but I think the opportunity is there every day.  Personally, I am hoping to avoid that experience.