Last ride at Big Lake (Mon.)

Today was SUNNY!!!.  Our one and only sunny day here at Big Lake, so we decided to go on a LONG ride.  We knew it was going to be a good day because Jeff spotted a horny toad in the campground, our first wildlife for a while, so we will surely see more today.  Sherry chased it out of the road, so then she picked it up so I could get a picture.

Jeff decided we should go to Hannagan Meadow for lunch, so off we went.  Jeff, our leader, spooked a small herd of bucks right beside the road, but Joe and I didn't see them.  He said there were 8, all bucks.  They call these "bachelor buck herds."  He said he had seen elk like this, but never deer.  When they took off, 6 went one way, and 2 the other, but Joe and I missed them all.  We were mostly on main forest roads, but once we got to Hwy 191, we had pavement for about 8 miles.  We had a real nice lunch at the resort there, enjoyed our first blue skies of the week.

Across the road from the resort is a nice meadow that Jeff said used to have elk grazing in it.  But since the 2011 Wallow fire, the elk have formed different habits.  And this year, with all the lush meadows and water everywhere, apparently they don't move far from where they bed down.  We sure haven't seen many.

 There was a real nice bench, with matching chairs, on the porch of the lodge.  Couldn't figure out how to pack this back on the quads, but it would be a nice place to sit and watch elk from across the road, if they ever showed up.

This ride took us past some beautiful scenery, including a river (I think it was the West Fork of the
Black Riveragain) and Beaver Creek.  We saw some interesting concrete formations which I believe are used as water diversions to keep from washing out the road.  Never seen anything like these before.

 You can see that Beaver Creek cut quite a swath through here.  And it was running.

We kept seeing little patches of some kind of red flowers under some of the pine trees.  I finally took a picture but it doesn't do it justice.  It was a nice, colorful patch in the green meadow.

Finally, we got to see some antelope.  Brenda spotted a herd of about 16, so we got to stop and watch them for a while.

We had left our better pair of binoculars at the RV because they had gotten moisture in them, so Joe dug out our back-up set.  But, alas, there was a malfunction.  However, he was able to re-engineer them so we at least got a look at the antelope.

We've seen lots of nice aspen groves up here, some pretty young trees but lots of older ones that didn't get destroyed in the fire.  I would love to come back when their leaves turn this fall.

As we neared the campground, I took one last picture of these beautiful meadows here.  To me, this is the prettiest part of our beautiful state, which has so many different looks.  We are really anxious to get home, but this was a nice way to end our long summer trip.

Today's ride was 80.5 miles, and Joe's gas tank was flashing empty.  Mine also said "empty" but it hadn't started flashing yet.  We spent almost 8 hours in the saddle, including an hour stop for lunch at Hanagan Meadow, so we could barely walk when we got back.  But it didn't rain on us all day, and the temperature was good.  Sometimes we had rainsuits on, but sometimes we took them off.  Our dinner tonight was "clean out the fridge and eat the leftovers," so it didn't take too long to get that heated up.  (Brenda did most of the cooking tonight, but I supervised.)  We all deemed today as an Excellent Adventure, with the sunshine and the antelope as the highlights.

Big Lake (Thurs.-Sun.)

All our days here at Big Lake are cloudy and rainy.  It rains sometime during the day, and usually also during the night. The camp host said it has rained every day since the first of July.  The mornings start out generally clear, but by noon it is overcast and appears to be raining somewhere in the area.  We have been going for rides every day (Joe and I did take Saturday off because it clouded up earlier than normal), and we usually get sprinkled on, at least.  Sometimes it is more than a sprinkle.

But the scenery is beautiful, even though the roads are muddy.  I usually provide the entertainment for Danny and Sherry, trying to dodge the mudholes that I see Joe dive into.  We sometimes find a secondary road to follow, and this one ended with some logs in our way that we had to drive over.  On this road, though, we spooked a flock of turkeys, probably 20 and they were huge.  One was scared enough to fly, so we got a good look at him.  There's lots of pretty meadows up here, and everything is green, green, green.

 On Saturday, we all drove into Springerville.  Danny decided he wanted to gas up for the drive home, and suggested we all go in and have breakfast at Booga Reds.  So we did that, plus a little shopping, stopped for diesel and Joe's diet soda, and headed back to camp.  It had been really cloudy all day, so Joe and I opted out of the late afternoon ride.   But they got drenched before they got back to camp, so we felt really good about choosing to stay in and take naps.  Sunday Jeff and Brenda got up early and headed out to the lake with their boat.  But as had been reported, the fishing is not very good and they didn't even get a bite.  When they got back to camp, they unloaded the Arctic Cat (they keep it in the box trailer to keep it dry), and we all headed out for a ride.  We knew rain was coming, so we geared up for it before we even left camp. 

 One of our stops was next to an area that was being logged from the fire 2 years ago.  It is so sad to see the damage from that awful fire, but we can see that the forests are coming back.  Unfortunately, we will never see the tree growth in our lifetime, but there are lots of signs of rejuvenation, lots of beautiful forest flowers, and lots of young trees growing.



Joe has found a kindred spirit in Danny.  We know we need to keep these two separate.  But the campfires would be awfully quiet without these two.


Our ride today took us along the East Fork of the Black River.  This is one of the prettiest drives we've found.  Jeff and Brenda caught sight of the rear end of two elk as they (the elk) topped a ridge, and Danny and Sherry stopped to look at a grave stone and spooked a badger, but none of the rest of us saw that.  Sherry also spotted a deer, but Joe and I didn't see anything.
08, 11, 12

We stopped for lunch right along the river.  Our buddies shared a tender moment before we headed out from lunch.

We did get caught in the rain before we got back to camp, no surprise.  As many clothes as we had on, I think we would have been disappointed if we had not encountered rain on this ride. 

We reconvened for dinner at Jeff and Brenda's.  Brenda had made crockpot stew, and that warm meal really hit the spot.  Unfortunately, Sherry had another migraine come on, so she went to bed.  After dinner, Joe took Brenda and I on our EWVD, but it was unsuccessful.  All we saw were cows!  We are thinking the elk don't like all these cows and have found other grazing areas.  We sure are not seeing the herds that we saw last year.  We finished our evening sitting around the campfire for a little while, before it started raining again.

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.