keely – Page 37 – State of Wilderness

Brazos Bend Part II: It’s For the Birds

After staying up until midnight talking, drinking, and eating with our friends on New Year’s Eve, we headed off to our tent. Despite the predictions of cold temperatures, it actually was not a bad night in our sleeping bags, and we felt quite rested in the morning. I flipped us some oatmeal-banana-chocolate chip pancakes that I had found a recipe for on Pinterest while J broke down camp. After all this, we had to drive back up to the headquarters to deal with some unresolved check in issues, and then finally we were ready for our actual goals for the day: work on finding some of the caches in the park we had not found, and record a list of bird species observed for the day.

I had decided that this year we were going to actually keep a species count of the birds we saw. I would say that it was our Big Year, except that we have really never had a “Year” at all. I would actually say that in fact, this is our “Baseline Year”. From the moment we got up, I had been keeping a watch out with the binoculars, bird book in hand, checking off the ones that flitting about the campsite in my Brazos Bend birding checklist that I had downloaded and printed out before we left the house.

When we pulled up at Diane’s campsite to see if anyone else wanted to go caching with us, I still had those items in my hands. We found Rod, and set off down the trail. We spent two hours hiking about along the Bluestem and Bayou trails, attempting to make cache finds. We ended up finding two out of the three we looked for, and I was able to drop off a travel bug I had been carrying for much too long. I was interested to see how my ankle held up, since we want to do some distance hiking this year. I was carrying a little bit of weight in my pack, but not a lot, and my ankle was a bit sore by the time we got back. I hope this will not slow me down from hiking this year. I probably should wear hiking boots and not sneakers when I go – it might help the stability of my ankle, although it is pain in my right heel after long walks that keeps me reaching for the sneakers and avoiding all other shoes.

Our total bird species count for the day was 14. We could have gotten a lot more if we had made it over to the lakes, since we only claimed one water bird species today. There are 4, 987 acres in this park – there was a lot of land we did not cover. We mostly saw birds at the campsites, and just a few different kinds along the trail. My favorite species of the day was the Eastern Bluebird that I saw on our way to the last cache. It was also during this sighting that I somehow lost the cover to the viewing glass of the binoculars, which J found understandably annoying.

These are the birds we saw today: Black-bellied Whistling Duck, Snowy Egret, Black and Turkey Vultures, Killdeer, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Northern Cardinal, Yellow-Rumped Warbler, Eastern Bluebird, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Tufted Titmouse, Carolina Chickadee, and American Crow. There were probably dozens more, but we are still novices at this birding thing.

These were, of course, the most common species seen today. Go figure. This only confirms my theory that we are making the world a very good place for vultures (or, if you read my previous post – maybe we can blame this on the coyotes).

Brazos Bend State Park: Tales of the Wilderness

It is our annual tradition to spend New Year’s Eve on a camping trip with a certain core group of geocachers, give or take a few. For me, this is only the third year I have been involved in this tradition, but for J, this goes back about ten years. (It would be the fourth for me, but last year we had to cancel it due to weather and my leg injury). I knew about it back in the day, but I had trouble convincing my family to go, until my family dynamic changed. This is the second time since I have been involved that we had it at Brazos Bend. The first year, there was a whole group of us there. This year, it was down to a handful.

When we got to the park, we had about an hour until the sun went down, and it was immediately apparent that J and I had different agendas. He was in a race to get the campsite set up, and I wanted to get those last two geocache finds to help me end the year by logging the event as my #3300 geocache find. He encouraged me to take the dogs and make the finds while he situated camp.

In retrospect, we realized that what he meant for me to do is to swing by the other campsite and pick up our friend Diane and maybe her friend, and have them come with me. I didn’t get that part, and plus they had their own thing going on, so I went off by myself at dusk to try to score some finds. I think if I had a friend or a flashlight, it would have been a little different experience for me.

The picture up above is a scene from the trail I took, the Hale Lake Loop. Also, below, a shot of the water from the bridge I crossed to get there. I was really brazosbend 1 enjoying the quiet serenity of having the park to myself – I saw a person when I first set out, but once I got on the trail, not a single soul.

However, the thing about being in the woods is – you are never really alone, even if you think you are. I realized this as I reached ground zero for the first cache I was after, which was about 250 ft off into the woods. I saw a big, black animal moving in the woods about 80 ft in front of me. I thought it was a bear for a moment before I remembered I was in Texas, so it was certainly not that – but in fact, a feral hog. They are a huge pest species in our state, and generally speaking will leave you alone – unless they are in a group, or feel threatened for some reason. I was worried this one would in fact be threatened if my silly dogs decided to start barking and lunging at it, and considered going back for a moment – but I really wanted that cache find, so I stood still, and that is when I realized that pig was not alone. One, two, three, FOUR pigs in a line passed within about 50-80 feet of us. I was amazed that when I told my dogs, “quiet,” they actually listened, and stood stock still, even stopped panting, to watch the pigs pass quietly. We made the cache find, and then got the heck out of dodge.

The sun was going down, but I wanted that next find, so I set off for the next one along a side trail that was the closest one to me. I started reading the cache description, and started getting a little spooked. The cache was called “Cat Tracks”, and it turns out the reason why that name was chosen is because the cache owner said they saw the biggest bobcat they had ever seen at the cache site when going for the hide. As I got closer, I began to get the paranoid feeling that I was being stalked. I had to go about 180 ft into the brush, which by now was kind of dark inside, and when the dogs and I were about halfway in the thicket, we heard a branch snap nearby. We all froze…and then beat a hasty retreat outta there.

About twenty feet back down the trail, I started second guessing myself, and started to go back in…only to see or sense something jump down off a nearby branch, which then bounced up and down from the relieved weight. Nevermind!

As I was headed out of the woods and towards the bridge that would lead me back to the campsite, I started hearing cracking and snapping of branches in the woods to my right. Several times the dogs and I stopped to listen, and I became convinced there was a whole herd of feral hogs in those woods, about to bust out and chase us down. As the sun was finally setting, I came to two realizations. One: those sounds, and the faint hissing sounds I was also hearing, where in fact only vultures settling in to roost, fighting over the best spots, and knocking down dead branches as they went. Two: that at dark, Brazos Bend State Park belongs to the creatures. That, although a frightening thing, is also how it should be, and I am glad the creatures have a place to call their own.

That night as we sat around the campfire sipping our adult beverages and telling life stories, I heard a sound. It increased in intensity, and J noticed it, too, and agreed with my consensus: coyotes howling. It sounded like a lot of them.

The next day, when we were hiking with Rod (from the caching team “uptrain”), he told us that earlier that day, he had come across the carcasses of four feral hogs that had been tore up. He had told the ranger about it, and the ranger explained that was the work of the coyotes. The coyotes lurk around the edges of the pig trails, working together to take down the weak and the young. I am not sure if it was the four pigs I had seen the day before – Jerry didn’t think so, because they were on the far end of Hale Lake, not the side I had been on – and I am not sure whose side I am on in this nature’s scheme, but I did find it interesting to think about what kind of dramas played out in those woods once the sun goes down.

Coming Soon

I have neglected this poor blog, and if you are a regular reader, bless your heart and I am sorry. I was consumed with wedding planning, as I tried to put together a wedding in less than three months with a very bare-bones budget. It’s over, and it was a success, and now I can focus on other things.

We haven’t been doing much exploration of the great outdoors and the wilderness, because we were focusing on home and family. There were two adventures we had in the past couple of months: going to Corpus for a weekend to see my brother, and driving out to La Grange to buy some mead for the wedding. We went geocaching along the way in La Grange and I made a new friend:

This year, I am hopeful we will have more adventures, and that I can share with you some of the fun and interesting things we do.

Of course our plans for the New Year’s include getting in better shape, like most people. We really need to work on that. We need to get in good shape to be better parents for the kids we have here, and for those we might want to have together. These are some of our other plans:

1) Discover Houston – from a kid’s point of view. We made a list of the places that make Houston unique, and set dates to take the kids to the ones we haven’t already taken them too.

2) Hiking: I have also set some dates and made some plans for that. I want us to get backpacking equipment rather than car camping equipment, so we can do long distance hiking. I would LIKE to do the Lone Star Trail this year and make some preparations to do pieces of the AT in following years. We don’t have specific plans for more that a weekend hike on the Lone Star Trail, though

3) Geocaching: there are two people I would really like to catch up to and pass, because I am competitive like that. They are about 300-500 caches ahead of me. I usually find around 500 caches a year, but we have really slowed down on geocaching this year. I want to get back up there, so I have also set aside dates to work on caching series. I am also working on solving the puzzle caches in my area and would like to find those, and widen out the distance to our nearest unfound cache to about three miles from our house. There are still ten pages of caches that are within three miles of us right now!

4) Explore Glacier National Park: this is the vacation I am planning for us this year. I also think we could take the opportunity to drive through Utah and try to get that Potters Pond cache that we were unable to get the last time we were out there. More grandfather caches! More western adventures!

5) Run a 5K with my oldest son – as part of my road to recovery, and something that he and I can do together.

6) Re-invest in my faith – get involved with the youth group again (now that I have that marriage certificate), and also spend some quiet time with God every day, and teach my sons to do the same.

I also want to investigate wineries, invest more in my friendships, replace my bike and go riding more often, and set up a regular revolving housework schedule that we can all stick to. What are your plans for the new year?

Fulshear Afternoon

We went out west this afternoon.

It’s been a long time coming, this latest trip to Fulshear. We hid some geocaches out there in 2012, and a few of them haven’t been found in a while. One of the things on my list that I wanted to do when I recovered from my leg injury was this very trip: cache maintenance, exploration, and a little cache finding.

The kids didn’t want to leave the house but we didn’t care. I did try to sweeten the trip with a stop at Essence House II for cookies and drinks before we started our journey in earnest, though. Once they got outside, they had a good time. The following are their portraits of outdoor play near the Brazos River bank:

This area is one of TPWD’s canoe launch sites they built in late 2011. I have yet to see the canoe launches they built out here show up on an actual paddling trail listing on the TPWD website, but this place does seem to be popular with people wanting to fish, play in the river, and shoot guns. The boys almost always find 12 gauge shotgun shells down here when we go.

In the top picture, the fishermen on top of the bridge support had just walked up there – that was not possible last time we were down here. The waters have receded a lot. You can see the pile of branches on the supports showing the level the water had been at before. We have been to this canoe launch quite a few times, although never to actually launch a canoe. There are a lot of trails that go on past where we have our cache hidden. Someday, we might hide more. I let the boys explore a little within eyesight of me, but the inclines on the trails were too great for me to follow them right now, being just a week and a half post leg surgery. I still have stitches in my leg and barely can handle any distance or terrain changes for the moment.

After this, we headed to the other canoe launch out here, about 3.4 miles away. For people who don’t canoe, we sure seem to spend a lot of time at the launches. We were here to check on another cache, named for a Sasquatch story a cop told us out here. It is also the site where a cross marker lay in remembrance of two people who were murdered near here and whose bodies were found in the river.

Today, there was another body out here, although we are fairly certain from the shape it was animal in origin, and not a human. We noticed it when we parked, a brown roundish lump laying on the ground in between the parking spot and the cache site, not 20 feet from the cross. We thought it was a dead deer, but when we got closer, we realized the brown color came from the blanket that was thrown over it. There were maggots crawling on the blanket, and when my oldest son (foolishly) threw a small rock at the decomposing body, you could see the ripples underneath of what certainly was a huge colony of maggots making work of this carcass. It started to smell and we were disgusted and walked away, none of us having the guts to lift the blanket and see what was underneath. From the body shape, we suspect it was a large dog, or perhaps a pig or other small livestock. This picture of the kids sitting on the culvert just to the right of this disturbing find.

Ew. After this, we were going to head for a small series of caches we have hidden on a country road about 6 miles east, but we decided to take a scenic backroad diversion to get there and then ran out of time. Instead, we found a shady country road that might be ripe for a new cache series (although the nearby residents that we saw outside their homes were causing us to question this choice – it seemed like sort of a rough area – it had a “Deliverance” meets South Africa kind of feel to it, with unfriendly eyes and condemned shacks – which was a surprise because the road backed up to a very nice high end neighborhood).

So we drove back up to the main road (1093) and then entered the neighborhood of Fulbrook and found a couple of caches there. Here is my log entry for one I particularly enjoyed:

JustKeely found Rocky Trail

I really enjoyed this cache, it was everything I like about caching. It was a short, scenic walk from parking, and we saw a blue heron and a great white egret in the pond. While signing the cache log, we saw some striking red, purple, and white flowers, as well as an interesting looking beetle. We saw a spider web with a small black spider with a white back on the walk back, and then we heard some bird just going at it, so we looked around to identify them. The smallest of our boys said it was probably a boy and girl boy talking to each other, and even though he got in trouble for talking so loudly and potentially scaring them off, he did appear to be right. Team Four Paw was also right when he speculated about it being woodpeckers. Two red bellied woodpeckers were getting into it, chasing each other around and tweeting. Well, on second thought, maybe it was two males and not a male and female – maybe they were fighting over territory or something. It was neat to see though. Thanks for the fun little outdoors experience for the day.

These are some of the flowers I saw. Took me a while to identify these flowers because I am not that good at it, but I finally found it: Turks cap, or Malvaviscus drummondii. Here is another shot of them up against a tree.

Too bad I didn’t get a picture of the woodpeckers. I did get one of the beetle we saw, but it is not in focus. The spider web would have been cool, but was too hard to try to capture with my cell phone camera.

I think the boys had fun, even though they were quite happy to be headed home after this. I feel good about finally maintaining my caches, and about getting out of the house. Hopefully, after I get my stitches out, my leg will actually heal up with no more problems and I can start hiking again.