Travels – Page 10 – State of Wilderness

Western Wilderness

We are finally home from a wild road trip out West, and still processing it all. I want to share with people some of our experiences, but it is going to take a bit of time to work through the details. Here is a simple summary of the trip details, though:

Miles Covered: 6602
Caches Found: 60
“Grandfather” Caches found: 9 (“100 Oldest Active Geocaches”)
States: Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma
National Parks: Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Arches, Canyonlands (briefly), Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, Zion (briefly), Glacier
National Monuments: Florissant Fossil Beds, Grand Staircase-Escalante
numerous National Forest areas, most notably San Isabel, Clearwater
State Parks: Caprock Canyons, Priest Lake (Idaho)

Wildlife highlights:
A badger running across a meadow of wildflowers in Utah
A group of baby skunks in the garden of our Moab motel, and a mother lingering near the trash cans
A herd of 100 buffalo in Caprock Canyons State Park
A prairie-dog town near the bathrooms in the same park
Coyotes (2) in Montana, including one very mangy and starving one who was dashing on to the highway for road kill
Wolf – one or two sightings in Montana, plus the eighteen or so that were at the sanctuary we visited
Moose -a pair in Cut Bank, Montana who were being stared at suspiciously by the local horses
Bears – four of them; a momma grizzly and her two cubs, and a black bear, all along the edge of forests/meadows off the road in the Many Glacier section of Glacier National Park. There are an alleged 750 bears total who call the park their home
Hoary Marmots and Mountain Goats off the Hidden Lake trail
Mule and White tailed deer, pronghorn antelope, possibly some elk

We didn’t see/identify as many birds as I would have liked, but some of the ones we did see were epic, life-listers, or particularly gratifying. Those stories I will tell later. Listed here are the species we saw that were new to us for this year:
Northern Bobwhite
Mountain Chicadee
Warbling Vireo
Northern Shrike
Broad Tailed Hummingbird
Black Billed Magpie
White Throated Swift
Mountain Bluebird
Pinyon Jay
Townsends Solitaire
Spotted Towhee
Rufous Hummingbird
American Dipper
California Gull
Ferrunginous Hawk
Barrows Goldeneye
Cooper’s Hawk
House Wren
Greater Roadrunner
Common Raven

These birds, along with the Purple Martins I have seen this year and not yet listed, bring our yearly observed total up to 115.

Some of the best parts of our trip involved rare visits with friends and family, seeing the “Super Moon” peeking out the North Window of Arches National Park, watching AJ be inspired by Utah, wildflowers, driving on remote forest roads, seeing a presentation by the “Buckskin Poet” Jack Gladstone at the Many Glacier Lodge, laughing so hard we nearly passed out, criss-crossing the Lewis and Clark trail, learning more about how these intrepid explorers brought the West to us, and having the stories of the ancient people be brought alive and feeling connected to it. These are the stories that I hope come out over the following days so you can connect with our experiences.

San Marcos: Purgatory Creek Natural Area and Prospect Park

I think I am turning green after this weekend..green with envy over this sweet, sweet setup my best friend growing up has got going on over there in the smtx. Not only does she have this great big yard that is part elevated open green space for the kids to play/part wilderness, but she also has this super awesome natural area walking distance from her house that offers a “greenbelt” with nature trails and the chance to experience an endangered species: the Golden Cheeked Warbler. This little bird has experienced so much habitat loss of the places it likes to nest in – tall juniper and oak woodlands – because of urban development that it hasn’t got a lot of places left, but this greenbelt is a protected space to hold back just a bit of this prime real estate for this brightly colored little bird to lay its eggs.

We didn’t see any of the warblers out during our two forays into the natural area over the weekend, but perhaps they were busy doing their nesting thing, which extends until the end of this next week. We might have heard them; there were unidentified bird sounds going on around us. Truth be told, we didn’t stop much to lift the binoculars, because we were too busy watching the rocks on the trail and/or our phone/gps to see where the geocaches were in the park. We were excited about the chance to see them, though, the opportunity that could happen at any time.

We did see a bit of other birds, butterflies and bees on our walks, as well as whole herds of mossies (that we could have done without – but the air was humid after a well-needed rain so that is just as well).

To be fair, I am not really feeling envious as much as I am feeling motivated to find a situation like hers. We were inspired enough to draw out some plans for our yard to allow more outdoor appreciation time in our own space. We really liked sitting on my friend’s porch on adirondack chairs watching the numerous birds flitting and flying about the trees and cacti in their yard. Several common nighthawk (#89) searched the tops of the trees for food in the evening, and in the morning, sparrows and cardinals, as well as other birds sang bright little morning songs. We saw our first hummingbird of the year flitting around a flower in her neighbor’s yard (I am not sure what species it was; it was too fast to identify). We want to build on the bird bath/bird feeder concept at our own house to draw them into our yard like that, although it certainly won’t be as spectacular as her yard is.

Of course, they also have the San Marcos River so close to their house – another reason to be jealous. We all loaded up the tubes and took them down to spend about an hour floating along. We saw some ducks on the river. One was a drake who stood up tall and stretched his wings, and I have been trying to figure out what he was. He looked like a Mallard but he was mostly black, and I am wondering if it is one of the Mallard x Black Duck crosses “they” talk about occasionally. There was a female with chicks that was possibly a female Wood Duck.

The river was very clear, clean, and cool. My youngest kept wanting to get off his tube and swim in it near us, and we let him do that sometimes when it was convenient for us. I felt the urge as well, and at the end, I did get to take a swim, but mostly to try to catch up to my oldest one, who had gotten ahead and needed to be told to stop.

There was so much good outdoor adventure on our trip, and some little places here and there that called to us that we didn’t have time to explore, so we do plan on going back. We also had a really nice time visiting with my friend Mari and her family, and the kids got along really well. I have already been looking at our calendar to see when we could fit in a return trip (although it probably won’t be until next year). If we go there again in March through May, perhaps we can lay our eyes on those Golden Cheeked Warblers after all.

Michigan moments

I had been in Texas in the morning, Georgia midday, Illinois early afternoon, then driven through Indiana to here, near Kalamazoo, Michigan.

I was on a mission; I have been trying to fill in my calendar on gc.com of days I have found a cache, and this was a day I needed. Finally I had a minute to take a short walk in the evening and see what I could find.

I came upon a herd of deer, about a dozen altogether. They were grazing in a field about five hundred feet from the hotel, just across the street from where I needed to look for the cache. A couple of young ones in the herd were curious about what I was doing, and turned to watch me. One couldn’t stand it, and finally had to cross the street and make attempts to graze at the grass near me, watching me. I tried to see if he would let me approach him (foolish girl – but he didn’t have antlers with which to gore me, and I was curious how close he would let me get), but this only resulted in the whole herd taking off for the safety of the woods, as if I meant to hurt them.

I didn’t find that cache, but I did find one on the other side of the hotel. I saw several Canadian Geese (#86) honking in the grass along the way, and the morning I saw them again in the back of the hotel.

This is the view from the back of the hotel in Portage. I didn’t get to explore much because I was sort of at the mercy of the sales guys, who had the car. I spent some time here, though, armed with binoculars to see what I could see. Most of what I saw were the same birds I had been seeing in Texas, except for a pair or two of Mallards (#87) that flew low near the trees on their way to some other water source. There were blackbirds, robins, and sparrows out there, others too that I can’t think of right now.

In the drive through Indiana, though, I had looked over and seen a glorious site of several sandhill cranes covering a field of beaten down golden stalks of some crop, probably corn. I also saw cliff swallows (#88) that had made a mud nest along the front of the building of the client we had come to visit. I thought I would have a chance for more wildlife observations when we returned to Chicago, but we stayed in an area full of tall buildings, and clubs and restaurants.

As much as it is nice to get away, it was also really nice to come home, return to my boys and my bike and the gorgeous spring we are having this year.

All The Things We Didn’t Do

It was one of those moments that is so typical of us, and yet so frustrating. He was on his tiptoes, and I was leaning over from a picnic bench, trying to make sure I didn’t fall down. We were peering into the windows of an empty cabin. A curtain fluttered from the breeze of the fan, a breeze that could have come from our sighs. These were sighs of regret over the choices not taken.

This should have been our weekend. This should have been our spot.

We imagined the kind of fun we would have had, walking out from the cabin in an early morning to see if we would get a bite on a line from the stocked lake. Pictured the kind of peace we would have had, chilling on the porch. Thought about all the dollars we would have saved, if we had just done the things we wanted to do.

We made our reservations for Buescher State Park back in December. I should have called it in, but I was confused about the difference between the cabins and premium screened shelters, and how each one is reserved in the system. We had known since two years ago, when we came up here to hike one day, that we wanted to come back and reserve Cabin #3, but instead I had reserved us a premium screened shelter, which looks like this below:

This weekend, the weekend of the Texas Challenge in Bastrop, we came up to the park, claimed our campsite, got our keys, and then never came back, until this minute, the minute of regret, as we were leaving town two days later. We had coughed up our $62 (after coupons) that we ended up spending on the reservation as a “donation” to the state parks. We had also managed to spend another $225 we didn’t intend to on two nights at a hotel.

Why, you ask? Because, this is what we do. Most of the time, we are really great for each other, but sometimes we do these things; I overplan, he procrastinates, we forget to communicate, we let timelines slide, we go with the flow so much that we end up missing out on things we meant to do. We ended up doing so many things this weekend that we never did the things we meant to do, like set up our campsite, relax in nature, look at the birds, drop a line in the lake, take a hike on the trail. We would have loved to take a bike ride from Fishermans to Ferry Park in downtown Bastrop. All weekend we drove back and forth in front of The Roadhouse cafe near Bastrop State Park, and never once did we sit down in there and have some hot sandwiches, fried pickles, and iced tea. I would have liked to get some pictures of those gorgeous wildflowers blooming all along HIghway 71, maybe stick the kids in there and be like a real Texan.

What we did instead is spend an ungodly amount of hours sitting at MayFair Park in Bastrop, in between going to geocaching event after geocaching event. Four events in twenty four hours. We spent hours planning, scheming and texting our team. We talked to lots of friends and teammates, exchanged travel bugs, spent too much money at Buccees, too much time at La Hacienda. We (or rather he) gave a water-bottle bath in the parking lot to one dirty little boy, who spent most of an afternoon rolling around in a dirtpile. We drove around to seven different locations to grab codes off doors to log the Lab Caches specifically put out for this event. We bought some more rocks for son and I’s rock collection, spent too much money again buying pecan treats and gifts at the Berdoll Pecan Company, checked out some bronze statues at a foundry, took a tour of a facility that bottles rain water and turns it into drinking water (and then tasted it – quite good!). We spit off a bridge and got a certificate for being an official SOB (member of the Society of Bridge Spitters). He taught the boys how to play shuffleboard. We bought a couple more bottles of mead and one bottle of a sweet table wine being offered as a sample at Cripple Creek wines.

Through all of this, we were just too tired each night to set up camp in the dark. If we had the cabin, it would have been all right – we could have just thrown our sleeping bags over the bunk bed style cots that are already set up in there.

We had no idea what the screened shelter we had rented even looked like until Sunday afternoon, when we stopped by to return the keys to it. The rangers had already called us, wondering what the heck ever happened. We peeked inside it, then inside the cabins. It turns out the floor was so neat and spotless that we probably could have just thrown the sleeping bags down on it and been all right, saved ourselves a few hundred bucks. It would only have taken us mere minutes to set up, yet we were too busy to ever even stop to look.

It reminded me of other times, like when we arrived midday at the campsite we had rented for the night before and never claimed in the Redwood Forest, only to discover it was the best campsite ever, and really not that much farther down the road than the place we ended up sleeping at. So much for all my planning and dreaming.

For now, all we can do is sigh, shrug, and commit ourselves to coming back another day; another day to do all the things we didn’t do.

I am going to make it April, before those wildflowers have all hidden their heads for the summer. This time, I am calling the reservation line, and nailing down that Cabin #3. I hope you are reading a completely different blog entry this time next month.