Up at 5:30 a.m. to catch up on picture editing and journal writing! No internet service for a long time, so will have to batch these posts later.
We had the small mouth bass I caught for breakfast with scrambled eggs and toast, the fish was indeed a tasty morsel!
After breakfast, we paddled out to the Ranger. Russ and Toni joined us and we decided to paddle to the end of the creek in Oak Canyon and hike to the end of the canyon. I paddled out to the middle of Oak Canyon to see if I could get a connection on the BlackBerry, and although I could clearly see Navajo Mountain looming right over us, there was no service. Patty's BlackBerry died yesterday, and I am pretty fed up, I think there are either Droids or iPhones in our fairly immediate future.
After paddling about a mile, we then hiked to the end of Oak Canyon, which is perhaps another mile. Oak Canyon has a lot of good sized trees, a little forest really, which is quite unusual in the canyons of Lake Powell. We saw not only the scrub oak for which it is named, but juniper trees laden with berries and even one cedar tree. We had done this hike last year but were not really prepared for it then. Patty was wearing rubber sandals and I was wearing Crocs This year we were ready with decent footwear, and a backpack with plenty of water and some snacks for energy!
There is an easy path on one side but we took off on the other side and kind of blazed our own trail back to the end. It was deja vu all over again seeing the deep pool in the rock creek bed and the steep rock face we scrambled up last year. We finally got to the large bowl at the end and climbed to a large ledge about half way up, which must have been an Anasazi abode 700 years ago. Although it is not restored, it is just too perfect not to have been. Baxter is a natural mountain goat dog, running back and forth along the edge of the ledge, giving me fits. He is really in his element on the trails here!
Shortly after we got back in the afternoon, everyone else had arrived. There are 25 boats here - 24 C-Dorys and one Ranger Tug. In the evening, we had the fabulous potluck we have come to expect at C-Dory Get-Togethers. No doubt about it, Tex Allen's fresh bass ceviche was the highlight, but there was lots and lots of good stuff. Tex also had a hand-crank ice cream maker, so all had a cup of ice cream, which we improved with a bit of Ryan's Irish Cream that Bill and El of Halcyon had given us. We moved all the folding chairs up around the fire pit and finished the evening off with a dandy campfire. All in all, a nearly perfect day!
OUT
No comments:
Post a Comment