Tuesday August 11, 2015 Merritt Creek Nevada
Note: I’m posting three blogs today. The first one starts on the 7th of August. Use the, recent posts thing on the right side bar of this blog to find the older posts and start with August 7. These blogs are being posted from the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. The next posts will likely be from Jarbidge if I can find internet access and it might be a week before you hear from me.
First thing this morning I went back out for another walk up the creek to check out the beaver action.
I went by this beaver area with the wooden dam.
This is the beaver dam in the above picture. Note that the sticks on the dam are facing up stream which would be helpful for big spawning fish that are swimming up stream in the winters higher waters. I don’t think they do it for the fish, it’s just the way they build there dams.
I stopped and watched in this spot for a good spell. You can sure see how the beaver have spread out the water. The shorelines are all wet and lush with vegetation. This is an older dam, you can see how the dam is reverting to nature, so to speak.
I went back to camp where I found Steve getting up. After awhile I took Steve back out to the beaver area and showed him what I found. His mood is improving, but not his sore back.
Steve is standing by a beaver lodge on the beaver pond.
We walked up the creek a little further to this beaver area with some ducks in it.
Here’s a couple of the ducks we saw in the beaver pond.
We headed on back to camp for a good long break then decided to go for a walk up in the quaking aspen trees up on side of the hill.
We walked up into those aspen trees up on the hillside and made a loop back to camp.
We worked our way up the hill and into the trees. It was amazingly lush under some of the aspens.
We walked through this lush area on the way back down.
This was our view of some of the beaver area in the creek just above our camp, from the hillside.
We headed on back to camp were we rested up and had something to eat. In the mean time, it was thundering off and on and spitting some rain, most of it not hitting the ground, but occasionally the clouds burst.
Around seven PM, I headed back up to the beaver pond where I saw the beaver the other night.
I spotted something zipping through the grass on the waters edge, which turned out to be this little three inch long frog. It and others were feeding in the grasses along the water line.
Shortly after that, this beaver came swimming by, so I moved to a good viewing spot close to the water near the beaver’s lodge.
The days light was fading fast as I sat by the shore and watched the beaver swim around in front of me as I sat motionless with my camera to my eye. It was swimming over ever closer to where I was sitting.
It turned and came straight into shore right in front of me, like this. I wasn’t moving. It was getting dark.
It sat there for a few minutes watching and I watched it, while being very still.
Eventually the beaver swam away and since the light was almost gone I headed on in for the day.
Eventually Steve came back from a hike and seemed to be doing a bit better with the mood thing, but his back is still paining him.
This was what our sky looked like just after the sun went down.
It’s continuing spitting some rain showers, very light and breezy and sometimes windy, but not hot and over all very nice weather with even cooler nights for sleeping.
Nice day checking out what the beaver can do for an area.
Tomorrow, we will break camp and head on down to the Indian reservation’s store to get gas and then move to a new camp. I hope to post all these blogs at the time at the reservation’s computer lab.