Saturday August 15, 2015 Scott’s Ranch Nevada
This morning when I looked out the van door, I didn’t expect to see all this smoke that had blown in overnight from somewhere else. We were planning to go for a hike up the hill in the background in the smoke.
We got it going fairly early to beat the heat of the day and were off around 8:30AM down the road through the meadows looking for the place we could cross the river to the other side to start our hike up the hill. We’d found a spot last evening but we had trouble finding it again and had to look around some more. It wasn’t’ the river that was hard to cross. It was, we needed to find a hole in the brush on the other side of the river to get up on the bank and start our hike up the trail on the hillside.
We did finally find the spot. We would have to walk through about six inches of water for about twenty feet. I choose to stop and take off my socks and put my shoes back on to cross, putting my dry socks into my wet shoes when I got across the river, which I thought might be a little less slushy and it worked out ok, my feet were only damp instead of real wet and slushy.
I’ve just crossed the river and am letting things drip off a bit before putting my dry socks and wet shoes on for the rest of the hike up the hill in back of me.
The trail started just in back of us up a little draw and then turned to an old looking cattle trail which was likely used to go up into this area to graze on the grasses. It didn’t look like the old trail had been used by big animals for a number of years and even though most of the trail wasn’t very steep, there wasn’t much trail left in some places and we had to be very careful of slipping down the mountain, which wouldn’t be good, at all, no. :O)
Here’s Steve resting just after we got going and up the side of the hill a bit, looking down into the valley were we are camped. It’s smoky and there’s not much trail which is just past Steve’s stick where we just came up, walking slow and very careful.
We slowly went up the trail higher and higher, sometimes we lost it and had to look for it again as through the years, things have slid down the hill washing the signs of the trail out.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to find some wild flowers blooming up high here. Not sure what this is, but it was looking great like this on the way up, but on the way down, it was mostly wilted. There were other types of wild flowers around too.
We made it to the top of the ridge where the trail lead to and looked back down into our smoke filled valley where Scott’s Ranch is located.
This hawk circled by as we made it to this ridge top.
We decided we couldn’t make it to the big rocks we could see from below at our camp, nor did we want to. But we decided to at least walk across the ridge top to see what was up ahead.
I spotted this fallen antler from a deer. I think it just fell off up here a couple years ago as there weren’t any other bones around. I stuck it in the top of a bush as a trail marker.
We wanted to walk across this ridge top to the head of the canyon just off the left side of the picture. We stopped at the big rock on the left for shade and lunch. From back at our camp, it looked like the trail would have come out at the big chimney rocks in the center of the picture, but from up here, it didn’t. I scanned the rocks for caves and luckily didn’t see any or I might have had to check them out.
Here’s Steve checking out the head of the canyon we had walked to. There wasn’t anything to draw us into it, so we looked and then turned around and started back taking a different route across the ridge top.
Here’s Steve as we are walking back along the ridge top exploring around, just looking for stuff and enjoying our hike.
I spotted some bowvinosarous bones and started looking for it’s skull which wasn’t far away.
We worked our way down the hill to a spot we thought was a bit greener then the rest and found another dead cow. We didn’t want to mess up and slip on the way down, or we might end up like this.
And we did have to be careful as we lost the trail several times and the rocks were real slippery in places, especially in some areas where the rock was almost as hard as glass. It made a clinging noise and slid down the hill easily.
Here’s Steve going through some of that hard rock now, sliding and trying to stay upright. We are almost down at this point. You can see they are flat rocks that slide easily in the foreground.
Once we hit the bottom, shoes came off and I took my socks off and put my shoes back on again to walk across the river. Dry socks back on, they were a bit wet by now, we walked over a mile up the road through the meadows back to our camp at Scott’s ranch.
The smoke was still everywhere, but it looked like it might be clearing a bit as evening approached.
Back at camp by about 1PM. I told Steve who’s attitude has improved greatly that we did well and were now in good enough shape to hike down into the Jarbidge River Canyon later in the trip if we can drive close enough to do it, to make the hike.
It was a nice hike exploring up in the hills and gave us a good workout that should make many muscles and bones ache that I haven’t used in awhile. Time will tell on that one tonight. :O)
We are planning to break camp here tomorrow and head on over to the Diamond A desert to a camp I call, BearPaw Mountain because it is on the side of BearPaw mountain just down from the top on the north side.
Nice hike and a nice day.