Some Crawfish and Fishing and an Evening Ride Up the Bartlett

Thursday September 23, 2021 Troy Oregon

Headed to Wildcat Creek

Once we got it going this morning we drove up this road to Eden Bench Road and headed to Wildcat Creek to retrieve our crawfish traps.

We drove up the Grande Ronde River along this road.

And pulled into Wildcat Creek here. Our purpose was to empty the traps if we caught any crawfish.

The traps were in this pool all night.

Crawfish

I pulled the two traps out and could see they had caught something.

Each trap had 25 or so crawfish in it. Now Marty had bait to fish with and we had a few to eat too.

Marty is putting the crawfish in the bucket in the middle of the bridge. Not much traffic.

Success

I’d say there are 50 or so of them in the bucket. Not very big ones but they’ll do.

Marty wanted to go down the road by the bridge on the Grande Ronde River to try fishing, but when we pulled in there these rafters were loading up so I shot the bull with them a bit as I know what a nice section of the river they just came down and how hard they had to work to get over the rocks in the shallow water.

Lost my case

So since they were sorta in the way Marty went back to Grizzly Flat to try his hand at fishing with the crawdads and I started to Troy to post when I realized I’d left my camera case back at Wildcat Creek,  so I had to turn around and backtrack about five miles.

I found the camera case on the road that someone had run over but it was in good enough shape so I headed back down the river to Troy to do my internet stuff.

Fishing away

After that I headed to Grizzle Flat where we would camp tonight. I found Marty’s van but he wasn’t in sight but I knew where he was so I walked over to the Wenaha river and found him fishing away. He hadn’t caught anything but he did say he had a couple of strikes so things were encouraging.

I wanted to put the two crawdads traps out in this river to see if there were any crawdads in it so I walked along it’s edge to see about a place to put the traps when I ran into these wild turkeys.

Putting out traps

I found the water to be a bit fast for the traps but decided to try them anyway as they already had bait from last night. I put one of them in here.

Appetizers and bait

Marty boiled up the crawdads for appetizers and saved some for bait to fish with. Here’s some of them all boiled up and pretty.

Evening ride

We had dinner  and then took my van up to Bartlett bench for an evening ride to watch for critters and stuff coming out to feed.

We drove by this ranch that was situated on the bench edge over the Grande Ronde River down in the canyon.

Did you spot the elk in the above picture grazing in the field?

Down the Grouse Creek Road

We drove up to Bartlett bench and looked around a bit then took the road called Grouse Creek Road that took us back down to the Grande Ronde River.

Critters

On the way we saw lots of critters that I wasn’t quick enough to get pics of. Chucker’s and quail and grouse and quite a few deer and some elk.

The Bear

A big black bear crossed our path quickly on the road. It had a gorgeous black fur coat on.

We stopped here for a break as we were almost to the river.

It was getting dark when we got to the river as we headed on back to Grizzly Flat for the night.

Nice day.