Devil Creek

After visiting Alaska, we went down to Idaho for a short family reunion. It was quite an ecosystem change, though we managed to have a decent amount of rain while we were there too.

My dad took my brother and I to one of his old stomping grounds. He hadn't been there in 40 years though and a lot of the places he used to go don't exactly have well maintained roads. If you imagine sagebrush to the horizon and two shallow ruts through it (in parallel so you knew they probably weren't just cow trails) you wouldn't be far off. And that was when we were on even that much of a road. We did (just) make it though.



It was fun getting to see more of that country, and definitely not a place that an outsider like me would have been likely to find on my own. I enjoy exploring different landscapes: Seeing new plants and animals; imagining different stories on the land.

Up the creek a ways there were some shallow caves in a side draw. We wondered if it might have been a spot that had been used historically by Native Americans. I didn't see a lot of evidence of that, though there were some small obsidian fragments in a couple of places below the draw that made me wonder.

In the first cave I looked at I noticed a bunch of woodrat tracks and scat in the dirt. I also noticed that there were some dry sticks and vegetation sticking out from a ledge at the top of the cave. When I stuck my head up there a woodrat popped out! It didn't give me much time to get a look - it just jumped down and scurried back into a whole deeper in the cave. I think that was the first time I've ever seen one alive.

On the way out of the draw we saw this lizard - I believe a western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis). It was fun to slowly move up towards it taking closer and closer pictures until I had it more than full frame in the camera.



As we started back we noticed a smallish rain cloud on the horizon moving somewhat in our direction. By the time we got back to the truck it had begun to rain fairly heavily and the rain clouds at spread out about as far as we could see as we were driving out. It was fortunate we had 4wd because the ruts in the road quickly became little creeks and the soil turned to slick mud.