Boondocking II

On Wednesday, we head toward the Box Creek Trail for a hike. On the way, we notice a dozen trumpeter swans (the largest bird in North America by weight!) and hundreds of Canadian geese on Tracy Lake. The hike highlight was a male and a female black-headed grosbeak.When we return to camp, Colene spots a bald eagle and its nest! For the rest of the week, we are constantly scanning the trees below our campsite to see if the bald eagle is home.

On Thursday, we drove into the national park to hike along String Lake to Leigh Lake. The birding here wasn’t as good, but the lake and mountain views were amazing. And we did identify several Swainson’s thrushes, singing their hearts out.

Swainson's thrush on the shores of String Lake, Grand Teton National Park

 After our hike we drive into the mountain town of Jackson to spend the entire afternoon in the county library.  For such a small town the library is phenomenal. We end the day with beer and dinner at the Snake River Brewery in downtown Jackson. As most of you know I have brewed more than 100 batches of beer, and we consider ourselves beer nerds. Snake River more than passed the test; they make excellent beers.

Friday we pack lunches and set out to tackle a very strenuous hike towards Amphitheater Lake--just the thing to get our legs sore. We didn’t make it to the lake, but the views were the best so far, and it was obviously Spring in the mountains as many flowers were in bloom.

Hike to Amphitheater Lake, Grand Teton National Park

The best bird of the hike for me was a western tanager; Colene pointed it out for me.  They are so striking with the red head on their yellow bodies!  In the afternoon we again go to Jackson so that I can run errands while Colene works at the library. We found very good microbrews and dinner at a place called Thai Me Up (ha ha).  They make several small-batch beers, including a “cherry freak,” which we loved, and the Thai food was very good, too.  On our way home there was a traffic jam that held us up for 10 minutes.

Bison-Induced Traffic Jam, Grand Teton National Park

Well it’s now Saturday, and unfortunately, it is also our last day of “boondocking” in the national forest. I had one more chance to bike this road, and then we broke camp.

Buffalo Valley Road, Bridger-Teton National Forest

We would like to stay longer, but we are agreed that it is time to go back to “civilization” and stay in the RV park so we have better internet. This week has been a good first test of our solar system, and it worked like a champ. Every day was sunny so we never had to worry about conserving energy. We could run the vacuum, the microwave, the toaster, the bread machine, roast coffee, and turn on all the lights we wanted.  Maybe next time we will get a couple cloudy days to see how we do.  As far as water, we added 10 gallons on Wednesday to give us a total of 60 gallons but I dumped close to 10 gallons of clean water before we left the campsite, so we made it 6 days on 50 gallons. When Colene no longer needs internet connection every day for her job, we definitely plan to do more boondocking.