9-12 November, 2010 Clear, Overcast, Wet, Dry, Snow and Rain ...

Went to Kalispell for the day on Wednesday.  Picked up a few things for the Uhaul.  We found a used countertop at the habitat for humanity store.  We'll use part for a counter top and part for a table top in the Uhaul.  I pulled my traps from the lake on Thursday.  It's beginning to ice over and I didn't want a repeat of last year of chopping through the ice to get to the traps.  We checked out another lake on the way to Kalsipell and may camp there for a week or so and trap on it.  It's larger with bigger waves so it should stay open longer.   It had several muskrat houses visible and a decent but deserted campground.  The fishing is good there too and there's a couple of good hunting spots there as well.

I saw a deer swimming in the lake Thursday when I pulled my traps and was paddling back to the landing.  It was on the cattail marsh between the lagoon and the main lake.  It jumped into the water and swam across the lagoon and got out at the boat landing.  On the way home from the lake I saw a nice buck whitetail at the crossroads.  All I had with me was my 22 pistol.  Not my idea of a good deer getter.

We went to Eureka to get some car parts and other things today.  I need U-joints for both front axles.  They had the more expensive ones in stock but we had then order the cheaper brand and we'll pick them up Monday.  We had a little snow on the ground this morning but it all melted off by noon.  When we got home we had a message from the UPS guy.  My traps are in.  They'll drop them off at the Post Office tomorrow.  UPS won't drive up our road.  They have an arrangement with the post office to drop packages off there for local delivery otherwise they call us to arrange for a time to meet them down at the pavement.  Only FedEx delivers up our road!

Susan is making gravy for biscuits and gravy.  The jar on the microwave has sausage patties she canned when we butchered our hogs a couple of years ago.

We pour our bas of rice into plastic buckets for long term, rodent proof storage.

As the tomatoes ripen we slice and dehydrate them.

Our onions have never kept well so we dehydrate them for long term storage.

These two pictures were taken on the way to look over the lake I mentioned in the first paragraph.

This is the river that feeds the lake.

The campground has poles with ropes and pulleys so that people camping in tents who don't have a vehicle to store food in can raise their food up to where the bears can't reach it.  This is grizzly country.

A scrape below my tree stand.  This is an annual occurrance here.  There have been scrapes here every year for the seven years we've lived here.  Several trails intersect about 10 feet to the left of the photo.

One of the open areas to the north of my tree stand.