I got in a 6 mile jog on Saturday evening down in the canyon below our house. It wasn't fast but I feel like I'm actually in decent shape for the miles of hiking I will be doing over the next week or so and hopefully packing an elk out of the wilderness. I've lost nearly 15lbs since the first week of August so that will help a little on the weight I'll be packing around as well.
On Thursday night and Friday morning we got 5" of rain at our house (our normal annual rainfall is less than 20" so that is a lot) and in Lubbock they got over 8". Lubbock spent several million dollars on a new drainage system a few years ago and it actually worked. The end result of the drainage is that the water ends up flowing down the canyon behind our house. When we went down in the canyon to jog on Saturday evening the water was still flowing over the road!
This isn't a spot with a small culvert under the road where water is expected to flow over the road. There are actually 3 very large culverts running under the road here and the water was flowing through them but it was still backing up and going over the road.
On Friday the water was flowing even harder and it looks like it washed out a little bit of the road here. There were some fences along the sides of the road that had debris all the way to the top of the fence where water had been flowing 5' deep across the entire valley floor. Pretty amazing how much water 5" - 8" of rainfall ends up becoming. Some of the lakes downstream ended up going up 5'+ in less than 24 hours.
I got some good pictures from the house of the canyon but of course they are on the camera at the house and I'll probably never get them uploaded. Those pictures were from the camera on my cell phone.
I practiced shooting my rifle a couple times this week and felt okay about it. It is funny how when I was growing up we would sight in our rifles on the day of the hunt and then it was pretty much if you could hit a box out in the field from 100 yards away you were sighted in. After reading on the internet about other folks sighting in their rifles now I'm somewhat disappointed when I put 3 shots in a circle smaller than a baseball from 100 yards. I know other folks use bench rests and things like that though and I'm just shooting from a makeshift bench with my backpack as a rest to simulate what it would be like in a hunting situation. I went back to 200 yards and used my shooting sticks without a rest and put 3 shots in a about a 6" group which didn't seem that great to me, but the target area on an elk is more than double that so I think it is good enough. The shooting sticks didn't seem that steady and the wind was blowing pretty hard, I think that had something to do with it.
I've been going through my list of stuff to pack and am pretty sure I'm prepared for most things. I'm still a bit nervous about being in an area with such a heavy grizzly bear and wolf population. It should be beautiful though and a great time of year to be there. It will be getting below freezing each morning and then warming up to the mid 60's maybe even 70's by the afternoon. I think I'm going to buy a small digital camera to bring with me. Cathy has been mentioning that she would like something smaller than the Nikon D70S for a while now and it would be nice to have a little compact camera in my pack to take candid shots of things that I'll see out hunting next week.
I still haven't got the tractor figured out but with the rain and then the trip it will be a while until I can use it anyway. I think that's about it for now, I probably won't post again until I'm back from the trip. I won't have cell phone access where I'll be let alone internet access!
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