One more post - trail camera pictures

Well, I said that I didn't think that I would be able to make another post before leaving for Wyoming, but I think I'm going to make one more post right now since it is already almost lunchtime and I don't want to start on the work project that I really need to get done today and then have to stop for lunch. Sounds like a good excuse anyway.

I did get a few good pictures from last weekend down at the land. With the tractor not working I didn't spend any extra time down there, just checked the cameras and filled the protein feeder and came home. The bad news was that the camera that I have setup looking at the protein feeder was dead when I got there. I thought the battery must have died but when I turned it on it showed to be at 99% with no pictures taken at all. I must have forgot to turn it on!! :-(

I did get some pictures of a new buck at the spin feeder though. Also it seems that either I am making a dent in the pig population or they are starting to spend more time someplace else. I only got a few pictures of pigs this time instead of getting pictures of them a few times each day like I have been.

Here's the new buck. I think he is 3 years old and it would be pretty hard to pass on him if I saw him during the daylight during hunting season.

The glowing eyes are a known issue with this particular camera model. It is a little wierd, but other than that issue the camera takes pretty good pictures. This is the same buck, he is a nice 10 point but hopefully I will be able to pass on him and if he makes it through the season he will be a great buck next year.

I did get some new pigs on camera this time. Not sure if the others moved out so these moved in or exactly what is going on. These almost look like domestic pigs with their spots.

Lastly the bucks are starting to shed the velvet off their antlers. That means that breeding season is just a month or two around the corner and the bucks will quit hanging out together. So far just the younger bucks have started losing their velvet but the older bucks are probably just a few weeks away.


Okay, that's it for now.

Nathan

Anticipation and Flooding. 2 seperate thoughts! :-)

Well, I'm getting pretty pumped about heading to Wyoming at the end of the week to go elk hunting.

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!

Busy Day

Well, I've had a pretty busy day today.

Went down to the land and checked on the cameras and the feeders. Everything looked good, except I forgot to turn on the camera that is overlooking the protein feeder!! I got some decent pictures at one of the spin feeders and I am trying to figure out where the deer are traveling going to and from the protein feeder so I had another camera setup on a trail but it didn't get very many pictures so I guess they aren't using that trail. I'll try to update this post when I get those pictures uploaded.

After I got home I messed with the tractor some more. I still haven't figured out why it is bogging down after it warms up. I went ahead and replaced all the fuel lines tonight and tried running it again but that didn't seem to help much. I've posted some on a tractor bulletin board and got some good advice but still haven't got it figured out. Not sure what I'm going to try next.

After that I got to go dove hunting. Baby (our full blooded rottweiler) and Jake (our 3 legged 1/2 rottweiler, 1/2 brittany spaniel) helped me out. They really do help a TON on retrieving the birds, there is no way I could have found some of the birds that they did (they found 4 out of the 5 birds before I did). Baby spent quite a bit of time hanging out in the pond (she has decided chasing the koi around is quite fun) but when it came time to retrieve a bird she was very helpful.

I took a picture of her at the end of the day. Jake didn't want to pose for a picture.


I'm still working out getting ready for our elk hunting trip coming up. I'm up to 40 minutes in the hill climb mode on the elliptical. According to the read out that is only 1.94 miles but it shows that I burned 458 calories so I've been losing some weight as well.

That's about it. I used up some brownie points tonight dove hunting instead of giving Eli his bath and putting him to bed. I'm leaving for a conference in Kansas City tomorrow afternoon so I'll be gone for a couple days.

Well that's about it for now.

Nathan

Labor Day was an accurate description!

Well, labor day turned out to be an accurate description of Monday for me. I started working outside around 9am and pretty much kept at it until 7pm with just a few breaks thrown in for Lunch and Dinner. I mowed around the house (about 1 acre) and then mowed down some heavy weeds in what was a wheat field last year but this year turned into pretty much a weed patch. Some of the weeds were well over 6' tall and quite thick. I should have taken some pictures.

I mowed around the house in morning and didn't notice anything unusual. Went after the weed patch and the tractor knew it was going to be work but nothing really seemed unusual about it's performance at first. I had to drop down into 3rd Gear on some really thick Russian Thistle but that didn't seem completely abnormal. The tractor was running a little warm but I figured that was due to the weed seeds and I needed to watch the radiator screen and keep an eye on the air filter. I did run low on fuel, not completely out, but it acted like it was going to stall so I idled it down and turned it off. Went and got some diesel and got back to work but it was running warm again so I turned back to the house and cleaned up the radiator screen and checked the air filter. It wasn't really bad, but had some seeds in it. I got back out there and it was still running warm - generally it runs at about 1/3rd on the temp gauge and it was running 2/3rds - not up to the hot but still above normal. I was now having to downshift on some fairly light stuff, and I couldn't keep the cutter spinning in 5th gear at all which is my normal gear that I use for mowing.

I thought it could be the mower, so I double checked the gear box on the cutter and it had oil in it but I topped it off just for good measure. I could turn the cutter by hand fairly easy so it seemed to be okay. The gear box was warm, but not excessively hot. I cleaned the radiator screen and hosed off the radiator and double checked the engine oil and coolant and everything seemed okay. I figured I'd go ahead and finish the last bit. It seemed to do better but still didn't have the guts that I would normally expect her to have. I had to downshift in some light stuff a few more times and at the very end I ended up all the way down into 2nd gear which is absolutely crawling. I noticed more smoke than usual from the exhaust when it was really giving it her all. Kind of a blue tint to it but not much. The color you would expect from a tractor really giving it's all, but I was mowing light grass and was in 2nd gear. I figured it had to be the gear box on the mower. I finished up and took it back to the barn.

I checked it over and let it idle awhile and when I went to shut it down the key wouldn't turn it off. That means that I blew a fuse but that's an easy fix.

To help me decide if it was the mower or not, I took it off and hooked up my tandem disc. I normally pull it in 5th gear as well. The tractor had cooled off and I took it out and started discing. Pulled it pretty well in 5th gear for about 5 minutes and then the temp started climbing again. It wasn't hot out today so that couldn't be the issue and I've run the tractor hard for hours and hours when it was hot outside without any issues. After 5 minutes it started to act gutless again and wanting to bog down so I had to shift into 4th gear to pull with the disc engaged. About 10 minutes into it and it was all the way back up to 2/3rd on the temperature gauge and working hard to pull the disc in 4th gear. It seems that the problem is with the tractor, not the mower. I went ahead and picked up the disc and ran the tractor back to the barn. I let it idle down again and checked it over again and nothing seemed obviously wrong. It's not really smoking on the exhaust except when it seems to think it is under heavy load. No unusual knocking noises or anything like that. I'm at a loss to what could be wrong and am not excited about taking it to the dealership for them to poke around because I really don't like the local dealer.

I posted the narrative above on a tractor bulletin board, and also talked to a friend who is a tractor mechanic and everyone pretty much agreed that the most likely culprit is a simple fuel filter! That made me feel a LOT better. I'm also going to replace the air filter because it was fairly dirty as well. I'm going to work on it tonight and hopefully everything is okay with the tractor, I am planning on taking it down to the land this weekend to do some work down there.

I'm trying to get in shape for elk hunting coming up in just over 2 weeks and have been working out quite a bit for me. We ran 3.6 miles in Weatherford this weekend with quite a bit of hills and I'm up to 30 minutes on the Elliptical in the Hill Climb mode as well. Last week I logged 17 miles total! I've also lost 11 lbs in the last month.

Well that's about it for now. Sorry I didn't get any pictures of the weeds before I mowed them down or while I was mowing them.

Nathan

Last weekend at the land.

Okay, I'm still a week behind so these pictures are from last weekend when I was able to go down to the hunting property and check the cameras and do a little hog hunting. I ended up shooting 2 hogs and was cooking them in the smoker most of last week. It is WAY less work than butchering them the traditional way and the meat ends up pre-cooked and pretty tasty as well.

I was anxious to check the antler growth of the two mature bucks that I regularly see on my property and have been getting pretty excited. The one I call stickers was really coming on strong and had a great sticker (hence the name) coming off his left G2.

Here's a picture showing it - notice however that there is some blood at the base of the sticker - it looks like he injured it somehow. (Sorry the pictures are crooked, I just set this camera up at this location and hadn't realized it was off kilter)

Here's a picture from a few days later, the sticker is drooping down and it appears like it is barely attached.

And my last picture of him, it has now completely dropped off. :(

The buck I'm calling "Double Wide" has put on some decent growth, but I still don't think he is going to end up as wide as last year. I think he must be a very old buck and is actually on the decline.

I got some pictures of a new buck that I haven't had on camera yet this spring. He has a split G2 on his left side.

And I think I can confirm that July and August are a critical time for deer in my area. I went through 300lbs of protein pellets in the last 3 weeks and with only 3 feeding tubes the younger deer are actually camped out waiting their turn! I have another picture with 6 bucks in one picture.

I sure hope I am able to see some of these guys during hunting season this year!

I also set one of the cameras up as a true trail camera to try to get a better idea on where the deer are traveling to and from the feeders. Well, I still don't have that great of an idea on where the deer are traveling, but I have a pretty good idea what route the pigs are using!


I did get some pictures of some deer but only a few and I got pictures of pigs nearly every day.

I moved the camera to a new spot and am hoping to get more pictures of the deer travel patterns so hopefully I will have a better chance of seeing them during the day during hunting season. Even through the summer most of the pictures of the deer at the protein feeder are at night and the best hope of catching them during the daylight is to catch them on the move making their way toward the food source.

That's about it for this week. I spent this weekend helping some friends move and picking up another friend at the airport in Dallas and driving them to Abilene. Not much time for anything blog worthy!

Going for broke, 3 posts in one day! ATV rescue mission.

Well, I can officially call this a bust for getting anything done today at work. I was going back through the pictures from our vacation and thought these would make a good post.

A couple years back I brought our ATV's to camp and one of them ended up getting run off a mountain by one of our friends. It is amazing if you happen to get off one of the trails how far down the mountain they can go. Luckily the guy riding it was able to bail off before the ATV went over the side and wasn't hurt. The ATV on the other hand ended up seriously injured and 2 years later still isn't really back to where it was before the mountainside excursion.

Fast forward to this year and a very similar situation. Some of the other people at camp had brought a couple ATV's up (they do each year) and were letting a friend ride one of the ATV's and he ended up running it off the trail and down the mountainside. Again, he was able to bail off before the ATV went down the side, and again the ATV was seriously injured.

Here is picture of where the ATV went over the side. Can you see it down there in the trees? Trust me, it is down there!


Well, being experienced ATV rescuers we came up with the perfect setup to get the ATV back up the mountain. It was WAY to steep to think we could push or pull it up by hand but we strung together a little over 300' of rope and used a little brain power to save on the man power.

We decided to use Mike's truck to pull using my trailblazer as an anchor point.


If it seems like my trailblazer is a little close to the edge to you, it felt like it to me as well. I was actually standing on the downhill side when we started to pull but moved over to the uphill side after the tires slipped a little toward the edge. Thankfully it stayed put and we didn't have a bigger rescue mission to deal with! That last picture might also help in getting an idea at how steep this spot really was, we actually had to repel down to the ATV using the rope.

Here's the ATV all hooked up and ready to go. We actually moved it about 20 feet to get it to this spot. It's initial resting place was a bit farther back in the trees standing on end up against a tree.

The plan is actually working!! Look, here it comes up out of the trees (it was actually down in the trees to the left in this picture, not the trees immediately behind it).

A little farther!

I had to quit taking pictures at this point as we had a near catastrophe when the rope came apart at a knot after it went through the pivot point of my trailer hitch. Thankfully it was when the ATV was on somewhat of a shelf on the rocks and the guys guiding it up were able to keep it from rolling back down the hill. Other than that little snafu, this worked very well, we ended up stretching one of the ropes out pretty good so we have marked it as unusable for any future lifting tasks.

Here's the ATV at the top. You might have thought some of the previous pictures were a little blurry and that's because they are because it was getting dark. It was pretty close to full on dark by the time we got it to the top.

The last bit ended up pulling pretty easy and we ended up pulling up faster than the owner could push up the steepest part of the mountain. He ended up having to use the rope to climb the last little bit up.

Another picture at the top. You can see that the ATV took some serious damage on it's trip down the mountain.


The amazing thing was that we were able to get the thing started and were able to actually ride it back down the mountain (at about 5 mph). There is a LOT of cosmetic damage and one of the front wheels needed to be replaced just to make it easier to to pull it back up the mountain but the only other real damage that was obvious was the rear axle was bent pretty bad. The rear tires wobbled back and forth about 3" but it made it back down about 2 miles from where it went off the edge. Of course there is a good chance that the frame might be bent, but it is still amazing to me that it could actually move under it's own power after something like that.

Okay, I think I'm done posting for today. That gets me caught up through vacation for the most part so now I've just got this last weekend's visit to the land to post. Who knows, that might take a week! ;-)

2 posts in one day!!?? More vacation stuff.

Well, I should be working but I thought I would try to make another post while I was at it. The big hike for the week in Montana was to Pine Creek Lake. Elevation 9,077'. The hike is a mere 5 miles but it starts out at 5,600' elevation so there is the challenge of climbing a mere 3,400' of elevation in the 5 miles. The first mile of the trail is actually pretty tame, but it is all uphill from there!

We actually hiked to the lower falls earlier in the week as a family and we got some pictures with Eli at the lower falls then.





From there the trail starts with the switchbacks to get to the top of the falls and the switchbacks continue for was seems like forever. Last winter was a big snow year in Montana so I was hoping that there would still be some snow at the lake although it was the very end of July when we were headed up there.

I started to see some snow on the other side of the valley and then hit some snow with still about a mile left to get to the lake.


As we made it to the top I was greeted with the large snow bank I had remembered the last time I was up there although that year we made the hike around the first of July instead of the end of July.



This is one of my favorite views with the double waterfalls and the little catch lake underneath.


But the view of the lake itself truly is worth the hike.




I thought this was a good picture of the trail on the way back down. If you open up the picture to the larger size and look really closely you can see some of the switchbacks going down the mountainside.



One thing that I decided on this hike was that I need to get in shape for my elk hunting trip to Wyoming in September. I thought I was going to have a heart attack and it took 4 hours to hike up there. Where we are planning on hunting in Wyoming is only 7,000' elevation and I didn't really start having problems until about that elevation on this hike, but it made me realize that it would for sure be a good idea.

Well I think that's it for this post. It sure was beautiful up there.