I put some new pictures up yesterday and today. The first bunch are from our camping trip last week, along with some other miscellaneous pictures taken this week, and the second bunch is from a drive I took today near Matt’s Summit.
I had planned on riding my bike up to Kyune Reservoir this morning, but when I got up there in the Subaru, I didn’t feel like trying to haul my bike over the gate, then riding five or six miles uphill on a road I’ve never been on. So I drove on to Matt’s Summit, then took the dirt road south to see where it went. It wound up the mountain and through the area where that wildfire was a couple weeks ago, and the stench of burned wood was still heavy in the air. I reached the point where the road topped out at a summit and started heading down into a valley, but there was what appeared to be a small rain storm approaching, so I figured I’d wait it out at the summit, then drive down after the rain had passed–I didn’t want to drive down only to find myself stuck at the bottom of a steep, muddy climb back out. It started raining, and after about five minutes, I saw a large lightning bolt strike a peak across the valley about two miles away, and I decided it would be best if I wasn’t inside the only piece of metal at the highest point around. I drove about 400 yards down the road I had just came from and parked near the treeline to wait out the storm, and just a few minutes later it started raining extremely hard. That little storm was pretty deceiving, and it appeared to have grown much larger in just a few short minutes. Water started running down the ruts in the road, and I decided I’d better get back down the way I came before it got any worse. The drive back was fun, though I almost slid off into the sagebrush a few times. It was the first real four-wheeling I’d done in the Subaru–the first time I’d ever needed to use four-wheel drive–and it performed quite well. If I’d been in my truck, I would have been screwed because I still don’t have a front driveshaft in it. Hell, if I had decided to trek on down into the valley before the rain came, I would definitely have been stuck down there.
After I hit the paved road again and had driven just a few miles, the rain was gone. Right before I reached Highway 6, I saw two deer right off the road, and ended up following one of them through the brush for quite a while before it decided to drop down off a steep hillside. As I was following it, it would keep a distance of about 75 yards, stopping to look back at me every so often. I saw two deer in the same area a few days ago, and another one dead on the side of the road today, so there must be quite a few of them that hang out by the river around there.