It's been a tough year so I have not felt much like documenting the trials and tribulations. There have been good parts, though, like the November visit from the Seattle area kids and grandkids who cooked tons of delicious food for us, enough that I could freeze some to have on Christmas, too. Kevin and Jessica had not been here in a very long time. Kevin wanted to hike through the woods where he hiked as a kid. Jessica cooked amazing meals. She is a fabulous cook. Jessica has trained their son Ian well and he and his partner Kellin came back a month later and cooked between-Thanksgiving-and-Christmas meals that we will have again at Christmas.
And now we are preparing for this year's Christmas Bird Counts. For many years, we have participated in the Upper Nestucca count which takes place close to our farm. We also participate in the Yamhill Valley count that is also not far from us. Preparing, for us, means scouting our assigned sector of each count. This year, friend Rand who has always surveyed the Teton area of our sector, is unable to because of failing health, so we scouted his section today, mostly to find the beautiful but elusive Burton Creek Falls that we have only found one time before. That story is here:https://ourwaterfallproject.blogspot.com/2016/03/burton-creek-falls.html That was back in 2016 and we have not found our way there since then. Until today.
With a plethora of maps, we headed up Wind River to the Tetons. (Yes, Oregon, as well as Wyoming, has Teton mountains... although ours are considerably smaller.) Unfortunately, the maps all disagreed and none, as it turned out, labeled the road correctly that actually gets a person to the unmarked falls, which is on tribal land of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Their timber area roads are closed on weekends so that's probably why we came to closed gates in other attempts other years.
Today the gates were open and, although the road numbers had changed from our maps or from our trip in 2016, we remembered the site well enough to, eventually, find it today. I was hoping we would find a resident American Dipper dipping up and down on the rocks at the foot of the waterfall, to give us an excuse to come back on count day but no such luck. Birds, in fact, were few to be found anywhere.
However, before we found the falls we made several wrong turns and I hiked a long brushy distance up the wrong creek before accepting that I was in the wrong place. We regrouped and tried another road and suddenly recognized the abandoned road next to the real Burton Creek. The falls is a short distance up that old road, but way down at the bottom of the canyon so difficult to photograph. In 2016 we hiked down the steep cliff to the foot of the falls but that was 6 years ago when we were, well, 6 years younger and more agile and daring. I was just glad to be able to get photos from the old road through the trees.
 |
Our first glimpse of the falls way down below was through trees
|
 |
Farther along the path we could look back at the falls and zoom it up in the camera
|
The Upper Nestucca count is scheduled for December 20th. With luck, the predicted snow will not be deep enough to keep us out of our sector. It's always fun, although exhausting, to spend a day driving and hiking in the beautiful Northwest Oregon mountains. Finding birds is just an added bonus.
.jpg)
.JPG)
Posts
