Spray Lake July 18

July 18, 2011

Well the sun is finally shining here at Spray Lake. The place is even more beautiful when the weather is nice. People are out boating and fishing and hiking. We even watched, with our binoculars, a group of about a dozen people climb the mountain across the lake. It’s a huge mountain but has a trail up about three quarters of the way and then they have to rock climb to the top. It took them about four hours to get to the top and about two hours to get down. It was a pretty amazing accomplishment and you could tell they were pretty happy when they reached the top. There’s a long ridge that runs along the top of the mountain and you could see them clearly outlined against the sky. Awesome!

We’ve had campers from all over the world. Quite a few Australian kids work at the ski hills in the winter then at the parks in the summer. We’ve had a lot of Dutch and Belgian as well as French. There was a group of young people from Argentina, Columbia and Mexico in one of our sites this past weekend…they were fun to talk with.

On the weekends the campsite is full and we usually have several parties camping in overflow. During the week we only have about 15 or so campers each day so it’s nice and quiet and we can get our work done. I’d like to start painting picnic tables this week…we’ll cross our fingers that the weather holds and we can do that. This past weekend was pretty quiet even though we had a few large groups camping. It’s nice when we don’t have to worry about people making a mess or being noisy and disturbing the other campers.

We went for a walk yesterday and found some tracks. Not sure if they are wolf or cougar...sure were big...far too big for a dog. Didn't seen any other animals but lots of sign/scat of various kinds.

I’ve been able to finally get to my artwork. I’m starting with just some crayon work and soon will try some acrylic paintings. It’s so inspiring to be here in the mountains with all of the animals, but with the weather being so cold, I haven’t been able to set up my paints yet but hopefully will this week. Tom has been busy carving out a sign for our fifth wheel with our names on it. He’s done some woodburning on it as well as carving and it has turned out pretty nicely. He’s got some creative/artistic bones in his body too.

We saw three lovely white tailed deer last night just below our campsite. They were munching on plants growing in the “front yard” but I think Tom moved too suddenly once and they put their tails up and off they went into the bush. They are healthier looking than the mule deer. The little doe that hangs around at the campsites at the end of the trail is fattening up a little bit but needs more meat on her bones than she has right now. She’s as friendly as they get though and I was able to hold my hand out and she came right up and licked my fingers. I’m sure she thought I had some wonderful kind of food for her.

Last weekend we had a couple guys camping and they were a bit messy about what they left in their site. A friendly little squirrel decided to raid their camp and I saw him carry back a whole Reece’s peanut butter cup. Next time he ran back into the site he came back with a whole unopened KitKat bar. Don’t know if we’ll have a sugar crazed squirrel on our hands or not now!

Time to go…will write more later.