AH! Life in the Forest

We'll get the weather out of the way quickly. Rain has been occurring about every night for the past week (last Saturday, we had about 2.5 inches). Lightening is always a concern with all the tall pines around. One strike did a little damage to the contact station we work in. Temps have cooled down to about 53 degrees at night but the days are very pleasant in the mid to high 70's.

Larry knows first-hand about trees and it's dangers. He was visiting with some of our neighbors outdoors and one of the pine cones fell and conked him on the head. Luckily he had his cap on but he still could feel the hit. Those little suckers pack a wallop when they drop about 150 feet to the ground. Several trees were also uprooted during some of our heavier winds. Their roots are very shallow as they grow tall very quickly. He also knows now not to point out grey squirrels to CoCo as the dog took off literally dragging Larry, who was hanging onto his leash. Larry fell and finally CoCo stopped. A few scrapes, but nothing serious, thank goodness. It could have been a lot worse.

The contact station sustained damage of another kind during Friday night's downpour - one of our late arrivals plowed his motor home into the contact station and moved it about 12" from it's previous location. Two of the Workampers and the area manager, Tom, were inside when the building was hit. No one received any serious injuries, but communication lines and electrical lines had to be repaired. Nothing like a little excitement to keep things going! Our campground was almost full, many of them tenters, so it was a very wet night for them along with the lightening and thunder.

The previous week, one of Arizona's escaped murderers and his female accomplice, were captured in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. They were captured in one of the remote campgrounds. The forest Ranger who spotted them was very, very lucky that neither the man or the woman were anywhere close enough to their tent so they could reach one of their guns or he would have been killed. In fact, the man later boasted that he would have killed the Ranger if he could have reached his gun. Pretty scary. This couple had driven into our campground earlier that day to look at some of our sites. We are all very fortunate that they went on to a more remote area. Everyone is sure glad that they have been apprehended.

We spotted our first elk last week at dusk. The female was about 30 feet behind our unit grazing and didn't even hardly lift her head when I went out to take photos. Unfortunately it was just dark enough that none of the images were very good. Will try to get better photos next time.