Paradise In Our Backyard

Tuesday afternoon late we were headed up the Boulder with the truck camper and ATV’s—to the paradise which is our backyard.  It was cloudy and a touch cool as you can see from Michael’s attire:

But we built a big fire and made the best of it—when it began to rain we headed inside—to our cozy little truck camper.  It rained off and on all through the night while we weren’t sleeping on the concrete mattress.  We even put a two inch memory foam mattress pad on top of the concrete mattress and it didn’t help! New mattress in the near future!

Wednesday we had a very leisurely morning, Michael made us a delicious breakfast on the campfire

before we headed out on the ATV’s—the first night’s campsite we chose as it was getting late in the evening sat high above the river and we thought we might like to be right on the water—so off we went.  Found one—right on the river—what we didn’t realize was just how incredibly noisy that high water river would be!  As we were unloading the ATV’s at the new site, Michael states, “geez it sure is noisy here.”  Beautiful, spectacular—but just a touch noisy!!  Here’s a short video of the river at the first campsite—turn up your speakers and multiple that noise by two—yep, it was very loud!

After a light lunch and getting our camp set up—

we headed out on the ATV’s again riding a total of 35-40 miles reaching the old mining ghost town of Independence.  We were surprised to be able to get that far thinking the snow would have stopped us—we saw snow and there was water running everywhere.

Independence—do you see a pattern in my cowboy’s diet—that Cheetos bag was never far from his hand—camping food he calls Cheetos!

a creative fence!Forget-me-nots were everywhere.

Back home after the long ATV ride we cooked steaks and potatoes over another big fire.  Sleep eluded us at times again due to the concrete mattress and the cowboy saying at 2am, “guess I will get up and see if the water is rising.”  WHAT???—that thought had NOT occurred to me!!  Now I was having visions of floating down the river in our little truck camper—not a thought conducive to sleep, let me tell you!!

Yep, I’m thinking we do have paradise in our backyard.  We saw a moose on the way up Tuesday evening and today I saw twin moose calves on our way back down the Boulder.  It was a great time camping with the cowboy and Ms. Emmi!