Springing into duck camp

Every early spring I like to drive the 45 miles to our 42 acres in Okanogan, WA to a place where we call duck camp. We take the truck, chain saw, shovel and other various tool for different situations, you never know what your going to find the first trip into camp after winter.

To our surprise there hadn't been any other vehicles into the group of properties so there was no tracks breaking the snow down. Most of the snow was gone but there was sections of the road that had drifts of a foot and a half. My wife always gets scared when we push through the drifts and there is a big ledge next to the road. Of course it always turns out ok. She was very happy there was no getting stuck "this trip".

We got to the lake next to camp and the winter had brought a tree down across the road. So we stopped and I started cutting the tree into firewood sized bits and stacked them off the road, for the                                                                              

 next time we come over to cut wood for the camp.

We called Dad and let him him know the state of camp after winter while we drive into camp. The lakes are still 75% frozen, there is a good amount of water in the small potholes and there are a few ducks around. Some Mallards, a few Pintails and lots of Buffel heads. The ground squirrels were every where, we saw a big mule deer laying in the sage brush and an early marmot digging in the rocks.

Maddy Cakes had a great time sneaking up on some Buffel Heads in the unfrozen part of the lake next to camp and then watching them fly all around us.

Although we only had a short time in duck camp we all had a blast. Maybe we will find time to spend the night there in the next couple weeks.