Can You Tell Me What I Found?

Saturday I drove friend Reta and a Boise couple, G and M into the mountains to scout a burn area called Gray's Creek. We were attempting to find out if the SIMA club could make a successful foray into the area the 2nd weekend of May to find morel mushrooms. We determined that the amount of snow pack would cause the foray to be delayed a month or five weeks. I drove through some pretty good snow pack because someone had used a cat to plow out a road to his cabin.

We saw some wild flowers, particularly lomatia (not pictured). We saw a grouse as you can see and we saw a little critter that I first thought to be a snake. It had the brightest cobalt blue tail that you can imagine. He was about five inches long and on more careful inspection we found him to have two sets of legs, fore and aft. Can you tell me what the critter is? The president of SIMA knew what family he was of and the name is pretty obvious once you know the family. It is the first time any of us had ever seen this critter.

Went fishing today with members of the fly fishing club. We went to Malheur Reservoir, but the wind was so strong that the fishing was nearly impossible. I caught no fish, and the best anybody did was to catch two. One oar broke so I gave up early and had a nice conversation with a retired ag econ professor from Univ. of Nevada (Reno) now living in Weiser and a man who owns a fly tying supply business in Kent, WA. He was traveling to contact his client stores and came on the trip with one of our members who works in fly fishing store. Interesting people.

Oh, and I am ever going to have to wash the pickup. Mud, Mud, and More Mud!!

Time to run,

Papa Coyote loves you all