Last Minute Camping and the Start of Fall

This will be my last Garden Valley post... at least for today, haha.

A couple weeks ago, Matt, the boys, and I decided to go on a last minute camping trip. We LOVE that our property is close enough to just go up spur of the moment. Since it was just one night, we took a tent, but then also hauled up the Razor. We found a couple of beautiful trails. Our favorite took us to the top of a mountain that had the best views.

And of course, every time we go up, we work on at least one project. Matt has been busy cutting trees both big and small (again, stinkin' beaver!) into smaller sections. The boys and I decided to use some of these to make steps down to the creek.

We also went up again yesterday for Bradley's birthday. We only had a couple hours in the mountains, but we made the most of it by working more on our fort. The leaves are starting to change and the fall light is just so beautiful. I wish I could capture the beauty in a picture.

The Creek

The creek was the selling point of our property, and has easily been the kids' favorite place to hang out. It is nice and shallow (at least at this point in the year) and it's nice to not have to worry about the kids getting swept downstream if they were to fall. They can play in the water on their own (with adult supervision of course) for hours.

Bradley's favorite activity is throwing rocks in the creek. He could probably just sit and do that all day!

Tyler loves floating little plastic boats down the creek... we just have to make sure someone is at the other end to catch them! I bought a bunch at the dollar store - such a great find!

Kylee likes to look for and catch little minnows and frogs.

And I enjoy just sitting in the shade, listening to the sound of the running water and my children laughing and playing. I'm sure Matt would enjoy this too, but he is usually off doing some project while I am watching the kids!

Total Eclipse

There was a lot of hype leading up to the total solar eclipse this year. Our family was pretty excited and joined in that hype by planning a little eclipse-viewing party up in Garden Valley :-) Garden Valley was in the path of totality, and it was the perfect excuse for our first camping trip on our land. We had quite the crew - Matt's parents, Natalie and her kiddos, Spencer, Beki's family, and our friends the Salisburys. Our family was lucky enough to be able to borrow my mom and dad's new trailer!

Notice that all the weeds are gone on our lot (thanks Matt!) and also notice our beautiful driveway. That was another project that Matt and I worked on... it might not look like it, but it was a lot of work. It involved tons of rototilling, rock removal, and raking.

Anyway, back to the eclipse! It really was one of the coolest things I have ever seen in my entire life. I thought it was going to be cool, but I severely underestimated just HOW cool it was going to be. We all had our certified eclipse glasses to watch as the moon started to move in front of the sun.

Mike had also created this cool contraption that showed the crescent shape of the sun.

As the eclipse progressed, you could see crescent-shapes on the ground and on the tents.

Finally, as the eclipse moved into totality, it got really cold and dark! I was told that it also got super quiet, but I wouldn't know because all the kids were so excited and screaming their heads off, haha.

It was truly a once in a lifetime opportunity (unless I want to travel to see future eclipses), and it is something I will always remember. What a special thing to be able to witness from our new little piece of heaven.

Burnt Post Trail

The "jungle" part of our property is pretty thick in places. The kids and I went for a hike one morning and it took us a long time to push our way through the vines to the forest. I decided to clear a small trail - it's amazing how much faster we can now walk through that part of the property! I'm sure we will continue to improve this trail over the years, but it's a start for now!

The Fort

You can't have a mountain property without fort building, right?! On one of our adventures, the boys and I discovered the PERFECT place for a fort - amidst thorny service berry plants. The plants naturally grew up and formed little "rooms". We have started clearing it out a bit... it's not perfect yet, but I just know our kids (and probably us adults too) will have so much fun playing in this fort over the years.

Dead Elk

I have a one-track mind these days. I have lots of other posts I still need to get caught up on, but all I can think about lately is Garden Valley. If I could stay up there full-time right now, I would do it in a heartbeat. I love just hanging out on the land and making small improvements, spending time focusing on my family, and dreaming of a one-day cabin.

I have had some people ask what we do when we go up to Garden Valley, so I decided to document some of the things we have been working on and doing! I am going to break this up into a several different posts so I don't end up with one giant post. This one, in particular, you may want to skip if you have a weak stomach. It was the one "not fun" disgusting project that we have had.

This is pretty gross... but I guess this is part of what comes with being a land owner, right!? After we put an offer on the land, we had a couple weeks for "due diligence". During that time, we walked all over the property. When we went down by the creek, we caught a whiff of what was most definitely a dead animal. After further inspection, Matt found that a dead elk that had gotten caught up in some trees that had fallen across the creek (darn beavers!). It was covered by a ton of other sticks that had also gotten washed down the creek, so it wasn't easy to see, but Matt could see the hooves sticking up. We knew this would be a big project, so we asked the land owner to remove and dispose of the elk before we closed. To make a long story short, they didn't remove the elk (or even come down in price on the land), but we bought the land anyway, so it was now our responsibility to remove.

Our kids were only allowed to play upstream until we could figure out what to do. Mandi and I started by fishing out bones (along with some skin and fur) from the bottom of the creek (what a nice sister!). We had a couple big black garbage bags full. I was surprised to see a mostly intact elk once we were able to remove all the sticks and debris to uncover it - I'm wondering if the bones Mandi and I cleared out were actually from a different elk? Anyway, the elk smelled before we uncovered it, but once it was fully uncovered, it STUNK. That is an understatement. I can't even explain how much it REEKED. We had to get it off our land quickly.

We had to figure out a plan of action for what to do next.  We started by getting a rope around the elk and tried to pull it out of the creek, but it was too heavy. Thank goodness we had splurged when we purchased the land and also bought a Razor! We took the Razor down by the creek and, with a lot of effort, were able to pull the carcass onto a tarp, get the elk wrapped up, and then dragged the elk all the way up to the road. We put the elk/tarp on top of a piece of subfloor so the tarp wouldn't rip, and we dragged the elk to some public land, where we dumped it off a cliff. Now that it was out of the water and in the sun, it would probably be decayed/eaten pretty quickly.

Once the elk was gone, I felt like we could finally start enjoying the land and do "fun" projects... stay tuned for posts about those. They will be much more enjoyable to read :-)

Garden Valley - A Quick Tour

We have loved exploring our land, and I feel like there is still so much more exploring to do. Here's a quick "tour" of our land. We have started calling it "Beaver Creek" so we don't just say "land" or "Garden Valley". We thought Beaver Creek was fitting because of all the trees the beaver has felled across the creek.

This is a picture of the front of our land. Our land is narrow and long. This is the flat part where we will build a cabin one day. For now, Matt has weed-whacked down all the weeds and we are using this as a camp space.

When we bought the property, we thought there was some kind of drainage problem, because the left hand side of the property at the top here was super wet and marsh-like. Matt started moving weeds around a bit and saw water bubbling up. What a fun surprise to find that we have a natural spring on our land! We have started to channel it a bit to try and dry things out on that side of the property. We are happy that we don't have to deal with a drainage issue, and that the water keeps our big, beautiful willow (and some cattails!) alive since we don't have a sprinkler system up there yet.

There is a bit of a drop off at the end of this flat section that goes down to the creek. We have an "upper creek" (that is really just irrigation water - you can see Matt standing by it below), and then another drop to the "lower creek" where we have already spent hours and hours playing in the water. The water in the lower creek is pretty low right now since it's the end of summer, but we were told it was super high this spring after all the water last winter. It will be interesting to see the water level change throughout the year.

There's a trail that runs along the creek. It cuts through our property and is maintained by the HOA. Yes, this means that technically people can walk through our property, but we don't mind. We only have only seen one other neighbor down there, and that also means we can walk along the trail along through our neighbors' land (we only have two other neighbors with cabins right now - the rest is undeveloped). The path is the perfect place for a stroll... and if you watch closely you might see some elk or wild turkeys! Hopefully we don't ever see any bears that we know are out and about too...

Just past the creek is our "jungle" area, with lots of viney plants (in the picture below, I cleared a small trail through the plants).

Past that, it opens to the "forest" with tall pine trees. This picture was taken close to the back of our property looking up toward the front.

Buying Land in Garden Valley

It has been my dream for 13 years to own property in Garden Valley... ever since my first visit to Robin's cabin.  I almost bought some land back in 2006 when some 1/3 acre lots were for sale by Robin, but I really wanted a lot on the river like Robin's, so I held out :-) Since we've been married, Matt has shared in my dream, and has spent the last 5 years checking properties on Zillow. There have been several times when Matt has suggested we drive to go look at some of the properties he's found, but we never went because it wasn't a real possibility at the time.

In April, Matt and I went to the Parade of Homes, and my friend Sally (who is a realtor) was talking to us about the housing market... Well, that conversation caused us to think about selling our rental. I went home that evening, crunched some numbers, and saw that it would make significant financial sense for us to sell our rental and put that money toward our current mortgage. It took a little longer than we had hoped to sell the house (due to the fact that we had just extended a year lease with the current renters so we had to sell to an investor), but we finally accepted an offer toward the end of June.

The last week of June, while Matt was at Trek, I had a crazy idea. What if we saved back some of the money from the sale of our rental and bought some land?! I found a property on Zillow that looked promising and sent the link to Matt, saying I thought we should go check it out. Matt called me as soon as he saw my text and was on board! The funny thing is that he had already "favorited" that exact property on Zillow (it had been on the market for about a year!). Shortly after Matt got home from Trek, we seriously started looking for properties. There were a few that looked like good possibilities, but I was really set on Garden Valley. I remember Robin telling me how they could get their kids off to school, head up the one hour to Garden Valley to work on their cabin all day, and then be home before their kids got home from school. That short drive was the biggest selling point for me, but Garden Valley also has so many other bonuses... Starlight Mountain Theater, an awesome tubing hill, a gun range, a river for floating or rafting, great hiking trails, and more.

We drove up and looked at a couple different properties. There was a gorgeous one-acre lot right next to Robin's property, and I was almost sold on it, but it didn't have direct water access. Matt really wanted water on whichever property we bought (and honestly, I did too), so we kept going back to that original property I texted him about. It was a three acre lot that backed up to BLM land and had a creek running right through the middle of it. The creek is what really sold us. We envisioned so many family memories being made there, and we decided to pull the trigger and take the first step toward making our dream a reality. We closed on the land the first of August and have been giddy about it ever since. It is our new "happy place". Every time we go up there (which was at least twice a week the entire month of August), we just can't believe that little piece of heaven is ours. Stay tuned for way too many future posts about our new home away from home (even though it's just bare land right now!).

Bull Trout Neighbor Campout

You know it's going to be a good weekend when this is the view up and down your street! In July, we went on our second annual neighbor campout. We rented a trailer and headed up to Bull Trout Lake - a little gem of a location close to Stanley. It was the perfect setting, made even better by the fact that we had the entire loop in our campground to ourselves! This was the best decision - it was so nice letting the kids roam and not having to worry that they would bother someone else.

Our camp spots were right on the water, and there were plenty of toys to play in the water with!

Saturday morning, a few of us decided to head up near Stanley to go on a hike. The weather was perfect and the scenery was breathtaking. I was proud of the kids and how well they did (although Bradley and Tyler did end up being carried for a lot of it!).

And you can't have a campout without dutch oven! We had our second annual dutch oven cookoff. My macaroni and cheese was a bust (too salty!) but there was plenty of amazing food - chili and cornbread, nachos, potatoes, sloppy joes, and more macaroni. Yum.

Our family loves camping. We love being out in nature. But camping with friends makes camping even better! Looking forward to next year!

4th of July 2017

Forth of July was just as wonderful as I have come to expect. I love everything from the flag raising ceremony to the parade to the outdoor activities to the company.

Tyler has been begging to try his "BB8" gun (he called it this even though I told him a dozen times it was a BB gun!). It was so cute watching Matt help the boys shoot the soda can.

Fishing was definitely a highlight of the trip. "The Farm" is so so beautiful, and we love that Grandpa stocks the pond! Tyler even caught his first fish (well, his first several fish!). We ended up going two days in a row :-)

 

I think one of my favorite parts about visiting Inkom is seeing the sweet relationship that my kids have developed with their great-grandpa.

One last picture... who needs fireworks when nature gives you this?! It was the perfect end to a perfect trip.