Fall Campout Pics

[Sparky-Watts]

Last weekend was my family's annual fall campout at the farm in eastern Kansas. I left Friday morning with Sonya, the Wonder Dog, and arrived at the farm about 3 hours later. It's 187 miles down there, and we had a good tail wind pushing us. The weather was absolutely beautiful, about 72 degrees, clear and sunny. As I passed through Iola, just past the halfway point, my brother called me. He was on his way up from Tulsa (Broken Arrow) with his two kids. He was stopped at the McD's and saw me drive past! He got to the farm about 30 minutes after I did.

The trees were spectacular this year, prettier than I had seen them in years. That was rather surprising, considering the lack of rainfall out there all year. Here's a few shots coming into the farm:

There is a lot lost in the photos. That's why I'm saving my money for a Digital Canon SLR. I miss being able to control the depth of field, lighting, shutter speed, etc. The colors were quite a lot brighter in real life.

I've mentioned before in other posts about my farm that this is the only road into the farm, and it crosses a low water bridge. Most times I've been there, there is at least a couple of inches of water flowing over this bridge, and on one visit, a friend and I spent a week down there and we got 15 inches of rain in 3 days. That week, water was running 15 feet over the bridge, the most I've ever seen! I've got pictures on slides somewhere in the attic of that week, one of these days, I'll get them digitized and post them. However, last weekend, there was no water in the creek, only the second time in my life I've seen it that way. This is a shot looking west off the bridge:

This is looking east off the bridge:

There had been some flooding earlier in the spring or late winter that drug a lot of the trees and debris over the bridge, as seen in that last shot. Occasionally, there will be a big tree dumped right across the bridge that we'll have to move.

 

[OutOfStep]

Beautiful, I really miss deciduous forests.

Here's a shot from our last outing last month. Not nearly as colorful

 

[Sparky-Watts]

About an hour after my brother got there, my uncle showed up. We visited awhile after setting up our tents and starting a campfire, then took a walk in the timber. The farm is 120 acres; 36 acres of cropland that we lease to a friend of the family, 80 acres of old-growth timber, mostly walnut, oak, hackberry, and sycamore, and last April we planted 4 acres of pecan trees in the lower pasture. We've got about 200 of the 250 or so trees we planted that survived, which is well above average for that type of planting.

A few shots from the walk in the timber:

Looking north from the high pasture. There is a small farm pond up in those trees that my great grandfather dug out:

A closer view of the trees:

Looking back toward the shed from the lower pasture (the flags and yellow mesh in the foreground are some of the pecan trees we planted):

Next post: More shots from the timber along the dry creek.

 

[Sparky-Watts]

Having the creek dry as it was gave us the opportunity to walk the length of it from the bridge east to the property line. In the quarter mile width of our property, the creek winds nearly 2 miles back and forth. More pics:

More to come....

 

[OutOfStep]

looks like it would be productive for upland game and deer

 

[Sparky-Watts]

Next: Wheeling and poser shots.

 

[Sparky-Watts]

Now, we all know a trip into the woods would not be complete without the obligatory poser shots of the Jeep. And after our little walk in the woods, I got the wheeling bug pretty bad, and since the opportunity to drive the creek is very rare, I decided to give it a whirl. I drove off the west side of the bridge, and up the creek that way. In the first 75 yards or so, there was a big water hole, with a sandbar to the right at a pretty steep angle. I tried to stay up on the sand bar, but it was softer than I had anticipated, causing me to slide down into the water hole. I was still in 4-lo at that point, and the Jeep came to a halt with the driver's side window only inches from a rather jagged piece of tree root. I shifted to 4-hi and backed up a ways, then took a better approach with a bit more speed and was able to get by without any more problems. After stopping to look at the carnage, I realized I was a lot closer to being stuck than I thought at first, judging from the depth of the ruts and softness of the soil (note the rut that stops at the end of the water hole about a foot to the left of the tire track that continues past the water hole):

After that, everything else was pretty routine and smooth sailing. So, without much more ado, prepare for poser shots:

 

[Sparky-Watts]

This is about as far as I could make it, due to a fallen tree across the creek bed. At this point, I was about a quarter mile up the creek:

 

[Gone&DoneIt]

Wow,... that looks amazing. I'm envious. Hope the Pecan trees take,... nothing better than Pecan pie,... or candied Pecans,... or hell even out of the shell Pecans,.... (In a Bubba Gump like voice) you can bake 'em, you can fry 'em, you can saute em,... you can make Pecan Jambalaya, Pecan Stew, Boiled Pecans......

 

[Sparky-Watts]

Just a couple more posers:

Saturday brought light rain and drizzle most of the day, starting around 7 am. It was a pretty miserable day by most standards, with temps in the upper 40's. I did manage to take a walk with my nephew, Jarrett, when the drizzle let up for a bit in the morning. However, we had gotten about a half mile from camp when the rain let loose with a vengeance. I gave him my rain coat and we huddled under a large bunch of tree roots that stuck out of bank of the creek, until we started hearing thunder and decided that being under a large tree wasn't the best of ideas. By the time we got back to camp, we were both pretty well soaked and cold. Usually, we average about 15 people at the campouts we hold twice a year (April and October), with as many as 25 one year, but this year we only had 5 of us. My cousin and his two boys from Illinois didn't make the trip this fall, first time in 2 or 3 years that he hasn't been there. I think the forecast of cold, wet weather on Saturday held a lot of them back. So, the 5 of us (and Sonya the Wonder Dog) huddled in the old farm shed around a small fire we had built there, and visited the day away, reminiscing about good times long ago, the history of the farm, and family members who had passed before us. The rain and drizzle finally let up around 8 pm, and the rest of the party all went to bed around 9pm. Sonya and I stayed up, kept the fire stoked, and listened to the coyotes, owls, whipporwills, and a cacophony of other wildlife sounds in the darkness. There have been times when I've been there all by myself, and I gotta admit, it can sometimes get kinda spooky there. You rarely ever hear any sounds from civilization, aside from an occasional jet flying high overhead, or a distant car traveling down the highway. The farm sits in a bottomland, so most of the sounds outside the hills go overhead or are muted by the timber. Once in a while, as happened Saturday night, we'll get visited by poachers travelling up the road to the dead end at the north pasture. They get spooked pretty fast when half a dozen high-powered spotlights hit their vehicle as they pass the end of the timber along the road!:lol:

 

[Sparky-Watts]

The farm was homesteaded by my great-great-grandfather in 1854. It is roughly 60 miles south of KC, and 5 miles west of the Missouri border. It has stayed in the family since then. My grandparents bought the farm from my great-grandfather in the 1920's for $3200. At that time, it was 200 acres. Much to the dismay of most of us, my grandfather sold off the north 80 back in 1979 after my grandmother had a stroke, to pay the medical bills. Had he consulted any one of us, we would have gladly paid the bills so that we could have kept that extra 80 acres. In 2003, we had the farm appraised at $1500 an acre, but since then, land around there has been going for as much as $10,000 an acre to people from Kansas City that want a home in the solitude of the country.

My great-great-grandfather built a house, a barn, an open grain silo, a machine shed, and two hand-dug wells pretty much all by himself, from materials he found on the farm. He hand cut the lumber, carried rocks and stacked them for the foundations, and lined the wells with rock as he dug down with pick-axe and shovel. The foundations of the house and barn are still there, as are the wells and open silo. Here is a picture of the foundation to the barn:

The wells that were hand dug have been covered by old hedge fence posts to keep animals and trespassers from falling in (they are a big liability, even if someone is trespassing they could sue our socks off). We have plans in the works to fill them in with rock, though it pains us to destroy such a piece of family history. The well by the house is 40 feet deep, the one by the barn is 60 feet deep, both dug down through tons of rock and dirt. I cannot fathom digging a well that deep by hand. It renews my respect for my ancestors and the battles they fought against the land. Here are pictures of them, though it's not much to look at:

Years ago, my brothers and a friend rapelled down into one of them before we had covered them. At the bottom was a pile of animal bones about 5 feet deep, mostly deer and coyotes.

One other interesting piece of history is an old cultivator that has been devoured by a large hackberry tree. The cultivator sits at the edge of the big pasture in the timber, just NE of the barn. The story I've been told is that my great grandfather held a farm sale to sell off some of the equipment when times were tough. A man from Missouri bought the cultivator for $5 (a heckuva lotta money in the late 1800's), but never came back to pick it up. There are several stories as to what ever happened to the man, ranging from illness, to getting lost in a blizzard, to being killed by indians or robbers on his way from the sale. Despite the actual reason for his demise, the cultivator is still there, waiting to be claimed:

Sunday was absolutely beautiful, after a very cold 24 degree temp in the morning. It got up to 70 degrees again, sunny and clear with no wind. So, since Sonya the Wonder Dog didn't get to do much on Saturday, I decided to stay late, after the rest of the group left in the early afternoon, and took another long walk in the timber. I finally headed home around 6 pm, tired from head to toe, depressed that I was having to leave to go back to work in the morning, but pleased in my heart that I was able to even be there, in my own piece of history and my own piece of earth, miles and miles from all of my troubles. 8)

 

[Sparky-Watts]

looks like it would be productive for upland game and deer

Yes, it is. None of us actually hunt anymore, but there are literally hundreds of deer in the 120 acres. Also a handful of pheasant, lots of quail and turkey, coons, coyotes, and squirrels. When my dad was a boy, there were no deer in that part of the state, which is very hard for me to believe. He remembers one day that the teacher in the one-room school took all of the students down the road to a farm where two deer hand wandered into the barnyard and were feeding at the cattle trough. It was that uncommon to see deer back then that they made it a field trip!!

Now it's not unusual to be sitting at the campfire and see a dozen or more deer wander through the pasture, not 100 feet away, grazing and playing with each other. Mornings are pretty cool, too, because you'll wake up to see deer all over the pasture in the mist, and find deer tracks just feet away from the front of your tent! Unfortunately, that also brings in a dirge of poachers that drive across pastures and through fences, both hunting deer and coyotes. Since the farm is so isolated, and the guy we lease it to is only there a few times a year to work the land, it's a haven for poachers.

 

[Sparky-Watts]

Wow,... that looks amazing. I'm envious. Hope the Pecan trees take,... nothing better than Pecan pie,... or candied Pecans,... or hell even out of the shell Pecans,.... (In a Bubba Gump like voice) you can bake 'em, you can fry 'em, you can saute em,... you can make Pecan Jambalaya, Pecan Stew, Boiled Pecans......

Some of my earliest memories are of going to a pecan grove near the farm on frigid fall mornings and picking up pecans, then later on having pecan pie made by my grandmother.

Sometime next spring, we'll graft the trees with a variety that is more productive. That will be extremely time consuming, and will also cost us a few more trees in the process, but will be worth it. My uncle is a county agent in Haskell county, and knows all there is to know about plants and trees, so we've got a good leader on the grafting line! He says that even if the grafts don't take, the base tree (the ones we planted) will continue to grow and we'll have a few more chances to get a graft started on them.

 

[mud4feet]

Awesome pics, Sparky! If we ever get out that way, you'll have to take us out there!!

BTW - they've just started takin' down pecan trees on our jobsite - EASY PICKINS!!!!! I've got about 20 lbs. sittin' waitin' to get shelled.

 

[Gone&DoneIt]

I've got about 20 lbs. sittin' waitin' to get shelled.

I can think of a very deserving redneck in Vegas that is suffering from Hypopecanitis,... its a tragically dibilitating ailment,... we don't know how long he has left,... if he doesn't get a pecan-transplant,... he might not stand a chance,... if only we could find a donor...

 

[mudwoman]

Sparky, I read each and every word and looked at each picture- it was as if I was there. Those pictures make me so homesick for the mountains of North Carolina- I understand it was beauiful there the last few weeks. I am so grateful you had a chance to go to your family farm and refresh your spirit- here's to many more visits and hopefully the day will come when you call that place home. Although I miss our mountains terribly, the warm weather down here is a gift I appreciate and it's so great to still have the windows out of Muds Jeep and the top and doors off of mine- gotta find happiness wherever you can. I'm glad you had a wonderful weekend- memories to sustain you through a long winter!!

 

[90Xjay]

SParky,
What were the overnite temps? Man I like camping when its in the mid 40's overnight. Make you appreciate the white man fire even more.

 

[Sparky-Watts]

SParky,
What were the overnite temps? Man I like camping when its in the mid 40's overnight. Make you appreciate the white man fire even more.

Friday night it wasn't bad at all...probably one of the warmest nights I've spent down there in the fall. Woke up to 59 degrees Saturday morning at around 6 am. It got steadily colder as the day wore on. Sunday night it got down to 24 degrees, but I still managed to stay warm. Sonya the Wonder Dog is like a 50,000 BTU heater on legs!:lol:

Several years ago, my dad, oldest brother and I spent the night down there either in late January or early February. Daytime temps never got above 20 and that night it was down to 5 below zero. I love camping in sub-freezing temps, don't know why, I just do. Something about waking up with a thick coating of ice on my beard and mustache is kinda cool. I think I've camped down there in every month of the year at some point. The worst is in the summer, but not so much because of the temps, just because of the bugs. The weeds get so thick in the timber you can't go anywhere, then you get attacked by ticks. One summer camping trip, I found over 100 ticks on me after a walk in the timber. Spring isn't too bad, at least in April when we go there, but there are still a lot of ticks by then. The weeds don't get too bad that time of year, but the fire weed is bad. You don't know you've been around it for about 5 minutes, then any part of your body that has touched it starts burning like it's on fire, hence the name. Fall and winter are the best months to be there. No weeds, no bugs, don't break a sweat taking a walk in the timber....perfect weather.8)

 

[droopey]

Sparky,Sure Reminds Me Of Growing Up Back Home,Thanks For Sharing !

 

[mingez]

Beautiful pics Spark! I especially love those fall colors!