Black River

I've been meaning to upload these pictures for a month now, better late than never!

About 6 hours east of us is the beautiful White Mountains of Arizona. It's so nice because you leave the heat and city and the madness behind you and you enter Cool Wheather and Pine Trees. There is this little turn off that we take and you drive a good 12 miles on dirt road and then you come to this:


and this:


One of the fun things we did was hike back to Horse Springs. It's probably a good mile off the road, it's a natural spring, that is probably at least 100 years old. Someone took a hollowed out log and drilled a pipe into the ground and clean, pure, mountain spring water flows all the time on it's own.

Here the boys are tasting the water. It was so good, it was almost sweet!

While we were hiking we let Cooper off of his leash and let him just run around. But once we got to Horse Springs he started freaking out. He was skittish and sniffing everything. He looked freaked out. He obviously knew something we didn't, so the boys (& Dad) started looking around for tracks or any sign that an animal was close and this is what we found:
It's kindof hard to tell from the picture, but that is a 6 inch paw print. It looked totally fresh and pretty deep, meaning what ever made it was probably a pretty heavy animal. We didn't stick around long after that. It was really beautiful and so green back there though. It was worth the hike!


Wish I could super-impose Little Man in there somehow.

The boys did alot of fishing and they both caught one with the help of dad. Hubbie caught a ton. We fried a couple up and they were delicious. Even Little Man was brave and tried some. He liked it, but didn't want more, Thank you.


Hubbie brought this fish back, it had claw marks in it and even had what looked like probably a tooth mark. Poor thing had probably fought for it's life to get out of a bears hands, only to end up in our frying pan.

Hubbie brought it back and put it in this bucket. Meanwhile Squirt is talking to it. Saying things like this fishy is my friend, and hello fishy. So I tried to take him away when Hubbie was going to kill it. But instead he says "Daddy, you gonna kill the fishy? Awesome!" And he sat and watched with too big a smile on his face. I'm gonna have to seriously watch this one!

We saw alot of wild life, which was very nice for the boys. We saw a mom and 2 baby deer. They were just across the river from us, and probably 100 yards up the mountain, they really blended in, but once we found them they never left the whole week we were there. I guess that was where they lived. We also saw a wild turkey, an eagle catch a fish out of the water, and a mother duck with about 12 babies swimming behind her. One time me and the boys went hiking up the side of the mountain. When we reached the top we heard what sounded almost like a baby crying. I'm thinking it was a baby deer? Squirt was insistent that we go "rescue" it. I was insistent that we leave. I didn't want to get to close.

We also celebrated Little Man's 6th birthday while we were there. We sent him on a scavenger hunt around camp looking for his presents, which he had a blast doing. Then we went into town later to get him some ice cream (and ice for the ice chests) It's a little hard to celebrate when your camping, but I think he still had a nice day. Unfortunatly, I didn't get any pictures of that.

I included a slide show, so as not to bore you with the rest of the pics. Enjoy!