Well, it was time for Carol and me to go to town and pick up few supplies, mostly from the hardware store. We had been very fortunate to have had surplus construction materials on hand left over from the bathroom pop out addition Carol and the boys helped me construct the previous summer. As I purchase materials I made sure I bought a few extra pieces to keep us going without excessive trips to town. When you are doing carpentry, roofing, electrical, plumbing, dry walling, texturing, painting and trim, you best plan ahead and buy a little more. Home Depot in Mesa was a major source for construction materials and has a great return policy. We had some time, so decided to take the Forest Road #182 back to town and see what we could kick up.
It was about 11:00 AM when we left the cabin. We timed it just right to hit Eddies Country Store before we headed back to the cabin. We would pick up some of the BBQ right off the portable pits set up in the parking lot near the front entrance. Eddies plans the cook times perfectly to be ready just before noon and with the smoke rising and the aroma permeating the air was all the advertising they need to draw in the customers. They do chicken, ribs, tri-tip beef and other slabs of meat. They also have a real, county smoke house in back where they use mostly apple wood for that great flavor it produces. I think I will try smoking with apple in the smoker Chad got us for Christmas last year.
As we dropped down from the large ponderosas around the cabin to a shorter variety of pines with a heavy mixture of oak we shared stories of past adventures and talked about how fortunate we were to have a cabin in an area with so much variety of vegetation and animal life. The shorter pines are probably also ponderosa but with the rocky ground and less water soaking their roots, they had more of a stunted growth. As we entered the areas with alligator juniper becoming more dominant brought out the stories of bear sighting. The alligator juniper is known for their trunk bark that looks like ….. you guessed it, alligator. The bears love their berries along with the grubs and other delicacies they scrounge up.
On a straight section of the primitive road the silence is broken with “Look at that! What is it? It looks like a big German shepherd. It is running at even stride in front of us. There it goes into the trees. It just stopped. It is now standing sideways, checking us out. It is a Mexican Gray Wolf!” They have released some in areas where they were once flourished but killed off by the cattle people. I didn’t think they were released in this area, but the wildlife people were being very secretive about where they did reintroduce them. In one area, the ranchers were so upset, the wildlife people had to round them up and move them elsewhere. They do kill the cattle. Well, that was thrill. We then continued on to Eddies, I mean to the hardware store.