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| no partners | | This was the colder and windier day, so we decided to see what was different in lower turkey creek and fill in the blanks. From camp we could stay high above the creek and have an easy walk through open forest which mostly made up for not getting as far down as we wanted. Things got a little slower as it tightened up between 5556 and Redman Mesa, but there was only one real obstacle and it was easily dealt with.
Bizarre seeing "upper turkey creek falls" with just a few pools, but it definitely made travel a lot easier and faster with hardly any water. We took the same bypass as last year below the big "lower turkey creek falls", without snow it's a very obvious heavily used cowtrack that passes over some old fallen barbed wire.
As per before, the creek was now flowing well. Hmmm. A lot of ice, but steady water flowing under it. Heading upstream we noticed seeps and springs coming up off of the north wall where there the blackberry brambles and holly. The falls itself was dry, but with a frozen over pool I couldn't resist walking around on to stand under the falls itself, and admire more bizarre bubbles in the ice.  Heading downstream the heavy winds of the night before the "tiger stripe cascade" truly striking! Slightly elevated radiation levels on the pretty pink/purple slabs, but nothing to set off alarms.
Once in Salome Creek we decided to pop down to where USGS shows and old trail going from JR Ranch to FR 2749, I noticed some posts, tin cans, barbed wire etc in this area before. No trace of the trail from some admittedly modest poking around aside from some old limbed trees following the creek itself.
Once again the water flowing out of the E/W turkey / little turkey / salome was a bit more than the water above it in the "main" salome / cataract creek N/S drainage (maps have conflicting names). More growth below the junction and as one got lower in the E/W turkey creek. Saw two probably smallish raccoon sized creatures, dark brown but with no markings I could tell from a distance with a slowish loping gate head down the slickrock and out of sight. Intriguing.
Exited salome/cataract at our usual spot, and came across an interesting partial carcass. Having done that stretch of road a bit recently decided to see if a cairn along the road 33.91777, -111.03389 was the bottom of the old ranch trail we caught on Redman Mesa then wandered off of. Shortly before heading up we came across a pack of Javelinas. They were rather skittish and had no tusks I could see but were fairly noisy. After that drama, the cairn turned out to go! It's a fairly followable path with a lot of ooooold limbed trees and at one point an R and an arrow carved into a tree. Cow maintained, but it took us up to 33.92202, -111.03397 where we had passed by a large cairn near some dead limbed trees (drop from the trees if heading down).
We wandered around Redman Mesa a bit before wiggling down the SE side to the drainage that borders it, then back to camp at a reasonable hour. It felt like it was going to be a cold night... |
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