Silver Creek - Crouch, ID

Silver Creek - Crouch, ID

Another weekend, another camping trip.  This week in the adventures of Rustic Reed and Camper Carrie, we went up the middle fork of the Payette River to Silver Creek.  With all the state campgrounds still closed, we found a spot and set up shop.  But this was not without controversy!!!

This is the space we pulled up in.  HUGE space, right?  My parents have been to this spot before and had 6 full size camp trailers with trucks, so there's lots of room.  When we pulled in, there was a single person tent and a single camp chair set up by the fire pit.  The tent was EMPTY.  Nothing inside it.  We figured someone was trying to save the space, but figured it would be OK to park on the outskirts because of the size of the space.  We set up the trailer and went for a little walk up the road we drove in on.  When we got back, there was a family there looking quite perturbed.  They had set up the tent a few days before and had gone back down to pick up the rest of their things.  They weren't at all interested in sharing the space.  The wife kept coming up with angry excuses like 'We have another family coming up', and 'our dog will eat all your food, so you have to keep it inside your trailer'.  We were totally OK with all of that.  They ended up packing up and moving to a new site.  It was just a weird situation all around.  Were we in the wrong?  Does setting up a single tent grant the reservation of a whole site?  Leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

The whole drive up was rainy, and with dirt roads the last ten miles of the drive, this is what my truck ended up looking like.  I'm totally OK with it though.  I'm with Blake Shelton when he was on Jimmy Fallon.  Trucks shouldn't be taken care of, babied, and washed regularly.  They should be dirty, banged up, and well used.  A dirty truck is a happy truck, and we definitely achieved that this weekend.

One of the best features of this location is this big hill for the kids.  It has some loose sand on the bottom half to get going, but the top half is slick for sliding.  The kids scramble halfway up, then use tree roots and branches to make it to the top.  They slide down on their butts and do it all over again.  The clearing over from ours had a couple families in it, and their kids came and played too.  They all had lots of fun.  When we took Emmy's boots off later that night, we dumped out more dirt and sand than we thought they could hold.  She definitely enjoyed climbing the hill.

I always have lots of scrap wood sitting around at home.  Cut-offs, cracked pieces that I can't use, etc.  I thought what better way to put them to use than to get some heat from them, so we brought a bucket up and burned them.  The good part was they were dry and started right up.  The bad part is we burned the whole bucket in half an hour.  They don't last very long apparently.  We quickly ran out, so I grabbed the chainsaw and the boys, and we drove off looking for wood.  The unfortunate part was that it had been raining all week, so any dead wood that was legal to cut up was soaked all the way through.  We didn't have much more than a smoulder of a fire all weekend.  Carrie enjoyed it though.  Little did I know, but I apparently married a pyromaniac.  Carrie spent the rest of the weekend getting grass and twigs to throw in the fire.  She would watch them flame up, poke them around until it died down, then go get more.  

This was our fire situation most of the weekend.  Half-charred logs because they were too wet to actually burn down.

One of the coolest parts of the weekend was cutting down a tree.  I know that doesn't sound that cool, but it was for a cool reason.  There was a small dead tree just outside our campsite that was still standing, so I grabbed the chainsaw and walked over to cut it down.  When I was slicing it into logs back at camp, Carrie reminded me she wanted a long piece for a craft project, so I cut off a 3' long section.  We looked at the end of it and lo and behold, there was a chunk of metal in the tree!!  Someone shot a gun and the bullet was lodged in the middle!!  Some may think it's lame, but I find it pretty cool that I cut down this specific tree, and cut in this exact spot to reveal what was inside. 





One of my favorite gadgets as of late has been this ThermoPro Thermometer.  It has a sensor that we place outside on the wheel of the trailer (protected from sun and rain, but still gives an accurate temperature reading).  We can see how cold it is outside when we wake up, and this internal one tells us what the inside of our trailer is.  It also has a maximum/minimum temperature reading so you can see how hot/cold it got during the day, with the humidity readings too.  I have one at home in the garage so I know if it's warm enough to glue cutting boards up.  The sensor is outside our front door.  I absolutely love it.   We take the batteries out of it when we pack the trailer up to go home and just put them back in when we go camping again.  HIGHLY recommend getting one.   (The link is for a newer model than we have, but it's only a difference of a dollar for the newer one.)

We did some double-decker hammocking.  Parker loved it :)
(Here's the link for the hammocks)

Anytime I have the chance to run in the mountains, you better believe I'm going to take it, even if it means I just go run up and down the road we came in on.  Luckily, this time I didn't have to do that.  About a half mile out of our campsite was the trail head for an ATV trail.  I did three miles out and three back.  The first three were nothing but uphill, but that just means I get to come back down when I turn around :)  I got passed by a family of dirt bikers on the way up.  The second to last was no older than 5 on probably the smallest dirt bike I've seen in a long time.  His dad was right behind on a four-wheeler making sure he didn't drive off the side of the mountain.  On runs like this, I play my audio book straight out of my phone speakers because there's no one to bother, and I always take water.  The Ultimate Direction running vest comes in handy for this.  I have room for 40oz of water in the two bottles, and room for a phone, GoPro, and some snacks.  I also carry about 20 squares of toilet paper in a ziploc, because, well, just in case...

Carrie and the kids roasting marshmallows the first night.

Parker fell asleep like this, but he swore he didn't.

Hey Dad!!  Look how I'm shoveling the dirt!!

Rainy day on the way out