Before leaving home, we had stored a couple of waypoints for geocaches in our GPS. We decided to try for one, Cattail Falls. We did not know where it was in relation to Park roads, so just turned on the GPS and kept an eye on it as we drove. When we came to the Sam Nail Ranch, there was a road leading in the opposite direction, which seemed to go right towards the cache. This was a virtual cache, which means there is no box, just an interesting feature to look at.
The road was horrible, and went in a good long way. Finally we parked beside a van from Québec, and hiked into the falls. We met the couple, from Granby, Québec, and exchanged hiking tips. It was a very scenic area, but the waterfall was almost dry. We saw a good number of Ash-throated Flycatchers and Black-throated Sparrows.
On the road back out, we finally spotted a Pyrrhuloxia (no photo), a bird which had eluded us on Tom’s tour.
We decided to visit the Sam Nail Ranch. There wasn’t much left, just a couple of old windmills (one working), which did attract a lot of birds. By then it was mid day, and things were pretty quiet.
We drove on to Santa Elena Canyon, just in time to see a couple of canoes emerge. The water looked really low, so we figured we’d have no problem. We drove on to Study Butte, just outside the park to book a canoe rental (another bad road).
It was getting rather late, but we decided to squeeze in one more short hike – the Grapevine Hills hike to see the Balance Rock. It was an easy hike except for the last scramble. We heard a songster which turned out to be a Scott’s Oriole. On the road back we saw several Black-tailed Hares. We got back barely in time to have dinner, after the sun had gone down.
