Great Friends, New Experiences and 80 Acres of Land

This winter has been a pretty mild one, and the sunshine and mild temps have allowed us to spend a lot of time outside.  Today, we took our adventure deep into the woods, on a hike on some private land that is for sale.  I've been wanting to find some land to build a house on, or even find a house on a decent sized piece of land with all my desired checklist of items, but so far we haven't found the right spot.

Derrick wasn't interested in hiking 80 acres, and I didn't feel it was the best idea for me and my kids to go trudging through the woods alone (especially since this location has a bit of tragic history with a dynamite bunker blowing up two teens in the early 1980's), so I called a great friend who is always up for an adventure outside with her kiddos, and we geared up for an adventure.  Prepared for a rough hike through uncharted territory, with our babies on our backs and our older kids in rain/snow boots and their hiking packs, we set off to see if there was any reason I should talk Derrick into making an offer on the parcel of land.

We were very curious as to why the screening was around the base of these large cottonwood trees?

These kids LOVE it when we have to cross streams!

Working together, they all made it across.

I even decided it would be easier to take the high road rather than slosh in the creek.

Amanda and her girls built a little bridge to cross the creek below.

It worked!

I had an aerial map of the property and with the GPS on my phone, we hiked over to the area where I thought I'd like to build a house if we were to purchase the property.  As we hiked up there, I got the feeling that this wasn't the piece of land for us, it was WAY too marshy and wet and too many areas that were too difficult to hike through, but it was a lot of fun exploring and it was a great day to do so.

The kids thought it was neat seeing a deer skeleton.

It was still slightly smelly, so we kept our distance.

  

It was a bit more noisy than I would have expected in the upper clearing,
and the amount of brush to work through was almost overwhelming.

In the clearing there was more evidence of deer.

One of the best parts of the hike was finding evidence of beaver activity and a beaver dam.  The kids and us moms thought it was pretty interesting, although it posed a problem of us crossing, so we had to make a small detour over a fence in order to get back to where our vans were parked.

  

Is this leading to the underwater entrance?

Pretty cool to see it up close.

On our way back, we stopped to check if the critter we had first spotted in a dead tree was still there.  It was, and after letting the kids toss mud balls, moss balls, and sticks and not getting much movement from the critter, we headed back to the vans, exhausted from our long hike.

The critter we spotted was WAY up at the top of this dead tree.
Everett tried to reach it with a long stick.  No success.

Ethan got really close on hitting it with mud balls, but it barely moved.
Here you can see it's grey ear.

From this photo, when it moved a bit, we concluded it was most likely a raccoon.
Obviously, he/she was needing a nap more than needing to check out some silly kids and two curious moms.

I am loving this weather, it's great to explore the wild outdoors without all the deep snow and freezing temps, but I'm a bit sad that this wasn't "the spot" for us!  I'm sure Derrick will be happy to hear I'm no longer interested.  :)