This Saturday we had an exciting trip out to Ruby Lake! What should have taken a few hours total, took us about 7!

Lee and I went up to the Ruby Lake area w/ my dad to look for and harvest Pine Nuts. It was a really pleasant trip there, and nice to get out of the house. Along the way we saw the most spectacular sight, just like we were in a nature film. We spotted a golden eagle about 30 feet in front of us, about 10 feet off the road. It was taking off with a rabbit which it dropped when we startled it! It was so amazing to see it in real life!!! Lee swears he looked it right in the eyes as it was passing us. To see such a magnificent creature so close to us was very awe inspiring!

When we got there we couldn't find many pine cones which were ready to harvest, but we decided to get what we could so that we could sun-cure them at home. We wandered around trying to find some trees that had cones close enough for us to reach and managed to get about 1/2-1/3 of a grocery bag full. We were going to move further up the road to look for more, but when we got back to the truck Lee discovered that it had a flat tire! The funny thing was that my dad had just had to replace his other tire the other day so the spare was flat, too! We looked around on the other side for a little bit for more cones since we were there, but had to scrap looking further up the road. Lee thought about pumping it up and my dad hooked up his little air pump. We got up to 20 lbs pressure in and decided to head for home.

We managed to travel every 3-5 miles before stopping and filling more air in the tire until we got to the ranger station where they filled the tire full. From there we were able to make it every 8-10 miles between fillings. About 1/3 of the way home the tire finally blew! My dad put the spare on and we limped back to Spring Creek doing the same thing with the second tire.

What took us about 1 1/2 - 2 hours to get there took us another 4 - 4 1/2 to get home! However, it was a still a great day and we had a lot of fun. Can't ask for more than that, can we?