Swimming Squirrel

When I woke up in the morning, Carsten and Penny were already up and had breakfast waiting for me. As we sat and ate, a little red squirrel went running by with his own breakfast in his mouth. He had been gathering  mushrooms for breakfast. 

​We had seen a trail on the map that was called the Big Bend Trail. It was supposed to be a fairly short trail so we decided to pack a lunch and hike the trail and then head over to one of the beaches to eat. 

We figured we would drop our garbage off at the waste management site along the way. We had to laugh and shake our heads when we got to the waste management site because there were "bear proof" garbage bins, but they were so full that people had taken to just leaving their garbage outside the bins. That kind of defeats the purpose of having bear proof bins!

​Big Bend Trail was not what I consider to be a hiking trail. It is more of a walkway to a landmark. The map says that this is a 15 minute trail but it took us all of two minutes to walk the "trail".  However, the destination made you forget that you were tricked out of a hike. 

In front of us was where the river made a huge bend in its travels so that it almost looked more like a moat than a river. This oxbow encircles an area of trees and shrubs that looked small from the height we were standing at. 

The area is all fenced in for good reason. 

As far as you can see, along all the edges are cliffs of beach sand. Big Bend erodes one foot every year. By having a platform for people to view this, it keeps the erosion from accelerating. 

All down the sides of the beach sand cliffs you can see trees that have fallen over and slid down the hill due to this erosion. I imagine that anyone who was at the bottom and wanted to climb up would have a pretty tough time of it. 

As we stood there taking in the view we noticed something swimming in the water. At first we thought it was a muskrat. But then all of a sudden it jumped out of the water, landed about two feet from on shore and started scampering straight up the sandy cliffs. 

As it got closer, to our surprise, we realized that it was a squirrel!  I'm not sure if I was more amazed to find out that squirrels could swim or to see this little guy climb these hills with sand rolling out from beneath it's feet the whole way.  It was not an easy task at all and it took him a fair amount of time to do it. He never stopped even for a second. I don't know if this is because he knew that if he stopped he was going to slide back down and would never make it to the top, or if something had chased him from one side of the river to the other and was fearing for his life. At any rate, he was the focus of attention for us and all the other people at the Big Bend as we cheered the little guy on. Finally he made it to the top and scampered away. 

The Big Bend trail does wind its way around the edge for a bit and then heads into the forest towards the campground. We chose to walk the trail a little to see where it led. 

This trail turned out to be just another winter trail. But it did eventually lead us past the cabins that you can rent in the park. So we got to check those out. 

There were plenty of damselflies flitting around on the trail.

After awhile we headed off to one of the 3 beaches for lunch. We went to Beach 2 since it was the closest. But it was crowded and there were no picnic tables or picnic shelters. Since it was supposed to rain soon we were really hoping for a picnic shelter. 

So we tried going to Beach 3 which is named Roe Beach. It was difficult to get to because it was on long winding, narrow, rough,  roads and wasn't easy to find. Once we got there we found it to be small and cute with a nice view but  there was no picnic shelter there as well. This beach was worse than the last one though because there was doggie doo all over the place on this beach. And I mean everywhere! Not just a little spot here and there.  I am pretty sure it is not the dog beach, but clearly people were bringing their dogs here and not thinking about how their dogs would have an impact on other people's enjoyment of the beach. I bet the dog beach was probably cleaner than this one was. So we left that beach too. 

Instead of going to Beach 1 we decided to instead head back to camp for lunch. We ended up toasting english muffins over the camp stove since the fire ban was still on. That made for a bit of fun because english muffins do not like to stay put on hot dog sticks. And they get a bit crumbly when they are heated. 

After lunch Penny and I went Geocaching. There is only one real cache in the area and it is situated just outside the park entrance. According to the posts of the other geocachers who were there in the past, the geocache was no longer there and had been "geotrashed".  So Penny and I came up with the idea to revive the dead geocache. We got a plastic container, a little notebook, a couple of pens, and some little treasures. We packed them up and headed off to replace the missing cache. 

The spot wasn't too difficult to find. I did have a problem syncing my phone to the location on the app, However, Penny had her phone too so between us I think we stashed the cache in the right place. Then we headed back to camp with a feeling of a job well done. 
The rest of the day and evening was spent relaxing and playing board games.
Another Dobson Fly showed up in the dining tent again. But this one was smaller and wasn't upset. So we were able to play our board games until bedtime which for us was around 11 pm that night.

 
It rained during the night . The tent held up well and did not leak. But then, it wasn't all that much rain. At least not enough to lift the fire ban. 

I heard something around my tent during the night. Whatever it was, it was only small and left some tiny little footprints in the dirt. It was probably that little jumping mouse again. 

And that is where this camping trip ends. We packed up and drove home before lunch. We had a good time at Arrowhead and will definitely come back again; perhaps in the winter to skate down one of the trails.