Ridley and I headed out this morning to explore the Fall Creek State Recreation Area. To the best of my memory, I had never been out quite that far, I know I've been close as a kid to fish in the middle fork of the Willamette, but never up Fall Creek. The weather was pretty rainy to begin the adventure, not great for hiking with a little one, but good for quick snaps out the truck of the low hanging clouds. I let Ridley bring his Leappad educational tablet, and I would hear him giggling every now and again from the back, it made me smile.
After pulling over a few times around Fall Creek Lake, we headed up Big Fall Creek road following Murphy Creek. There was a location I had seen where a forest fire came through killing most of the trees but a vast amount of them stayed standing like light poles. I would guess the fire came through 7-10 years ago based on the new undergrowth. We put around for a while with Ridley driving his monster truck over the trail, but the rain picked up again, and we decided to head out and head up.
When we drive on old logging roads, I let Ridley sit up front with me. We never get over 15 miles an hour, and since the name of the game is to find photos, we often drive much slower. At this point, we put away the LeapPad, and I get Ridley's snacks out, and the adventure begins. Halfway up a few deer ran across the road and Ridley called them Ding-a-lings (a family term for dummies) because they ran across the path in front of us.
We continued upward and eventually found ourselves in the snow. At first, it was a few patches here and there but ultimately got pretty thick. I tend to try to get up as high as we can hoping to find an elevated viewpoint, but this time it was working against us, we just got into deeper and deeper snow. Now it was nothing crazy, but I'm new to 4x4'n and don't have much recovery gear, to boot my partner in crime is only four years old, so I try to keep it pretty safe. Once my "spidey-sense" kicked in, I decided to turn around and a good thing I did. Within 10 feet of me turning around, I nearly got stuck in a foot of snow in 4-low with the diff locked. Of course, we made it out just fine, but it was a lesson to me to follow my gut and that I also need some better recovery gear.
