NEW CAMPSITES

11 April 2012:  We had to get water, dump the camper and pick up a few things at the store so spent a night at the Desert Lakes RV Park by the Butcher Hook.  It is a pretty new RV park and is clean and neat.  We even went over to the Butcher Hook Restaurant and had breakfast before we left.  I think we were the only ones in there that were not locals.  And the waitress new everyone and what their “usual” order was.  Pretty amazing.  The food was really good also.  We left there and parked the camper in a spot we thought we would like to camp.  Did not set everything up though as we headed to the lake to kayak.  We are glad we didn’t put it all together.  There were a lot of goat heads and the filaree had gone to seed and they are really stickery stickers.  Saw a better place when we came back from kayaking so drove down there and set up.  Kayaking was good.  We saw a brown pelican which is a first for us here on this lake.  And also got to watch the grebes do their courtship dance which consists of them moving their heads and necks all around then running on the water together followed by a dive.  There are both the western and clarks grebes here on the lake.  Some of the pictures below are from our previous campsite at "the point".

A pretty colorful butterfly.

 The prickly pear has some bright yellow flowers and the bugs just love them.

Lots of flowers in the desert now.

Walking up washes is sometimes the easiest way to get through the desert.  Lots of flowers like the ones below along the way.

There are spiders that live in the ground making some pretty elaborate webs like the one above.  And below you can see the little creature that makes this kind of web.

 

The flowers are every where.

What remains of a by gone era - when cattle ran in these hills.

Some clarks grebes doing part of their courtship ritual.  The way they bend their necks and move is pretty interesting.

The brown pelican taking a little nap.

Crossing the Tonto River.

Campsite at the point.

The brown pelican provided us with a lot of entertainment.

Connie's back is getting pretty tan.

A few more of our campsites.

Just after sunset.

If you click to enlarge, you can see the white spider in the center.  I think it is laying eggs at the base of the spines on the cactus.