Josie's Birthday

Josie's birthday was filled with adventure and ended with a nice surprise birthday dinner at the lodge.

We started out after breakfast to take the Forest Service Road (229) to the Buck Mountain Lookout that was about 6 miles off the road. The lookout sits at over 7500 feet elevation and you can get a pretty good view of the area from the top of the tower. Here are a couple shots of the lookout:

One person at the top of the tower said that on a clear day you can see Jerome and Sedona. It was a little hazy as a result of the controlled burns that the Forest Service is performing in the area and we got a shot of one of these burn areas

There were several hummingbird feeders hanging from different places on the tower and the hummingbirds were swarming around all of them. We tried to get a good shot of them but they were so fast and moving in and out of the feeder that we could only get this shot to give you an idea:
After leaving the lookout, we decided to take the Forest Service roads to Stoneman Lake instead of going back out onto Lake Mary Road and driving further north and coming back in on another road. It was kind of a mistake. A good portion of the back road was a non maintained road and made Josie really nervous because of the ruts and boulders and dips and drops in the road. Bob travels roads like this all the time on his hunting trips but it is nerve racking for Josie. Good thing we had the Jeep. We finally connected to a maintained road again and Josie was happy.

Stoneman Lake was a joke. It was very similar to Mormon Lake (swamp). It looks like such a nice lake on the map and it even has beautiful homes all around the lake. It's too bad that all the residents there have lost tremendous property value as a result of the lake draining. There were lots of homes for sale and some even looked abandoned. One home, advertising lake front, was for sale for nearly $500K and it looks beautiful but probably is only worth half that much now.

Here is a shot of the "lake":


After that disappointment, we headed back to the rig.

My plan, as arranged with some of the staff at the lodge, was to take Josie to the lodge for pizza night to celebrate her birthday. The chef was to bake a cake and we would have a nice, small celebration. It turned out that the chef prepared a steak and baked potato dinner, with party favors, wine and a cake that was a classic. It was mentioned in previous posts that Josie had become the "Mice Queen" of the staff since she has always set the traps and "captured" the mice. Probably about 10-12 since she started planting these traps in the right places. Below is a picture of the cake that was baked:

Notice the (candy) mice that they put on the top. There is even one coming out the side. We certainly had a good laugh over that. It was a much larger celebration than expected and it was much appreciated. Over all, Josie's birthday was a fun day and one that she will long remember.

The post today was delayed as a result of an outage by Alltel so we couldn't get a connection in order to publish it prior to our start for work. Anyway, that sums up the day and we have the large group coming in for the weekend so it should be fun...