My dad discovered records about my Great Grandpa Hanson Bayles and the Decker Brothers being the only people to raise successful crops the first year in Bluff. It referenced Great Grandpa Bayles farming at the mouth of Recapture Creek. It is only 35 minutes from our house, so we figured we could check it out.
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The research started with a comparison of a modern satellite image to the map my dad provided from 1886, trying to locate Recapture Creek in our modern world. After asking a friend about the area, he said there is a decent dirt road most of the way, so we decided to just take the truck, rather than load up an ATV. Here is a link to the Google Maps view of the area |
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| We started by pulling off highway 162 onto a dirt road. We followed that for about a mile, then things got interesting. We turned on to a smaller trail and got to run through a couple mud pits and drive down the dry riverbed for a 1/3 mile. We stopped when.... |
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| ...we got closer to the San Juan river. The clay/sand mixture quickly became too wet to drive over and we had a brief worry that we were getting stuck. |
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| But we were able to escape, which made Melissa pretty happy. |
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| And Zoe too, she thought this muddy, cold river bed was one of our best hikes ever. |
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| We walked down to the San Juan river, the mouth of Recapture Creek bed is actually quite wide. We weren't getting a very good idea of where you could farm in this area, so we drove back up the trail part way and found a trail on top of the hills. |
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| From on top of the hills it is easier to see where you could plant, San Juan river is in the background and the Recapture Creek mouth is just off camera to the right. |
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| Here we see a little of that large flat in the prior picture and another expanse of flat land to the right of Recapture Creek (running from bottom right to top left). |
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| We ended up hiking above the creek bed for about 30 minutes. |
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| And Zoe was pretty proud to stand guard above the family farm. |
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| Panorama from above the creek bed (right side) |
You can view a satellite track of our course from the highway down to the river bed, back up on top (where we left the truck to hike) and heading back up the dirt road to the highway. (starts at the green pointer, ends at the red pointer).
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