june 4-fossil creek

On a list of things to make your life better is "go sit by a stream" For the second year now I have taken that advice and taken my daughter & grandsons to Fossil Springs to catch crawdads and explore.
The day dawned with high clouds, unusual for Arizona in June, but unusual weather has become something of the norm lately, and an overcast day is always welcomed when you are going to be outside all day.

Very early on we realised the fishing poles I'd gotten were destined to become a huge tangle of fishing wire, so we abandoned them for the trusty nets we'd brought along and within minutes we began catching crawdads.

Along with crawdads, Katie discovered tadpoles, some with beginning legs, some without. The tadpoles were fun because you could touch them without getting pinched.

Tadpoles and frogs are native species that we want to keep in Arizona streams, but crawdads are invasive. When it was time to go, we sent the tadpoles back int the stream to grow up and have babies,

but the crayfish we took home . The forest service asks us to dispose of as many ans we can.

The boys slept all the way into Cave Creek, where we stopped for an ice cream cone.

It was a perfect day. I did nothing, really. Thought only about crayfish and little boys. Walked in the water, built a damn of rocks across the stream and thoroughly detached from the school year part of my life to the summer part.