Birds and bites

For  a change the rain had kept some of the party up during the night, and this continued throughout much of the morning, including torrential downpours with limited visibility back through the valley on our way to Salt Lake City.

We retraced our steps to Bear Lake/Garden City in the deluge, and then took the more direct route to Brigham City, where our campsite was booked. This turned out to be surprisingly scenic, climbing through the Beaver Valley, once again admiring the colours of the trees, the river through the gorge and the mountains.

Our initial destination was the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, in an attempt to delay the awful prospect of packing all of our dispersed belongings. We quickly found the visitor centre - very new indeed, and with a very impressive range of displays and interpretation within the building, and extremely keen staff that practically pounced on Les as he loitered too long at a board, and had a bird ID guide pressed upon him.

We started our exploration with an attempt at walking the arduous 1/2 mile 'wet and wild' trail. This turned out to be very short lived, as we had only just made it to the wetland when great clouds of mozzies descended upon us, prompting a quick about-turn and hurried retracing of steps, flailing as we went to prevent further bites. Alas, Les had been the sacrificial protection for the rest of the party, leading to much scratching for the remainder of our tour.

Piling back in the van, we started the auto tour. This involved a 12 mile drive down the road, then beginning a very slow and bone-shattering further 12 miles across gravel track, before returning along the same access road. The route was beautiful, with wonderful light over the lake (part of the Great Salt Lake), the adjacent mountains and canals. Clouds of dragonflies and big grasshopper-like insects, with impressively coloured wings, enveloped the vehicle as we lurched along. We saw many birds, both in numbers and species, including American pelican and a possible sandhill crane. The Refuge is known for the largest population of resident American avocet, of which we saw a few. To be honest, it was hard to look through binoculars when you are being jarred so much. Photography was limited to through the bug-splattered windows of the van, as opening them was totally out of the question (the ravenous mozzie hordes...).

Returning our bird guide to the visitor centre staff (who turned out not to know anything much about the birds either...), we started our journey to the campsite, entering the I15 and then getting off at the next exit, about a mile down the road. The campground is located amongst orchards, at the foot of the mountains, with views across to the Salt Lake. This was the calm before the storm as we began the increasingly-panicky packing up of everything, and palming off of the surplus foodstuffs (of which there were a great many - Les will not let the jetlagged girls shop for food again - especially for carbs). We managed to leave the huge sack of rice (and pasta, and tins of tomatoes, and couscous and yet more rice...) with the camp reception. We also had much surplus booze, which didn't need palming off (a noble sacrifice), including a bottle of Californian champagne, which slid down very nicely as  a way to say goodbye (and good riddance) to the van. This was accompanied by the only other food items to hand as canapés/nibbles, namely a hunk of red pepper and the remaining crumbs from a bag of crisps.

Tomorrow we hand the van back (accompanied with much moaning and complaining about the many faults) before having a quick tour of Salt Lake City. We then catch our flight the next morning to Vancouver, which will be our base for the next couple of nights before the party splits up!