Cabelas-Ourdoor range-Weekly fun

Chris's grandparents got VIP passes to go shop at the new Cabelas in Farmington before it opened. Todd, Jana, Roy, Kathy, Chris and I all headed down to tour the store. We spent way too much money ha!

I did find a killer deal on a new bow fishing bow. Ive been looking for one for weeks and found a perfect set up!

We finished the night off with dinner at Olive Garden. I was teasing Chris telling him it can be our anniversary dinner since we didnt get to celebrate our anniversary at all.. insert sick kid with strep....

Kennedy has FINALLY been on the mend. I never knew strep could make a child throw up so much. Her dr said its really hard on their tummys. She was back to school Monday (no longer contagious) and by Tuesday she had finally stopped throwing up.

Wednesday her and I went to the outdoor range and hiked the lower course. 

 It was so nice and warm and sunny!

 She was asleep before we even hit Sardine on the way back. When we got home she asked if we could lay on the couch together. Her and I both crashed hard for a few hours!

Any time we go to Todd and Janas she wants to ride her bike there. Its a good 6 blocks (according to Google .8 miles) Plus then she rides her bike all over with the neighbor kids while we are there. This time she was tired and didn't want to ride home. Instead of putting her bike in the car Chris decided to ride it. We were laughing so hard. He told her he was going to ride her bike and she got all worried. She told him "dad im really worried you're going to pop the tires"

 Kennedy got to help Grandma Jana plant flowers. She let her pick where she was going to put what colors and help her dig. 

 A clean boat is a happy boat!

Chris and I took off his blind and worked on getting the boat cleaned up for duck season.. and to do some carp hunting if the freaking weather ever cooperates!

Not many wifes will vacuum the duck boat haha

 We've made some changes to the backyard range. We added a solar light so we can do some night shooting. 

  Chris and I ran a few calls for the county this weekend too. We spend a few hours Saturday night out in Deweyville waiting for Rocky Mountain Power to show up.

 I got my belt buckle I won at the Cache Bridgerland indoor shoot that I took 2nd place in. Its the first buckle Ive ever won. 

 Most people on their commute to and from work listen to the radio.. I practice my two turkey mouth calls for the upcoming hunt...

Harold Crane Rx Burn

Thursday we had a great opportunity to go out to Harold Crane and do a phrag management burn. Phragmite is awful stuff. It overtakes the water and spreads like crazy. The idea is to spray it and then come in a year or two later, drop the water down and burn it. Then the next day or two flood it with water so it chokes it out and doesn't allow as much of it to grow back. We were out on Harold Crane where we spend a lot of time duck hunting. Phrag management is a great thing for duck hunters! We combined hunting conservation and fire fighting all in one day :)

Its really hard to get a prescribed burn to go. You have to have all the air clearances, have the right winds and temps to be allowed to do it and have the right weather forecast for the day. Thankfully we had pretty decent windows and a short amount of time to get it done.

We all meet at Harold Crane boat launch at 8am. The DNR guys were our air boat drivers. Their two bosses came out for the briefing and hoping to see some fire before their meetings.

We had our morning briefing and took some weather. It wasnt quite where we needed it to be so we worked on getting everything set up and trying to kill a little time hoping the humidity would drop.

 Dusty, Spencer, Morgan and I ran around to the far south side down the dike that separates the two bodies of land. We had to build a fire line to stop anything from going to the south JUST IN CASE

We took the ranger down the canal road and all those black specs you see out the window are ducks and geese! The place was FILLED with them.

 We drafted and lit a small burn to create a line. 

 My job was to create a wet line and soak anything close that might catch

 Thankfully it was still pretty green and didnt want to burn.

 While we were doing that the guys were a ways away doing a test burn.

The BIG cloud is out far away at a private b urn and you can see our little smoke cloud from the test burn next to it.

Test burning to see the winds and how the fuels react before we light a BIG fire

 From there next we went to the far west end where they had matted down phrag and did a control burn for a fire line. This stuff took off pretty good. Phrag burns really hot and really fast normally.

Chris lighting some fire

Me supervising haha

 We only needed to burn the east side of the road to stop the fire from crossing to the west if our burn went really really good.

 Dan lighting

 Dusty

 Chris

 TJ, Colton (with DNR) Dusty and Chris

 Little Hubby/Wife selfie

 Tj and Spencer

 Once that was done I was paired off with Jason (DNR) and we went out in the airboat to light the east side. There was one other airboat with Colton (DNR) and Morgan lighting the west end. We were hoping for a strong burn that would tie together in the middle.

We started out with fuzees and fire ignition pistols.

The flare guns are so much fun to shoot off the boat

 My driver for the day

 We were able to get a decent line by shooting a bunch of flares and throwing a bunch of fuzees but it wasnt taking off like we needed it to. So we ran to shore and got a drip torch to try and get a little more fire on the ground. 

This is a shot of my boat for the day and the fires I just lit.

 West end crew working on some fire and the road crew (that Chris was on) lighting along the road.

 Even with the drip torch we were having a hard time. Our boat didnt have polymer on the bottom so we weren't able to get as close to the weeds as needed. If we were getting in close on some stuff the push of the airboat getting us out was putting out some of the fire. We only had so many flare rounds and fuzees. We eventually had to pick pockets of land to pull up next to. Jason hopped out of the boat (he was in muck boots and I was in wildland boots..) and lit some fires from the ground.

 The other crew was having to get out on foot too and hike through the marsh to light their fires.

We didnt get quite as good of a burn as we were hoping. We had some spots that it just wouldnt spread at all. So our airboat came back in. They switched out the crew in the second airboat and went back out.

Colton drove, Chris, Spencer and Morgan lit fires.

They lit for about 2 hours and then came back in for the day.

We got a decent burn. Hopefully this duck season it will be great!