Back to Bear Island, but this time for an overnight camping trip. If you read the last Bear Island entry you will know where we entered from and now the road ahead to Pink Jeep campsite. Pink Jeep campsite has 9 campsite, a few bear proof boxes to store your food, and even a bathroom of sorts. The bathroom is a hole in the ground with a plastic toilet over it, but it is surrounded by 4 concrete walls and a roof. Stacey really wanted to go camping so she asked Carl to pick a campsite so they could go for an overnight trip. Now why did Carl pick this site out of all the places they could have gone? Well Stacey was about 15 weeks pregnant at this point and wanted to go out camping before she had her baby. This site had everything Carl thought would make an easy campsite for his pregnant girlfriend. Well except for 3.3 mile hike from the car to the camp with all the gear. Below is a picture of Carl and the trail we walked. The trail is very nice and dry plus it overlooks a lot of water.
Where there is water in the everglades you will more than likely find gators, like the one pictured below. Now this gator was actually laying right buy the trail until we came along. Stacey was walking close to the edge looking out over the water for wildlife not knowing what was right under her. As she walked she scared the gator and it dove into the water which in turn scared Stacy, as she thought it was jumping out of the water at her. After a few deep breaths and looking out at the water to see where the gator had swam to we were able to take some pictures and move on. Now the last time we came here together Carl had got out of the car to open the gate to get in the parking area. Only to scar a great heroin under the over pass as he closed the door. The great heroin honked so loud that it startled Carl, who then tried to jump back in the car. Only problem was he forgot he closed the door and slammed right into the car door. That left Carl with a few bruises not to leave out the bruised ego.
The picture below shows Stacey looking up at a bear claw mark in a power power that has to be 7-8 feet up in the air, now that's a big bear. This trip we did not see any bears but we did see lots of signs that they are there.
Ok so we made it to camp and first things first, we need to rest our feet. Below Stacey is sleeping in a hammock that is covered with a homemade bug net. The bug net was made from some cheap shear curtains and worked great to keep the bugs out.
After our little rest we set up the rest of camp and planned our dinner, or should I say Stacey planned our dinner. We set up two hammocks one with a bug net and one without, a tent, and then lite a fire in our homemade rocket stove. If you do not know what a rocket stove is then look it up on you tube. We made ours from 3 food cans and one paint can. This stove worked great and boiled our water fast and after dinner and coffee we took the twigs out that were still on fire and the made our big fire from that.
We could hear owls starting at around 9-10 at night and a few birds that sounded like monkeys plus a few cat meows, we could not tell if it was bob cat or panther. Having timed this trip for the coldest night of the year I have to say that, yes we were cold all night and did not get much sleep. All that aside we got our wake up call from the red shouldered hawk pictured below. It may have been a little to early for our liking but the hawk was right over our campsite and was such a nice looking bird. Stacey got up and fired up the rocket stove for some very welcomed morning coffee. Now we did not bring lighters or matches on this trip, all we had was a fire starter rod and striker kit that I have listed in an earlier blog entry. This was the only thing we used to start our fire and it never failed
to strike and made starting our fire very easy.
After breakfast we took a rest in the hammocks for a few hours and watched all the birds flying between the trees. We saw all kinds of birds and were just in aw of what we were seeing. After our rest we packed up camp and started our hike back to the car.
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