Idaho Trip - Day 3 - Part 2

At the end of Part 1 I asked a question about the Scottish bagpipers. Did you figure it out? See the next photo.

At first I thought it was just a few, but they all had sheep covers on their bagpipes.

The crowd was asked to be quiet while the sheep trailed through town. There are two sheep with halters at the front of the herd. The woman leading them was introduced as being part of this since being a little girl with her pet sheep. It helps sheep to have another sheep to follow so I assume that maybe at the staging area it was helpful to have these tame sheep be part of the plan. Maybe if we go again we’ll watch from that area—that would be interesting.

The sheep were followed by two more sheep camps, each a more modern version than the horse drawn camps.

I think this was an official part of the parade and he didn’t just sneak in to try and make a sale.

The last “entry” was the street sweeper.

After the parade we walked through a small outdoor vendor area. There were pushpins so that attendees could mark their locations on this map.

There were booths selling sheep and wool related items.

I stopped here because I thought I recognized the yarn. Not the actual yarn, but the style. Sure enough it was spun at Mountain Meadow Mill in Wyoming where my Timm Ranch yarn is spun. The wool comes from Nevada and one of the family members is working with this vendor to market the wool as yarn and as blankets.

They found a weaver in Boise. This made me anxious to get home and get my AVL loom up and running again. I’ve had glitches with the new compudobby (probably my fault and not the loom’s) and have been avoiding it. I have the yarn and I have the loom and I really want to get back to weaving blankets.

Seen on the way out of town.

Moving on from sheep, also seen on the way out of town.

This very cool set of bronze statues is at the south end of Hailey. I couldn’t get a decent photo of the whole thing. There is a herder with his horse, a dog, and several sheep. The artists’ portrayal of the animals’ body language and movement is just perfect. I can see my sheep turning like that to the dog, who crouches down to encourage the sheep to turn around (or in Ginny’s case, she’d bark and the sheep would turn around and stare).

In this view the dog and the herder are at the back.

On the long road to home. We hadn’t decided if we were going to stop along the way or just make it home.

A call from the Artery made that decision. I was supposed to work my shift Monday morning at 9:30. I think I hadn’t written in down because I knew that I should trade with someone for that day. Oops! We drove and made it home at 12:30 a.m.

Idaho Trip - Day 2

After driving to Weiser Idaho to drop off sheepskins (last post) we drove onto McCall and stayed at the Rustic Inn. We met Chris for breakfast at his favorite diner in McCall.

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6 Three 4 is an old gas station that has been repurposed as a cafe. Notice the counter top added onto the old truck and the roll-up garage door.

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Additional seating.

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Some old Hardy Boys books leveled our table.

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After breakfast we drove east out of town to go hiking in the Payette National Forest.

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Chris had heard of an unmarked trail to a lake a couple of miles up this main trail.

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The fall colors were gorgeous...

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…accented by a beautiful blue sky.

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Chris found the unmarked trail…

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…and we followed him down the other side of the mountain we had just hiked up…

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…to Crystal Lake.

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A panoramic view of the lake.

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I keep looking at this photo and find it hard to acknowledge that the lower half of the rock is a reflection—it is so vivid.

The sky was gorgeous.

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The fall colors were stunning.

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It was a lovely day in the Salmon River Mountains and great to spend it with Chris.