on Sunday. I'm guessing it's been about 17 years or so that I've been doing this,
always on March 1st. It was a tad cool this year, but certainly not the worst
I've seen. This year was a much smaller crowd, I'm assuming based on a
combination cold weather and bad roads around the area (I heard about 1,178 tags sold, compared to expected 3,000) . Much of the roads were
snow covered, and I-44 was even shut down for a while. We saw several vehicles
off the road, and a pickup completely turned over close to the park. The governor
was supposed to come but didn't make it. The person doing the honorary horn
blowing at the start was someone that Ron used to work with at Enterprise. We
stayed at the usual Sand Spring resort, right outside the park. Always a good
place to stay, even though we had a temporary "1st day of the season" water leak
in the bathroom. Just like my real estate experience tells me, a vacant
house/cabin tends to have some problems over time. We don't fish at the opening
whistle on the 1st, as it's too crowed, but go out later in the day after it
thins out some. Fishing seemed a little slower than some years, but we caught
fish, and both brought a couple home. The high temperature was about 34 on Sunday
and it started out 10 on Monday. Ron fished at the opening whistle on that second
day, and did good, although the eyelets on the rod started freezing over. The
park was really beautiful with all the snow, including an eagle that we saw. Of
course it's always fun to run into the Liberty fly fishing gang for breakfast and
a few lies (I mean stories). Roads on the way home were just fine and dried out.
And the snow was almost totally melted when we got back home.
All the pictures are here:
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=B39C3ED8614A9863!352&authkey=!AMipN87z3-eR6y4&ithint=folder%2cJPG
Video of siren (low quality):
http://youtu.be/4BX3QMR13nE
