Huckleberries

So, with all my older kids in school all day, I had to do SOMETHING, right? So I took the 3YO with me and we drove to Kelly Canyon, which is some distance away, through farmland and past some volcanic areas. Also near the Snake River. It's quite an abrupt change of landscape, from jagged cliff/desert scrub/volcanic rock to lush mountain canyon.


There are basically thousands of huckleberry plants all over the hillsides, if you are looking for somewhere in SE Idaho to go. (Nobody shares their secret picking locations, but I think that's general enough to get you started. :) If you drive up there and pull off anywhere, you can find plants. So, that was the good thing. The bad thing was that the place we started was pretty well picked over. You could tell there had been good ones, because every so often we'd find one that had been overlooked. But the bushes were picked clean.


We did see a...hm, a brown, owl-sized bird that was chortling to itself in the underbrush, as well as what I think was a pheasant at the roadside (perhaps both were the same kind of bird? I have no idea--but the one in the bushes that we couldn't see well was very big). And uh...we also saw a huge pile of bear scat (not recent). That's when we thought maybe we'd go back down the trail and maybe drive up the canyon some more and see if we could find some that were closer to the road and farther from the bears. But then there was thunder and it started to rain. And I don't know about you, but I am not one for standing in a forest during a thunderstorm. So we'll go back. Besides, it looked like there were some unripe ones that will be good in a bit.



So as you can see, we didn't get many, and they are kind of tart. The whole house smells of huckleberries from that one little handful, though!