Frog Gigging Blog

A friend from church and I went to his neighborhood lake a little before sundown to see if the bullfrogs were out of hibernation. We walked for a few minutes and then we heard one that sounded like it was on the other side of the lake.  A little while later, we came up on a large one that jumped into the lake.

The water was high and the wind was slow and cold. The tips of grass blades stuck out of the water in some parts and Canadian geese were walking around with their young. The young geese were no longer infant but were still in early youth. The young feathers were more of a mixture of dark tan and blond colored fuzz.

I will give it a few more weeks to warm up some and then I plan to head up North to Fargher Lake and see what I can gig.

My little girl and I went to a nearby swamp last night and listened to frogs. We heard regular frogs but no bullfrogs. I plan to check again in a week or two to listen to hear if the bullfrogs are out of hibernation then.

My oldest boy and I got up and ate breakfast and then headed out to the Lewis River again in search of Mud Lake. We went to the spot where the creek and the clearing meet and began working our way up the creek.

We stopped at a beaver dam and removed part of the dam so that the creek could flow and would not be as deep. There is still more work to be done on the dam removal.

My boy is six years old and is getting good at working his way through the woods. Today, we pushed very hard and he was getting very tired and had quite a few pokes from thorns. The water scared him some but we both had on life vests and I would go first to make sure the water was not too deep.

There were some deep spots that I would hop over and then he would grab my hand and I would lift him over the deep spots. This worked well because I was constantly comforting him by letting him know that he was okay.

We did manage to push up stream quite a distance until there appeared to be a rather large clearing around the bend that I think was Mud Lake.

I finally got to a spot where I stopped and looked around at our options. The mountain side and thorn bushes made land travel extremely difficult and the water was simply too deep to go further. I felt uncomfortable and turned to head back.

I think my son sensed my doubt and began to feel afraid. He broke down sobbing saying that he wanted to go home. I held him in my arms and let him cry. I told him that it was okay for him to cry and that he could cry if he wanted to. He cried for about a minute and then we started heading back home.

On the way back through the thickets, we lost our trail. I knew the location of the creek and the clearing so I knew what direction to head. We managed to find our way back to the clearing about fourty feet South of the creek. Once we made it to the clearing, it was easy to get back to the truck.

It would be much easier to just show up at the lake from the other side of the lake where there is a public park. The only problem with that is that you cannot be at the park past dark so that makes parking overnight for frog gigging illegal.

Our final plan is to come back again with our inflatable raft and slowly work our way upstream using the raft. The water has almost no flow so paddling upstream will not be too difficult.

We did find a tree frog but we left him alone. We also found a hornets nest that was about the size of a beach ball and we definitely left that alone.

We did happen to come across a crawdad that was sunning himself on the sand. We gigged him and had him for a snack once we got home. He was pretty big. The tail piece that we removed from the cooked body was over an inch and a half long.

My oldest boy and I got up early this morning and went to the Lewis River. We returned to the pipes that we had found at our last visit and walked through one of them and to a creek on the other side. We walked up the creek for about a quarter mile. It was very muddy but not very deep. We managed to work our way over and under fallen trees and tree limbs until we came to a crossing.

The crossing was a four way crossing with the creek at the bottom going East and West and a clearing coming down the side of a mountain running North and South. I was pretty sure that the creek was coming from Mud Lake but the creek just East of the clearing looked like it was getting a little deeper and harder to navigate so I decided to look for alternative paths that might give me a view of the lake.

We climbed the mountain to the South and managed to get all the way to the top. We were looking for a good overview so that we could see the lake. We did not see the lake so we returned down the clearing, crossed the creek and went down the North clearing until we came to a trail that went East. We followed the trail East with no success in finding the lake. We did find some delicious blackberries and my boy loved them.

My boy and me are planning a return trip for another day. We plan to go back and work our way slowly up the East section of the creek until we finally make it to Mud Lake.

I went to La Center yesterday and noticed that there is a swamp to the West of the main bridge. I stopped by one of the nearby houses and spoke to a friendly couple who own part of the property. I noticed that the husband had a Danish accent. His wife grew up in Minnesota and I am not sure if she was Danish or not.

They said that there were not many frogs in the swamp but that there were egrets and other special birds that nest in the swamp. Perhaps they have been making meals of the frogs. The Danish couple did have an access path to the swamp but it was very steep and too dangerous for me to go down with my children. There is a small portion of the swamp that is owned by the county and might have a safe access by the bridge. I may return at a later date to look for the county access.

I got up Saturday and took my oldest daughter with me to Vancouver Lake to see if we could find a place to frog gig. We walked a long time down a trail. We left the trail to look at a swamp. We then returned to the trail and hiked the rest of the way down to the end of the trail. Along the way, my daughter screamed and she said that she had seen a snake on the trail and that it had crawled into the bushes.

We were getting pretty hot from the sun. We stopped and ate some blackberries. Well, she only ate a part of one because she said that she did not like it. The were big berries and sweet.

We ended up at the end of the trail and she made a sandcastle but it was hard to do because the sand was muddy and did not want to come out of the cup that she had found.

We did not see any frogs but I think the swamp might be a good place to come back to at night to listen and find out if there are many frogs there. The trail is long so I will probably gig by walking around in the mushy swamp instead of hauling my boat that far. The gate closes at midnight though so I will have to get there early enough to be at the swamp as the sun is going done so that I will have enough time to enjoy the trip. My daughter did not care too much for the swamp so I will probably bring my oldest boy if I decide to gig in the swamp.

My biggest son and I went frog gigging. Well, actually, we went looking for a place called Mud Lake that I saw using Google Earth. Well, we looked and looked but it was pretty landlocked by private property owners; however, we did manage to find the river to which it is connected.

We found some big drainage pipes that went under the road and into the river. The river is very shallow banked and the drain pipes are big and clean and only about 50 feet long, about 15 feet in diameter, with about an inch or two of water so it appears to be safe to enter the pipes. We are going to get on Google Earth again and see if those drain pipes are what we are seeing on our little printed out road map that indicates that the lake is connected to the river by a very narrow waterway.

If that is the case, we want to get up early some morning, eat a big breakfast, load up the frog gig, life jackets and my 38 S&W police edition (for protection against humans) and we plan on hiking in to the lake. If it is going to be this hard to get there, I can only imagine that the place might be riddled with frogs since there probably are not many giggers willing to make all this fuss over some frogs. Well, that is what I am hoping anyways. For now, it is time to log off and check out Google Earth to see what my boy and I can figure out before bedtime.

“We think too small. Like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.” – Mao Tse-Tung