Gray's Lake National Wildlife Refuge

We recently took a road trip (well out of Utah Valley) to southeastern Idaho. We love visiting wildlife refuges (see our entries on Ouray and Bear River) and so we jumped at the chance to visit Gray's Lake.

We didn't really know what to expect, but we'd read that there are thousands of sandhill cranes at the refuge. There were a lot of cranes, but sadly not a wide variety of birds to see. Additionally, the refuge was well off the beaten path. For those reasons, Gray's Lake National Wildlife Refuge is only for hardcore adventurers.

We drove an hour off the freeway to arrive at the refuge, and we were met by a tiny one room "visitor's center" that didn't seem to be visited much. In fact, we were told we were one of about 12 visitors so far this year (it's June).

The dirt road drive around the refuge was nice, but the kids got bored (rare for our kids) and the baby started crying about halfway around the loop.

Like every adventure we take, we're glad we did it, but we won't be doing it again anytime soon.

These Sandhill Cranes have a chick, hiding in the grass on the far right. He's sort of yellow-orange.

One of the few other birds we saw, a Mountain Bluebird.