I've had my new camp trailer parked at my in-laws' house for the past two weeks not just because I don't have room for both the old and new trailers in my driveway, but also because I've been dreading backing the new trailer into the drive. I've spent this time fixing up the old trailer--installing new linoleum and carpet, adjusting all the doors so they open and close without sticking, tightening loose screws, fixing screens, etc.--in order to sell it. I finally got it all finished this week and then swapped trailers. I took the new trailer to an empty parking lot for a few practice runs first, though it didn't make me any more confident that I'd be able get it parked at home. I built a ramp out of 2x10" lumber to lay over the curb so that I could cut the corner of the driveway a bit as I backed it in, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed. I managed to get it backed in in one shot, and it's really nice to have it parked at home now. Traci and I still need to get all our camping gear stowed in the new trailer, and I need to put in a new battery, change the oil in the generator, and make sure all the appliances run on both gas and electric. I also have an appointment to get the axles flipped soon, which will give the trailer some much needed ground clearance so we can take it off the beaten path. We won't get a chance to load up the ATVs and go camping for a couple of weeks, though I'm half-tempted to sleep in the driveway just to get a feel for our new home away from home. :)

While Traci was with Michael at Scout daycamp yesterday, Bradley and I did the Coal Wash loop ride on my ATV. The weather was forecast to be 75-80° with a 20-30% chance of showers. That seemed acceptable to me, though considering that we'd be riding in the bottom of canyons with large drainages for most of the ride, I did have some concerns about flash flooding. We left home pretty early and got to the staging area and started riding before 9:00 AM. It was beginning to get overcast, and there were some very dark clouds moving in from the west, but I decided to risk it. The first part of the ride through the main part of Coal Wash was pretty boring because I've been through there so many times recently, although that part of the canyon isn't terribly scenic anyway--the really nice scenery kicks in at the fork. We reached the fork of Coal Wash and, for the first time, I headed up the South Fork. Up until this point, my travels have always taken me up the North Fork, and the only reason I chose to do this loop counter-clockwise was so I could see the South Fork first on this trip (which turned out to be a a good decision).

The scenery along the South Fork of Coal Wash is a bit different from the North Fork. The canyon bottom is wider and there are more springs along the South Fork. I saw some interesting features there, including a large alcove that beckoned for exploration, but they were too far away from the ATV trail for me to visit them on this trip. We only made a couple of short stops in the canyon, one of which was at a spring where Bradley played with the tadpoles in a shallow pool right at the edge of the trail. The ride through that part of Coal Wash seemed short, which it really was--compared to the North Fork, it's much easier and faster riding. We soon found ourselves at the beginning of the Eva Conover Road.

At about this point, it started sprinkling on-and-off, which continued throughout most of the day. I expected the Eva Conover Road to have a steeper climb out of Coal Wash, but it was pretty easy-going. The trail was very scenic, and followed the rim of a minor fork off of Coal Wash for the first little while. Bradley and I found our first geocache of the day along that section of trail. The next geocache that we found was about two miles farther along the trail on Secret Mesa, and there we saw two guys on dirt bikes who were the first people we'd seen after a full three hours of riding. When we finished up at the cache, it was nearing time for lunch, so we rode on while looking for a nice and sheltered spot at which to eat. We came to the end of the Eva Conover Road without having found a lunch spot, and just kept going past the UDOT shed (where they keep the snow plows for the nearby stretch of I-70) toward Eagle Canyon, but we found a very nice place to stop before reaching the trail leading down into Eagle Canyon.

During our lunch stop it became a bit more windy and began sprinkling more heavily, so we donned our jackets for the first time. Bradley was cold enough that I put him in front of me on the ATV where he could take advantage of the heat from the engine. Luckily, as we descended into Eagle Canyon, the high canyon walls blocked much of the wind and it was much more comfortable for us both. When we got to the bottom of the Canyon we saw a couple more people, one person in a UTV and another guy (wearing shorts and a t-shirt!) on an ATV. We found three more geocaches in the canyon, and I really enjoyed the change of scenery. We weren't far from the highest point in the Swell, and we'd gained over 1,000 feet of elevation from where we'd started the ride. Plant life changed from small scrub and pinyon/juniper to more grasses and various pine trees. We passed under the bridges of I-70, which were very impressive when viewed from underneath (they're rather unremarkable when driving the interstate), and saw the huge natural arch in Eagle Canyon. While finding the geocache near the arch, a group of about eight ATVs passed us by going in the opposite direction.

After less than four miles in the bottom of the canyon, the trail climbed out toward Swasey's Cabin and the Head of Sinbad. There were even more pine trees as the trail climbed higher, topping out at about 7,200' in elevation, and the scenery there was unlike any other part of the Swell. I stopped to talk to a couple on ATVs right before reaching the top of the trail near the cabin, and they remarked how comfortable Torrey looked riding in her basket on the front of my machine. When we reached the cabin, there were four motorcycles parked there but no people in sight. Bradley and I checked out the cabin, and just as we were about to leave, the motorcycle riders appeared along the nearby hiking trail and we stopped to chat for a while. They were from California and were on their first trip to Utah, and they also made a comment about Torrey and her comfy spot on the four-wheeler.

After the cabin, we made a short stop at some rock art close by, then crossed under I-70 through a concrete tunnel where we saw the last people (a couple on one ATV) that we'd see on the trail for the rest of the day. We made more very quick stops at Dutchman Arch and the Locomotive Point rock art. We crossed over Reid Neilson Draw started the descent down to Cane Wash. The first part of the trail was ugly--very rocky and pretty steep, and it was the first part that made me glad I was doing the loop counter-clockwise so I didn't have to go up the hill. It eventually leveled out more and the descent slowed, and we found another geocache at a gorgeous overlook of Horseshoe Bend. From there, I could see the Wickiup and a huge chunk of the Swell and beyond.

It was nearing 5:00 PM when we left that cache, and for the first time during the ride the sun shone from behind the clouds. I had been wishing for sunshine during the day, mostly so my photos would turn out better, but it was short-lived. We reached Cane Wash and stopped briefly to let Bradley and Torrey play around and try to catch lizards, then started up the trail that leads over Fix-It Pass to the North Fork of Coal Wash. Shortly after leaving Cane Wash, some much darker clouds moved in and it began sprinkling again--it was time to put our jackets back on.

I stopped to take some photos at the top of the steep but short trail that leads down into the North Fork of Coal Wash, and that was the last time I took out my camera for a while. It started raining lightly, though still harder than anything we'd experienced so far, and it was almost 6:30 PM and already later than I'd expected us to be out. Going down that section of trail was really tough--by far the hardest thing I had done all day--and I was extremely glad that I wasn't going up it instead. I made it to the bottom after making Bradley get off the ATV while I negotiated some bouldery drop-offs, then I let Torrey run alongside for about a half a mile just to keep her happy. The rain gradually got heavier, though still not too bad, but I decided I needed to pick up the pace and so started riding about as fast as I dared in order to get home at a decent time.

Shortly after passing up the Devil's Racetrack turnoff, the rain started dumping buckets. We were still about an hours' ride from where the truck was parked, and there was no escaping the rain. A few minutes later, waterfalls began pouring off the canyon walls. It was then that I realized we could be in serious trouble. I stopped just long enough to grab my camera and cell phone and put them in my backpack where they'd stay dry (though not before snapping a quick photo of one of the waterfalls), then took off again at full speed. Although it was about 7:00 PM and it should have been plenty light enough to see, I had to remove my sunglasses in order to make out the trail in front of me, though they were prescription lenses and so left me still not seeing as well as I should have been able to.

My ATV has never been ridden so hard and fast. I was seriously looking behind me on the straight stretches of trail expecting to see a flash flood rushing up behind us. Even a relatively small flow (not large enough to wash the ATV away) would have caused huge problems by obscuring obstacles in the trail and making egress difficult or impossible. There was some water already running in the bottom of the wash, which served to get us even more wet as the ATV splashed through it. After about five miles of hauling ass, we finally reached the junction where BLM road 6768 meets up with Coal Wash and we were able to exit the wash bottom. It was a huge relief to be away from flash flood danger, though we were now riding above the canyon rim and lightning was striking near enough to make me worry about getting struck. Fortunately, with the sandy and gravelly soil, mud wasn't an issue...yet.

Bradley was miserable and kept asking how close to the truck we were, and Torrey was probably worse off than he was because she had no idea what was going on other than that she was cold and wet and bouncing around a lot. After what seemed like hours, but was actually about 50 minutes after the downpour started, we finally arrived at the truck. I pulled up right alongside the door, unlocked it, and picked Bradley up and set him down inside the truck, then did the same for Torrey. The road hadn't been muddy up until that point, but the ground at the staging area was extremely sticky clay, as was the next mile of road leading back to civilization. In just the 40 or 50 feet I'd ridden across the staging area to get from the road to the truck, I'd gotten probably 50 pounds of mud stuck to the tires of the ATV. After getting Bradley squared away with a dry change of clothes (which I always carry for the kids), I circled the ATV around and drove up the ramp into the truck bed. I stayed in the truck bed while secured it with the ratcheting straps that I'd left in the truck bed, but I had to jump down to the ground to get the ramp unhooked, folded up, and tucked away under the ATV.

By that time I probably had several more pounds apiece of mud on my shoes, and after getting into the truck I spent a few minutes getting the mud off. By the time I was ready to drive away, I realized that I had forgotten to turn the hubs in, so I had to get back out and lock them in, then knock and scrape the mud off my shoes again. I've had an experience driving on this road in the mud once before and it wasn't pretty, and I knew what to expect for the first mile of the drive back home. Despite being in 4WD and having better tires than the last time I was in this situation, at several times I was traveling with the truck at a 45-degree angle to the road but still making forward progress. There's a ditch along the road that gets deep enough to swallow a vehicle in some places, and I almost slid into it a few times. It took me about 20 minutes to travel that one mile of bad road, though during dry conditions it's easily possible to do between 30 and 60 miles per hour on it. After the greasy stretch, the road becomes gravel, then alternates between native surface (that's not so clay-like) and gravel for the rest of the drive to Ferron, and I didn't have any more problems with mud. I stopped just north of Ferron at a pull-out on Highway 10 so that we could eat some dinner which consisted of ham, cheese, crackers, and Fig Newtons. We got home well after 10:00 PM, and all I had the energy to do was to take a shower and go to bed.

I spent about two hours of my Father's Day today cleaning the mud off the truck and ATV (and then the driveway). I would still want to do this ride again sometime, though it would be nice to have more daylight and nicer weather for the ride. With today being the summer solstice, I don't believe the former is possible. :) I would definitely only do this loop in a counter-clockwise direction. Some of the hills would be difficult to go up, and considering the amount of time the ride takes, difficulties should be minimized.

We've owned our old Layton camp trailer for six years, and with the kids getting bigger and now having ATVs that we need to haul when we go camping, it was finally time to replace it with something more suitable for our family:

Traci's uncle had this sitting at his used car lot in Helper, and though I'd actually stopped to look at it once, I didn't think it would be within my budget so I didn't even inquire about it. However, Traci did stop to ask about the price the other day, and although it was more than we were looking to spend, it's only a year old which allowed us to get a longer loan term and keep our monthly payments low. We're planning on dumping money toward the loan to pay it off early.

The only downside is that it's six feet longer than my old trailer, and I'm not sure I'll be able to back it into the driveway. It's parked at Traci's parents' house for now, until I get the nerve up to try parking it at home. I'll likely have to block traffic for a short while, and I'm worried about hitting the tree that's one foot from the edge of my driveway entrance, and I really don't want to drop the tires off into the gutter. Other than that, it shouldn't be a big deal.

Traci spent all day yesterday doing Relay for Life, so instead of sticking around town and being bored, the boys and I went for a road trip. I'm not quite sure why I settled on the San Rafael Desert, but it's been a while since I've been there, and I never really got a chance to explore the area the three previous time I'd been there. It wasn't until Friday after work that I even decided on where to go, so I spent that evening getting everything prepared for a fun trip. I knew it would be a very long trip with a lot of driving (it was 260 miles total, with 100 miles being on gravel and dirt roads), so I found a few ways to keep Michael and Bradley interested and entertained along the way. I let them pick out their own lunches and dinners (mostly Lunchables, with a few snacks in between), and also planned out several short stops along the way to break up the monotony of the drive.

We left Price just after 8:00 am on Saturday morning, which was a little later than I'd hoped but still early enough to have a full day for exploring. Our first stop was for a quick potty break at the beginning of the gravel road just south of Green River, and several miles after that we stopped again at Horse Bench Reservoir so that the boys could climb around on the rocks and I could find a geocache. Our next stop was at a place where the road crossed a small sand dune. Michael and Bradley love playing in the sand (hell, so do I), and there's no shortage of it in the San Rafael Desert. Short stops like this really kept them happy, which in turn made the trip worthwhile for me.

After the sand dune, we moved along to the Chaffin Ranch to see the geyser there (see DesertWoodrat's blog post for more photos and a great video). When we arrived, the ground around the geyser was pretty wet, so I think it had erupted shortly before we got there. While we waited for the geyser to go off, the boys played around and collected rocks and sticks coated in travertine. I have a problem with them always bringing home rocks in their pockets (we have too many at home as it is), so I had to set some ground rules wherein they could only collect rocks on this trip when they had my approval, and I let them each take one piece of travertine from there. We waited around for just over 40 minutes with no eruption--all we got was to hear some air escaping early on, though it was silent when we left. Michael and Bradley were disappointed because I told them they could play in the water if it erupted while we were there, but they also understood that the longer we spent waiting, the less we would be able to do later in the day.

The next stretch of driving was pretty long, but the boys were satisfied so far with everything we'd done, so it wasn't too boring for them. We kept going south on the main road after crossing the San Rafael River bridge and took the turnoff to Saucer Basin. The basin was surprisingly green, much more so than I remember when I was there four years ago. The road was washed out slightly where it crossed upper Moonshine Wash (or lower North Spring Wash, I'm not sure which), and I tried to power through the sandy edges of the washout in 2WD but got stuck. Locking in the hubs solved that problem quickly and we were soon on our way again. My destination at the end of this road was the Cone, a formation at the west end of Gruver's Mesa. I'd seen the Cone many times in satellite photos, and had even seen it in person from quite a distance. The topography has always amazed me--the sandstone is heavily pock-marked, with some of the circles/craters being bigger than 200 feet in diameter. I've long wanted to see it in person and up-close.

The road atop Gruver's Mesa crosses an old landing strip that has mostly grown over with brush. In the satellite photos, it looked like the road ended at the west end of the mesa, but I wasn't able to drive that close. There was a narrow ridge that the road crossed about 0.15 miles from the end, but it had washed out a bit and I didn't dare drive across it. We parked just before the washout and ate lunch since it was nearly 1:00 pm, then filled up our water bottles and set out on foot. I didn't want to push the boys too hard, so I told them that we could stop hiking and head back to the truck anytime they wanted, and I half expected them to see the route down to the Cone and want to turn back right then. I was very surprised when both of them saw what we had to hike down, and they both still wanted to go there, even after I reminded them that we would have to hike back up the ridge we were about to hike down. I expected it to be difficult finding a route down to the Cone, but the "road" actually continued down most of the way, apparently a remnant of mineral/oil exploration from many decades ago. We had to pick our way down a series of ledges near the bottom of the mesa, but it wasn't anything that a five-year-old couldn't handle.

Upon reaching the bottom of the Cone, I decided that climbing to the top wouldn't be appropriate for Michael and Bradley, so I convinced them to hike all the way around it instead (the summit will have to wait for another day). About the time we had gone halfway around the Cone, they decided that they'd had enough hiking and wanted to go back to the truck. Since we were already halfway around, they were amenable to continuing the rest of the way around, although the terrain was a bit rougher ahead of us. We made it without any troubles though, and I decided to place a geocache at the base of the Cone before we continued on our way. Very shortly after we started heading back, we found chert arrowhead chippings scattered over a huge area, and each of the boys picked up a piece to take home. The hike back to the top of Gruver's Mesa went smoothly. Just before the last steep hill before the very top, I stopped to pick up a piece of petrified wood that I'd spotted on the way down. It weighed about 50 pounds, and it was no easy feat getting it to the top. Even after that, carrying it on level ground was difficult, but I made it the entire 1,000 feet back to the truck without breaking my back. :)

By the time we got back on the road, we'd been gone from home for about eight hours and most of the day was gone. I had to skip a few planned stops in order to make it home at a decent time, but we still had time to squeeze in the huge sand dunes near Middle Canyon and the igneous dike near the Big Flat Tops. There was quite a bit of driving between Gruver's Mesa and the sand dunes, but the kids were beat from the hike and both of them fell asleep along the way. I made a brief stop at Lookout Point, and as I pulled up I startled a golden eagle that was just sitting on the ground there. I was about 30 feet from the eagle before I even realized it was there, and it noticed me at about the same time and took flight. I was too slow in grabbing the camera to get a decent photo, but I spent a minute or two enjoying the view, then moved on.

When we got to the sand dunes, the kids had awakened and were ready to play again. I had expected to spend a lot of time there, but the wind was blowing a lot of sand and soon irritated the kids to the point where they were ready to stop playing and eat dinner. I had them strip off their shoes and clothes and cleaned the sand out of everything (and there was a lot), then we drove a short distance down the road and found a nice spot to park and eat dinner. I really hated having to drive past the Sweetwater Reef turnoff, but I knew that the area was too big to explore with as little time as we had left, so we pressed on toward the igneous dike. There are three large sections where the dike is exposed, but I chose to stop at the the largest section on this trip since we were short on time (I'll be back for the rest some other day). We had to hike about a quarter-mile from the nearest road to the dike. We climbed around on it, and I took a ton of photos. I've seen a couple of igneous dikes (there aren't a lot in this part of Utah), and this one is the most interesting. I placed a geocache there, the kids each picked up a piece of volcanic rock, then we headed back to the truck. I gave the kids some snacks for the drive home, then we were on our way toward UT-24. We had to pass up Little Flat Top, which was another place I had wanted to stop. The full moon appeared in the sky before we got back to the highway, and I caught glimpses of it in my rearview mirror all along the drive home.

We got home at 10:20 pm, just in time to take a quick shower and crash in our beds. I was hoping that my sunburn would wash off, but only some of that redness was from the red dirt and sand in the desert. The backs of my legs got burned pretty badly, but the kids fared better because they've spent more time out in the sun than I have this summer. I took 400 photos on the trip, and I've whittled them down to 77 that were worthy of being posted online, which you can view here.

I've spent a lot of today contemplating my next trip to the area, but I'm not sure I'll make it back there during the heat of summer. Spring seems to have passed me by, and I sure didn't get out quite enough when the weather was moderate. I'll have to make the best of this fall.

After a lot of procrastination, I got my vegetable garden planted on Monday. I think this is the latest I've ever planted, and I came this close ---><--- to not doing a garden this year. Starting from seeds, like I normally do, has gotten to be too much work and takes up too much space on the window seat in the dining room. This year I got all live plants, and I decided not to plant corn because it's never really grown well in our yard. I've got a lot of tomatoes, crookneck squash, cucumbers, and zucchini. There's probably room for couple more plants in the garden, but I haven't figured out what I can plant that wouldn't be less trouble to simply buy at the store.

This was a much-needed lazy weekend. I was surprised when the winch for my ATV arrived on Thursday, and I spent a little time that evening installing it. I only got the winch itself installed when some high winds and rain started up very quickly, and I had to hurry and put all my tools and the ATV back in the garage where it's too cluttered to do any work. I wasn't feeling up to working on it more Friday, but I spent most of Saturday wiring everything up. I wanted it to look factory-installed, and I was very particular about where and how I routed the wires. I used about eight feet of wire loom and almost two rolls of electrical tape. Space was very limited in the compartment behind the battery, but that was the only space at all to mount the winch relay, and mounting it and routing the wires was a tricky prospect. I didn't get finished until about dinner time, then I tried the winch out in the back yard. I attached the winch cable to a tree, locked up the front and rear brakes on the ATV, and reeled the cable in. It dragged the machine effortlessly with all four tires locked up. I still need to get some real-world experience with it, but I'm confident that it'll get me out of most situations that I get myself into. I just need to make sure I don't use it as an excuse to get into bad situations in the first place. :)

I took the boys out for a short hike today in one of the forks of Cordingly Canyon. I'd seen what looked like a hiking trail up the left fork from the end of the road in this canyon the last time I was there on my ATV, but there was still quite a bit of snow on the ground at that time and I only hiked about 100' before turning back and making a mental note to try it again later in the year. I finally got around to it today. The road was rougher today than I remember it from a couple of months ago, and one part in particular was definitely more washed out, probably due to the rain we had all last week. I found myself wishing that I'd ridden my ATV today instead of driving the truck. The hiking trail that I thought I'd seen only went a few hundred feet farther than I had hiked along it earlier, but we kept going up the canyon after the trail petered out. It was very slow-going, with a lot of downed trees and boulders to negotiate. There were also a lot of burned trees from a wildfire two years ago, and I think we all got a bit of charcoal on our skin and clothes. We hiked almost exactly 0.3 miles from the truck as the crow flies, but the round-trip distance came out to 0.9 miles due to all the zig-zagging around obstacles. I might try the hike again without the kids some other day. There's a mountain peak at the head of the canyon that I want to hike to, but it's not somewhere I would try bringing my children. I would also like to explore the right fork from the road's end--I'm hoping to find clues up there as to why the road was built in the first place (presumably prospecting for coal?), because there sure weren't any indications up the left fork.

I finally pulled the trigger and bought a Warn RT25 winch for my four-wheeler. I've been thinking about getting one ever since, oh, about the middle of January. ;) Warn is offering a $50 rebate on that winch through the end of the month, so I figured the timing isn't going to get any better. I chose the free shipping option, so it'll probably be nearly two weeks before the winch and mounting kit arrive. I plan on installing it myself--the instructions make it look pretty easy, though I'm not looking forward to cutting part of the front fascia off.

Despite the rainy weather today, I went for a drive in the car and did some geocaching. My primary motivation for getting out was to check out this canyon, but there also happened to be some caches along the way. I've been eying the road up that canyon for some time. I first noticed the road in Google Earth near where it ends, which is only three-quarters of a mile from the end of the road in the left fork of Cordingly Canyon, and only two miles north of Kenilworth. I had been thinking of hiking from Cordingly Canyon up to this road, but it would be a steep hike through some very thick trees. Instead, I'm now thinking about just riding my ATV along the road, even though most of it is on private property. CEU owns the property where the road begins just off US-191, the Blackhawk Coal Company owns most of the rest of the property that the road passes through, and there are some BLM parcels in between and at the very end. Today I hiked about a third of a mile up the road, past CEU's property line and well into the Blackhawk property, and I was pleased not to see any gates or signs. It was raining lightly when I started hiking, but it came down harder the longer I hiked, and Torrey and I ended up drenched. The canyon was beautiful in the rain. Low clouds obscured the tops of the mountains, and the wet sagebrush smelled great. If it stops raining long enough this weekend I might just drive the truck up there, because most of the road that I hiked along looked like a good 2WD road, with only one part at the beginning that requires 4WD. I'm not feeling up to an ATV ride all the way to the end of the road yet (especially not in the mud), but a drive in the truck would do me some good.

I rode my ATV hard yesterday for a little more than two hours and covered 25 miles, and the noise I was hearing on Saturday never returned. I hope that whatever it was doesn't come back at an inopportune moment when I'm riding out in the middle of nowhere.

Riding the past two afternoons was nice practice using the maps in my new GPS. I'm used to planning my route out at home, in advance of a ride, so I usually know exactly where I'm going and I can simply follow the waypoints I created at home while I'm on the ride. Now I can go somewhere and just start riding, and whenever I hit a fork in the road, I can consult the map and determine which one I want to take. It might be fun to start doing things a little more spontaneously.

After twice going through the trouble of loading my ATV into the truck and hauling it such a short distance to the staging area at the baseball fields on the north end of town, I decided I ought to check into whether Price City has an ATV ordinance that allows ATVs on city streets. There's an ATV route map on their website, but there's absolutely no other information (not even a map key) that explains what the blue lines mean. Contrast that to Helper City's site, which has a very easy to understand map and the full text of their ATV ordinance. I e-mailed Price City's police department asking about the map, and for a copy of any ordinances related to ATV use within the city limits, and this is the full response I got from the Chief: "You can use the access roads to get to the dirt and back home again if you are off-road legal. Must obey traffic laws when on the street." That fell very short of what I asked for, but I suppose I can take it to mean that it's legal for me to ride from my house (using the shortest route possible) to one of the designated ATV routes, and from there to any of the dirt roads that leave town.

Actually, I could ride from my house into the San Rafael Swell (assuming that I can legally pass through Wellington, which seems likely--I'll have to check on it), but it would be a 25-mile ride before I hit the Swell just south of Mounds. I would have to refuel in Cleveland or Huntington, or carry extra fuel along. I think it would be fun to try, but perhaps just once.

Before taking my ATV to the dealer today, I decided to try to pinpoint the noise so I could be very specific when I described the problem to them. I took the machine over to my mom's yard, where she's got a lot more room than in my yard, and rode it around a bit, pushed and pulled it with the engine off, bounced up and down on it, and I never could get it to make the noise that it was making during the ride on Saturday. I thought that perhaps it needed to be ridden for a while to get it warmed up before it would make the noise again, so I went for a ride up on Wood Hill. I don't really know what I was thinking (other than that I probably wasn't thinking at all), but there were some dark clouds rolling in when I left my house, and I didn't even consider that I might get cold and wet on this ride. I was planning on sticking to the gas well roads north of town so that if something catastrophic did happen to the ATV, I'd easily be able to pick it up with the truck. Once I topped Wood Hill, I saw lightning hit the ground about a mile away. Shortly after that, the wind really picked up and it started raining. I was wearing only shorts and a t-shirt, and my entire left side was soaked while the right side was dry. I pulled off the road and found a pair of pinyon pines large enough to shelter me and the ATV, and I hunkered down for 20 minutes until the worst of the rain cleared up. There was another wave of dark clouds behind the first, so instead of continuing on the ride, I just headed back to the truck and called it a day. The ATV never did make the noise again, and once on the way back I found a long steep hill to roll down with the engine off, but the only sound was that of the tires on gravel. I only got about 10 miles in, but I think I'll do it again tomorrow and try to ride closer to 50 miles, possibly with some more weight on the rear, and definitely more prepared for the weather. If I can't get the noise to recur after that, I guess I'll have to write it off as a fluke, though I'll be pretty wary of riding in remote areas in the near future.

A couple of weeks ago I started having problems with my GPS. It would turn itself off whenever it got jostled around too much, sometimes doing so whenever I would clip it into the belt clip or the windshield mount. It was getting to be a hassle, so I broke down and ordered a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx. It got here late last week, and on Saturday's ATV ride I got a chance to try it out for the first time. It wasn't terribly different from my GPS 60, except that it has a built-in basemap, barometric altimeter, and an electronic compass. The basemap only has major highways, which are useless to me where I tend to recreate. The altimeter and compass proved to be useless on my first ATV ride--I had to turn the compass off altogether because it kept pointing the wrong direction and I didn't want to stop my ATV to recalibrate it.

I had planned on "acquiring" some topo and street maps for the new GPS to make it worth the additional cost, but today I remembered some free maps that I'd seen mentioned before, though I'd dismissed them at the time because my GPS 60 didn't accept maps. I downloaded and installed the free maps for the 60CSx today, and I'm frankly shocked at their usefulness. Not only are they vector maps that look great at any scale, but they have great detail (1:24,000) and show a lot of roads and trails that don't show up on any other mapping products. Did I mention that they're free, and I didn't have to, *ahem*, borrow them from a friend? ;)

Now, I'm just waiting to scratch the screen up so I don't have to worry about it anymore. :D I first scratched the screen on my older GPS within a few months of owning it while hiking through Moonshine Wash and squeezing through a narrow part of the canyon. After that, keeping it in like-new condition wasn't a concern. Perhaps that's why I just had to replace it...

I had a pretty ambitious route planned out for riding four-wheelers yesterday in the northeastern San Rafael Swell, but we didn't even get through half of it. We parked at the staging area about four miles south-southwest of Woodside, and the plan was to cross over the Woodside Anticline, then cross the outer flank of the Swell (the same formation that, farther south, is much steeper and is called the San Rafael Reef) four times through different washes (Middle Fork of Summerville Wash, then the main Summerville Wash, Neversweat Wash, and finally Camel Wash).

Traci and I had stayed up way too late the night before, and we slept in the next morning and got to the staging area two hours later than we'd planned. We crossed over the Woodside Anticline easily, and riding down the western slope was a lot of fun. I'd done that trail before so I knew what to expect and we didn't have any problems. Here's some video that we shot on that section of trail:

Next came the Middle Fork of Summerville Wash, and we ran into a few minor problems. There are a lot of motorcycle trails in the area, though some of them are shared with ATVs. Twice we started up forks in the trail that were wide enough for our machines but shortly afterward they narrowed up or got too steep. We backtracked and found other trails that got us where we wanted to go. After making it through the difficult sections of the wash, we found a shady spot and ate lunch. It was pretty hot by then, and we were grateful for what little shade there was.

After lunch, we rode some pretty flat terrain a bit farther west, then turned north and rounded Entrada Point. I've heard this section of trail referred to as the Whoop-Dee-Doo Trail, and it's very aptly named. There are a lot of consecutive short up-and-down hills in the trail and it can get quite obnoxious at times, but the trail had its redeeming qualities as well. We stopped at the stone building at the north end of the trail where it meets up with the main fork of Summerville Wash. Here's more video from that trail:

From that stone building, we rode farther east down Summerville Wash to another stone building a mile away. I found this building the last time I rode in the area, and this time I placed a geocache nearby. From there, the plan was to follow Summerville Wash until we hit Neversweat Wash, and then follow it west through the uplift once more. However, shortly after leaving the stone building, I started hearing noises coming from my ATV. I stopped several times to try to pinpoint the source of the noise, but I couldn't definitively tell where it was coming from. I was pretty sure it was the rear driveshaft binding up and making a popping or tapping noise. I didn't want to risk breaking down in the middle of nowhere, so we decided to cut our trip short and take the easiest route back to the truck. Luckily most of that route was a graded road and we were able to stay in fourth of fifth gear most of the way, which not only made for a quick trip back, but also made the heat more bearable. I was worried that the faster speeds would cause the driveshaft to fail, but it was actually quieter the faster I went.

I've still got plenty of reasons to go back to that place. There are trails through two washes that I didn't get to see, plus we had to skip out on seeing some abandoned mines closer to Chimney Rock that I just found out about on Friday. The area is filled with interesting scenery and history, though with the heat of summer getting worse and my ATV in need of repairs, I'm not sure I'll get back there until this fall.

I am really beginning to get to know the Coal Wash area, and I'm really liking that place. I first rode Coal Wash on my ATV in December, when I did the lower part of the canyon and the north fork, then took the Devil's Racetrack trail. Again in January I rode the north fork, just before crashing my ATV in Eagle Canyon. While we were camped near Horn Silver Gulch a few weeks ago, Traci and I rode along the lower end of Coal Wash. I never really stopped to explore off the trail any of those times, but on Sunday and again yesterday, I did just that.

Last week I was chatting with Cortney, and he asked if we wanted to ride Coal Wash with his family to see the sights mentioned in Mark Williams' book, Utah's Scenic San Rafael. I managed to talk Traci into going on Mother's Day, so that morning we met up with the Hunt family at around 10:00 a.m. at the staging area near Horn Silver Gulch. We made many stops, including The Drips (a natural spring that flows out of an overhanging cliff), a large sand dune for the kids to play on, some rock art, natural arches, and an old copper mine. We rode as far as Slipper Arch, where we ate lunch and climbed around on the rocks under the arch. I hiked nearly all the way to the top of the arch, but turned back because we were short on time and still had a few stops left to make on the ride back. One of those stops was at the ZCMI mine, where a hundred years ago somebody had tried mining copper from the Navajo Sandstone. It doesn't look as though they had much luck, because there are only two short prospect shafts in the hillside. We went, with our dim flashlights, all the way to the end of both shafts, then Cort and I placed a geocache nearby. I had spotted another natural arch in a cliff on the ride up Coal Wash, so on the ride back down we stopped briefly so I could check it out. I never did see through the arch--I could only see sunlight on the cliff below it that seemed to indicate that there was an arch. It was yet another hike that wasn't on the itinerary and would have to wait until a different day.

That day came sooner than I expected, and yesterday I decided to work earlier in the day so I could spend the afternoon and evening riding Coal Wash again and doing some more exploring on foot. I got to the staging area at around 4:00 p.m. and rode straight through to the North Fork of Coal Wash without making any stops. About three miles into the north fork, I parked alongside the trail and hiked to what I was pretty sure would be a natural arch. After hiking away from the trail for a short distance, I was able to see the arch from a different angle and, sure enough, I could see the sky through a big hole in the top of the cliff. I placed a geocache nearby, then headed back to the trail and my next destination, Slipper Arch.

I was pretty sure from Sunday's hike that I could get on top of Slipper Arch, but I didn't summit the plateau that time and couldn't tell for certain. Yesterday, I hiked through the arch and then up the steep, rocky, and bouldery slope behind it and made it to the top of the plateau. From there, it was an easy and relatively level walk to the top of the arch, with only one small downclimb. I had planned on placing another geocache directly on top of the arch, but the downclimb could be tricky for some, and the dropoff on either side of the arch was huge, so I hike a few hundred feet southeast and found a good hiding spot for the cache.

It was about a quarter past 7:00 when I got back down to my ATV. I had poor cell reception there, so I sent Traci a text telling her that I was done with my hikes and would be back at the truck in one hour. I wasn't sure that I could actually make it that fast, but I sure tried. I don't think Torrey enjoyed the ride back, since she bounced around on the front of the ATV while I kept the throttle pinned for most of the ride. I made it to the truck in about 55 minutes, and the sun was already down by then.

With as many times as I've now been through Coal Wash, I still haven't been over Fix-It Pass or through the South Fork of Coal Wash. Someday (perhaps not until after summer) I'll do the ride through the North Fork of Coal Wash, over Fix-It Pass, across Cane Wash, around Locomotive Point, under I-70 to Swasey's Cabin, down into Eagle Canyon and under I-70 again, then up onto Secret Mesa and down into the South Fork of Coal Wash, and back to the truck. That would be an epic 55-mile ride, probably without much time for stopping to enjoy the scenery, unless I camped overnight along the trail and made it a two-day trip. I'm sure that during that trip, I'll see yet more places that will leave me wanting to come back to explore. A place like that could keep somebody busy for years just trying to get acquainted with it.

It's been a surprisingly good week. Usually after a long and exhausting weekend, I end up spending the following week being lazy. This week I've done some yard work, gone geocaching three times, and I've still got a day left in the weekend to do something else. On Tuesday I went hiking and geocaching with my family near Pinnacle Peak. There were two new geocaches there, and judging by the descriptions they sounded fun. We had to hike down a canyon to get to one cache, and the other was at the top of a cliff overlooking Pinnacle Peak, but it also had a very nice view of Price and most of Carbon County. I spent most of Thursday evening with just Michael and Bradley in Huntington finding a few caches there. We didn't even try looking for two others because they appeared to be on private property and I didn't want to drive past the "No Trespassing" signs that we encountered.

Today I took the boys out again to find some geocaches in the Consumers area. It was raining when I woke up and it continued throughout the morning, and I had all but given up on getting outdoors. To top it off, Michael was complaining about not feeling well and he had a fever. After lunch, however, the sky cleared up and things started drying out rather quickly, and Michael was feeling quite a bit better. I figured it would be worth the risk of getting stuck in the mud while finding a few caches, but we saw very little mud the entire afternoon. The first cache we found was on a plateau near the golf course. I had been there once before about six years ago, but I'd driven in from a different direction and came across a locked gate and had to hike part of the way. Today I drove in on a different road and was able to park right next to the geocache. The next three caches were up Consumers Road, and all were easy to find. We did get rained on during the drive to one area, but it stopped before we parked the truck and started the short hike to the cache, so we were lucky to avoid getting wet.

I'm really enjoying the longer days and warmer weather of late, but I'm not enjoying either the yard work or my allergies. It's been nice getting outside a lot more, but I'm already looking forward to fall.

The geocaching event last weekend was great, and it was a nice break from work and the everyday grind of life. We left town Wednesday afternoon as soon as the kids got out of school and arrived at our campsite just in time to set up camp and fix dinner. After we ate, I took the kids for a ride on my ATV and accidentally locked mine and Traci's keys in the truck before I left. It took some doing, but eventually I was able to unlock the truck using a piece of wire. It was lonely the first night since we were the only people there, but we kept ourselves entertained and had a good night. We didn't have a campfire because it was a bit windy in the evening, and we didn't want to use up too much firewood and not have enough for the rest of the weekend.

On Thursday, we knew many of our friends would be showing up that afternoon and evening, so we spent the morning driving the truck out to a remote geocache in Red Hole Draw. It was a long and bumpy road which the truck wasn't well-suited to. ATVs would have been a better way to reach the cache, but we only brought one with us, while Sam and Mark wouldn't be bringing our other ATV down until later that evening. It was worth the drive though--the cache was fairly easy to find, and the scenery along the way was excellent. We returned to camp, ate a late lunch, then left again for a short drive to check out a nearby road that followed the bottom of the Red Ledges about half a mile from camp. While we were hiking around on some rocks there, we saw the first of our group pulling into camp. We went back to meet them, and spent the rest of the evening at camp just hanging out. Sam and Mark arrived that evening too, and some others got there after we'd gone to bed. It was windy again all evening and into the night, so we skipped the campfire again and didn't spend the night socializing like we normally do.

Friday morning we set out with Sam and Mark and the Cowboyz to see the Eagle Canyon "crash site." Chris placed a cache along the road when we were on our way back from retrieving my wrecked ATV back in January. We went to find that cache and the one I placed after I wrecked. Traci and I were riding with the kids on our ATVs, Cowboyz were in their Teryx, and Sam & Mark and their family were in their truck. On the way back, we parted with Sam & Mark so we could ride Coal Wash back to camp, which is an ATV-only route. It was a fun ride, and although we stopped at The Drips (a spring dripping out of a cliff) for a while, we still managed to catch up to Sam & Mark when our trail connected back to the main road. When we got back to camp, there were more people there, and even more showed up that evening. Mark and I went for an ATV ride south of camp and found an interesting and very old steam boiler that I think was used to power a drilling rig. There was also the remains of a wooden building there, but what it was used for I couldn't tell. I placed a geocache there, then we rode back to camp where we spent the rest of the day. It was still a bit breezy at night, but we had a campfire and I stayed up pretty late talking to all the friends I hadn't seen in months.

Everybody spent Saturday doing different things. Some people hiked to Sid's Mountain, others went for an ATV ride, and Traci and I went geocaching with Sam and Mark. There were only a few caches in the are that I had yet to find, so we went looking for them. A pretty ugly storm was moving in from the west, and we were hurrying to find the caches before the ground got wet, 'cause the clay roads would be impassible and we'd get stranded if it rained hard enough while we were out there. We managed to find all of the geocaches that we wanted to before the rain hit, but the storm wasn't as bad as we'd expected after all. It was another nice evening around the campfire, and I stayed up even later than I had the night before.

A few people left camp early on Sunday, but we stuck around and went for a hike into North Salt Wash to see some petroglyphs. I passed within a couple hundred feet of the petroglyphs when I hiked to Sid's Mountain two years ago, but I was too exhausted to hike up the steep hill to see them at the time. I was amazed to see how high up the cliff face the rock art was. Some of it was 40 feet or more straight up a cliff, and I can only imagine that the Fremont Indians had built ladders in order to reach that high. Michael and Bradley went with me and the others on the hike while Traci waited in the truck at the trailhead. I was surprised that the boys did so well on the hike considering the 400-foot elevation change over a very short distance.

After the hike, everybody returned to camp and started packing up to go home. As is usually the case, we were the last ones to leave. We got home just in time to clean up, eat dinner, unload a few essentials from the trailer, then crash in our beds. It was a fun weekend for us all, and I'm excited to go back in October to do it again.

I've gotten behind on keeping my blog up to date. Between working a lot, and getting ready for this camping trip, I haven't spent much time on the computer.

Last Saturday, I went for a pretty sweet ATV ride. I'd spent all Friday evening and even part of Saturday morning trying to decide what I was going to do, and finally I made up my mind to ride around the Woodside Anticline. I have never been too far off the main road through that area, and just recently it became safe to leave vehicles unattended there, so what better time to explore it? I couldn't talk Traci into coming and I ended up riding solo. I spent seven hours there and rode a total of 55 miles. I did something that I haven't done since I got a GPS--I went down there without having planned out my route beforehand. Normally I spend some time using my mapping software or Google Earth to decide where to go, but this time I just parked the truck, unloaded the ATV, and started exploring. I went down a couple of trails that dwindled down to singletrack trails and I had to backtrack, but eventually I found my way to Summerville Wash. There, I found an old stone cabin--one of two that I now know of in the area.

After crossing the entire anticline from east to west, I was on another main road that would eventually take me back to the truck, but I still had plenty of riding time left. I rode south past El Rancho Not So Grande and followed the old abandoned railroad grade to Cottonwood Wash. There was a geocache there that was placed months ago, but nobody had yet found it. I had no idea that Cottonwood Wash was so awesome. It's a canyon that cuts through what is technically a part of the San Rafael Reef, though the uplift in that area isn't nearly as spectacular as it is farther south. The formations in the Navajo Sandstone are awesome, though, and I'm sure I'll go back to play around some more. I found the geocache there easily, but I wasn't able to find the petroglyphs that are nearby. I ended up hiking about a mile up the canyon before turning around and heading back to the ATV, then I sped back to the truck. Here are a few photos from the trip, and here is a Google Earth .KML file that includes my GPS tracklog and a few waypoints.

I spent Sunday getting a few things ready for the camping trip, including an hour and a half of splitting firewood (my back and shoulders are still sore). On Monday I went on a hike with some other geocachers to the geocache that I placed last year on the mountain above Kenilworth. Tuesday (yesterday) evening I worked for several hours loading all of our camping gear into the truck and trailer, and I did a lot more of that today. We left town at around 4:00 pm and got to our campsite a little before 6:00 this evening.

We were, as usual, the first ones here. I'm in the Swell now, sitting in the camp trailer as I type this, after having had a bit of excitement after dinner. I had grabbed the boys' helmets out of the truck so we could go on a short ATV ride, and when I got back from the ride Traci asked my for my keys to the truck. I told her that they were in the ignition and she could have gotten them at any time, to which she replied that the truck was locked. Shit. I guess out of habit I'd locked the doors, but my key was in the ignition and Traci's keys were in the truck too. My cell phone was in the truck, Traci's phone battery was dead, and her laptop (with wireless card) was also in the truck. We don't even have a spare key at home, so being able to use the phone or internet wouldn't have been of much use. After considering all of our options, we tried breaking into the truck. I wanted to avoid breaking a window, but using a screwdriver to pry at the rear sliding window and attempting to break the interior latch made it feel like the glass was going to break. I tried to gently force one of the lock cylinders to turn with a screwdriver, but that didn't work. My next idea was to force a piece of wire through the weather stripping on the wing window to try and hit the power unlock button. I couldn't get enough downward force on the wire to push the button, so I used pliers to form a small hook on the end of the wire and tried pulling up on the "Lock" side of the rocker switch. The wire was too thick to fit between the gap around the switch, and Traci suggested that I try hammering the wire to thin it out. After setting the end of the wire on a rock and giving it a few blows with a hammer, the hook on the end was much thinner. I managed to slide it in between the gap around the switch, then I pulled on the wire and the doors unlocked! It's a good thing I had all of my tools with me on this trip.

So, the plan for the rest of the weekend is to just chill. I've been working a lot of overtime at work, and I really need a vacation. More people will be showing up here tomorrow, and I'm sure we'll get out for a lot of ATV riding and hiking and, of course (my favorite) sitting around the campfire and bull-shitting.