My hiking boots have a nice, thick coat of red dirt on them. I had a lot of fun hiking yesterday, and now I can’t wait to go back to the Moab area for more. Pictures are here.
I met Matty in Green River early in the morning, then we headed down to Moab in the Mazda. The drive wasn’t nearly as long as I remembered, but the last time I was there I must have been about 13 years old, and being a bored kid riding in the back seat can make any drive seem long. The dirt road that led to the trailhead basically followed a narrow wash (Ida Gulch) most of the way, but about .25 miles from the trailhead, there was a steep, loose climb that I don’t think the Mazda could have made. We parked there and started hiking.
The trail was well-marked by rock cairns, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected. The cache page says the elevation gain was around 2,000 feet, but it was more like 1,400. And since it was well-traveled, and switched back and forth a lot, it made for pretty easy going.
We reached the base of the cliffs on top after a couple of hours, and spent a lot of time searching for the cache. I finally managed to dig it up (literally) after exhausting all the obvious hiding spots. After we signed a log and placed it in the cache, we took a break and ate something, then headed back down to the car.
The hike down took about half as long, but it was still pretty slow going because of the sheer steepness of the slope. Matty hid another geocache at the junction of the dirt road and UT-128, since there are so few easy caches anywhere near Moab.
I’d really like to go back to Moab and do some more hiking/caching. I wanted to go again today or tomorrow, but I couldn’t talk Traci into letting me. I am, however, going hiking somewhere tomorrow, but I’ll wait until afterwards to write about it. =)