Our trip to Buckhorn Wash yesterday went very well. Luckily, it wasn’t crowded down there at all. We stopped at the dinosaur footprint, the pictograph panel, and a petroglyph panel that I hadn’t seen before. We also ate lunch at a very nice spot, and it didn’t rain on us–just sprinkled a tiny bit.
Both my sister and I placed new caches down there: Dinosaur Footprint and Buckhorn Wash. The cache I left there is probably my favorite of all the caches I’ve placed. When I came home through Buckhorn Wash from The Wickiup in March, I saw an awesome rock formation–it’s basically a tall, long, and thin fin of pockmarked sandstone sticking up in the middle of a designated BLM camping area. I wasn’t sure if it could be climbed, but I found out yesterday that it’s definitely possible–Mark and I climbed more than halfway up the least steep side, but it was still a pretty difficult scramble. I think it would have been possible to climb all the way to the top, but I didn’t want to place the cache up there and have somebody risk his/her own life trying to find it.
Today, I went on a little fossil-hunting expedition near Mounds Reef. I started my hike at my cache, and hiked north for about 1.5 miles until I came out on another road. I didn’t find any fossils until I had almost reached the road, and the rocks I found were too heavy to carry all the way back to the car. I left them on the side of the road, then started hiking along the road back to the Mazda. Once I got about halfway back, I realized that the road went pretty far south before it turned back north to where I was parked, so I headed cross-country and took a more direct route.
I was specifically looking for cephalopods, but all I found were some small shells and some fairly large fossils that I can’t identify. What sucks about the whole hike is that it wasn’t until I was nearly back to the car that I really started finding interesting (and numerous) fossils. Now I want to go back another time when it’s not raining to search some more.
After I left the Mounds area, I decided to go south to Desert Lake, then I was planning on going through Cleveland and north on SR-10 on my way home. It had been sprinkling or raining most of the afternoon, but the roads seemed merely damp everywhere I’d been up to this point. However, shortly after I crossed the bridge over the Price River, the road went from mostly gravel to mostly dirt, and it got as slick as ice. I almost lost control and slid off the road doing only 20 MPH, and if I’d gotten anywhere near the edge of the road I’m sure I would have become stuck. I managed to make a 10-point turn in the middle of the road and started back in the opposite direction, and drove the half-mile back to the gravelled part of the road in first gear. After I reached safety again, I cruised back home the way I’d came before it got any more wet.