I’m still recovering from Saturday…it was a truly exhausting day. I left home at 8:30 in the morning, and drove about 35 miles to Castle Dale, then hit the dirt road leading into the Swell. After that, it was nothing but driving (145 miles of dirt roads) and hiking for the next 12 hours or so. I spent most of that time on some pretty rough roads, so much so that my seatbelt left a mark on my left shoulder from being jostled around in my seat all day. My left arm, neck, and face also got nicely sunburned from all that driving, so I’ll be looking pretty goofy until it fades.
I only visited 11 cache sites out of 13 that I’d planned. After the sun had set, I decided to call it a day and found a nice place to stop and fix something to eat. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and even that only consisted of a granola bar and some coffee–I’m not sure how I made it through the day on so little.
After cooking something on my camp stove and relaxing for a few minutes, I continued east on the Green River Cutoff road toward US-6. I’d never been on that part of the road before, and driving it in the dark wasn’t fun–I wasn’t sure if I’d even make it to the highway, but I think I was just being paranoid. I eventually did make it there, after making a few guesses as to which roads to take, and made it home 13.5 hours after initially leaving.
I was so mentally and physically exhausted by then that I was having a hard time putting words together to form sentences, but I still felt good. In hindsight, since I didn’t complete my goal, I wish I’d have spent more time in some of the areas that I visited. The Black Box was especially awesome, and I think I’ll return sometime with Traci so we can do some hiking there.
It’s funny (or not) that I left home with the expectation of finding all the caches in the northern end of the San Rafael Swell that I hadn’t previously found, and when I got home there were three new caches listed on geocaching.com that I’d actually passed with a couple miles of. They were all placed the day before, but hadn’t been listed until after I left home. I’ll be returning someday this week after work to (hopefully) get FTF on them.