I’ve been up Spring Canyon three times this week. I first drove up with the whole family on Tuesday night to find a new geocache up there. It was getting dark when we left home, and it was almost full dark when we got there. The hike to the cache was a little tricky with two kids in the dark, but we made it up to the general area without any problems. Finding the cache proved to be the really tricky part. Traci eventually took the kids back to the truck while I stayed up on the hill looking for the cache with just my dim headlamp, but I never did find it. We went home empty-handed, but it was still a fun trip.
A couple of days later, I went up with just Michael, and we found the cache after a brief search. Daylight made all the difference. After that, we hiked further up the old tramway where they used to haul coal down the mountain and did some sight-seeing. I found an old underground tag that the miners used to use to indicate which people were underground at any given time. Strangely, it was laying out in the open, and I’m surprised nobody else had seen it and picked it up.
Today, I returned with the kids to find some petroglyphs. I noticed this image yesterday, and decided I would try to find the petroglyphs up there on my own. Looking from inside the car along the road wasn’t much use, but walking along the old railroad grade was even worse because it was so windy that I couldn’t keep my eyes open without getting dirt blown into them constantly. I ended up taking the kids back to the car early, and we drove a ways past Standardville, then turned around and headed for home. Shortly after passing a car going the opposite direction, I came across a fallen tree branch that covered both lanes of the road. It couldn’t have fallen any more than a minute before I came across it, because the car I passed obviously made it through. Luckily, the tree was mostly dry-rotted, and the branch wasn’t impossible for me to move.
I saw some interesting plant fossils two of the times I was up in Spring Canyon. Actually, it was just off Spring Canyon in Sowbelly Gulch. There were some tree leaf impressions much like those on the trees in my front yard, and there were also some palm fronds in some of the rocks. The sandstone was pink, and the leaves were mostly dark red, especially the palm fronds (like this). In fact, if you go to this page and scroll down to the Price Utah > Mesa Verde Group Dinosaur Tracks section, I believe those pictures were taken in the same canyon. I may one day try to find that exact location, just because I get a kick out of doing things like that.