I did some great 4-wheeling today in my truck. There’s this geocache that I’d planned on finding this weekend, but after all the rain during the week, I decided not to even try. But last night, somebody posted a find on the cache, and he was able to drive to within 0.6mi of the cache, so I figured I could hike that far if I had to. I ended up following my sister’s family all the way to the cache, with them in their Bronco and me and the boys in the F-250. It wasn’t until after we’d found the cache that things got interesting.
There was a canyon that I noticed in the satellite photos that looked interesting, sort of a slot canyon for about 200 yards before opening up really wide. We found a road that appeared to go off in the right direction toward that canyon, but it really tested the limits of both our vehicles. The road snaked down a ridge, pretty narrow in some places, into the bottom of a wash. Getting down wasn’t a big problem, but I had my worries about getting back up. I almost got stuck in some deep mud down in the bottom of the wash, and after walking farther down a short section of the road, we decided not to press on and risk really getting stuck. Getting out of the wash and back up the ridge turned out to be as difficult as I’d feared. One steep section in particular had a 10-inch high ledge going across the road, and on my first attempt, the truck couldn’t make it over the ledge. I had to pile up a lot of rocks and dirt in front of the ledge so that my tires would roll over it, and even then I had to get a run at it (here’s a video that my sister took). Mark made it up just fine in his Bronco, and after that part the rest was easy.
This was just another of those places where I’d really love to go back to explore some more, but it’d really be better on a mountain bike, ’cause I don’t want to put that much wear and tear on my truck again. 🙂 I’ve heard from two different people now that there are some dinosaur bones in that area, and I’d like to see that. The petroglyphs near the cache were interesting, and I’m sure there’s got to be more of them around as well.