I’m just barely starting to wind down from my long camping trip. Here are a few selected pictures from the several hundred that I took. I got back three days ago, and I haven’t had much time on the computer (except for work) since then. I drove down with Bradley Wednesday after work. It was windy as hell, and at one point on UT-24 I thought it was going to blow the trailer over. There was sand blowing across the road in some spots and drifts of sand were starting to form on the asphalt. By the time I got to camp, it was just too windy and cold to set up camp so I got the trailer as level as I could and set up the jackstands underneath it to keep it from rocking in the wind. Bradley and I ate an early dinner and then turned in for a restless night of sleep, with the gusty wind keeping me awake. I hate wind.
By Thursday morning the weather had gotten much calmer. I set up camp and just lazed around all day with Bradley. By evening, Traci and Michael showed up, with Sam and Mark and family close behind. It was nice having a campfire that night.
On Friday, we tried driving down Iron Wash to some sand dunes that are supposed to be there. You can see the sand dunes in Google Earth in imagery taken last year, but not in the USGS aerial photos from 10 years ago. 4WD was necessary to drive in the soft sand in the bottom of the wash, and the going was a little slow. It was fun, though! We only got a mile down the wash before running into a fence with no way around or through it. We got back on UT-24 and drove a bit farther north and tried a different road, but that one dead-ended at some fun sandstone hills that we drove on for a while. Here’s a video from Iron Wash and surrounding area. After that, we just gave up on the dunes and headed back to camp. There were other geocachers there when we got back, and we stuck around the rest of the day while others started trickling in. All told, I think we had about 30 people camped there that night. There was a geocache called Fat Man’s Misery about 300′ from where my trailer was parked, so a bunch of us climbed up to it that evening. It was so fun I think I climbed up there four or more times throughout the weekend. Here’s a video I put together from a few of the trips up to the cache.
On the following day a group of cachers hiked down Crack Canyon, but the hike wasn’t quite kid-friendly so we hiked Wild Horse Canyon instead. We also found a few caches in the area, did the potluck dinner in the evening, and stayed around the campfire drinking well into the morning.
Most people went home on Sunday, including Traci and Michael. The weather started turning bad again that evening, and most everybody who was still at camp holed up in their trailers early. By early Monday morning, it started snowing/raining. Taking down camp wasn’t too fun in the mud and rain, but I think it was still worth staying an extra night, just to have another day away from home and the rest of the world.
Since returning, I’ve either been at work, or unloading the camp trailer and truck, or cleaning out my garage. I bought a new Craftsman tiller today so I can till the garden and the front yard. I’ve borrowed my mom’s tillers in the past for the garden, but I can’t get either of them to start now–they’re each well over 10 years old. I was originally going to rent a tiller, but at $120 per day from the only rental place in the county, it cost less than three days’ rental to buy a really nice one. Bleh, so now my wallet’s a bit lighter, and I’ve got something to keep me busy this weekend.