This weekend’s camping trip reminded me of another trip two years ago, where it rained quite a bit but didn’t put much of a damper on our fun. The weather was nice on Friday, and I hadn’t even checked the weather forecast before leaving home, so I simply expected more of the same. We did some hiking around our camp on Buckhorn Flat, but didn’t do much else that evening.
On Saturday we found a nearby geocache, then returned to camp and hiked up Cedar Mountain. There was a relatively large cave about a quarter-mile up the mountain that was fun to go inside, but it probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do. 😉 We saw several other small caves carved out of the dirt just below thick ledges of sandstone, and all of them seemed potentially unstable. After returning to camp, it started raining. At first it was a light sprinkle, then some heavy rain moved in from the south, and it kept coming in waves. During one break in the storm, Sam and Mark heard running water somewhere on the mountain just above our camp. Mark had gone to investigate, and I followed him shortly afterwards. We found the leading edge of some water just beginning to trickle down the mountain, and eventually it reached our camp, but it was flowing just to the west of us and didn’t actually go through camp.
As the rain kept coming down, we decided to keep a roaring campfire going, so us guys set out in my truck to gather a bunch of dead juniper branches. Even with a big fire, the rain eventually got the better of us and we turned in for the night early. At around 1:00 am, Mark woke Traci and me up to tell us about the water that was flowing right through camp. It was flowing pretty good, right around both sides of the fire pit which still had hot coals in it. I started getting nervous then, even though the drainage area of the small wash we were in wasn’t very big and probably couldn’t produce massive flash floods. There wasn’t much we could do about it in the dark, so we all just went back to bed and tried getting some sleep. After another 30 minutes, the rain stopped for good, and I was able to sleep until morning.
The water had stopped flowing through camp by the time the sun came up, and things dried out surprisingly fast. We were able to drive a few miles down the road, with my family in our truck and Sam and Mark’s family in their minivan, to find a geocache and check out some petroglyphs. We spent the rest of the day just hanging out around camp and getting ready to head home.
I took a lot of pictures, but I’ve hit my disk space quota on this web server, so I can’t upload them until Solo remedies that. Until then, I’ve put a few rock art pictures up on my Flickr account.
Update:
Still no luck on getting the disk quota changed, but here’s a video full of short clips from the weekend: