Today was the first day in months that it didn’t feel like winter to me. My family and my sister’s family set out this morning on a trip through Buckhorn Wash and then down the Mexican Mountain road. We left our trucks at home–I drove the Taurus, and they drove their minivan. We were looking for a campsite where other geocachers could come in their cars, so I figured if I can’t get my car into a site, it wouldn’t be suitable anyway.
There is still a lot of snow on the ground just south of Price, and as we were leaving town all that snow got me worrying. I worried that there would still be snow on the dirt roads in the Swell, or that the snow would be melting quickly and there would be a lot of mud. My fears were unfounded, because it was gorgeous today. It was t-shirt weather, and the roads were not only dry, but they were smooth and appeared to have been graded somewhat recently. Gotta love the Emery County road department.
We checked out a few campsites along the Mexican Mountain road, and found one in particular that was more than adequate for DeViDe’s event. After spending some time at that spot, we drove farther down the road and stopped at Red Canyon for a hike. We hiked along the wide, sandy bottom of Red Canyon for nearly half a mile, but the canyon bottom is so wide that it’s uninteresting if you stay in the bottom. We left the bottom and headed cross-country to the east about a quarter-mile and found a fun place to hang out. There were a couple of huge boulders balanced on small mounds of dirt/shale, and an abundance of petrified wood. I placed a geocache right above this boulder that was wedged atop a dryfall, then we hiked back to the vehicles and had a pick-a-nick.
The drive home would normally have been uneventful, but we stopped at the pictograph panel in Buckhorn Wash for a potty break. While the ladies were using the restroom, Mark and I crossed the bottom of the wash and hiked around the sandstone formation on the other side of the canyon. We were only over there for about five minutes or so, but when we got back to the wash, there was flowing water several inches deep and about six feet wide in the bottom! I immediately bolted off downstream to try to find the leading edge of the water. It was just runoff from the snow melting up-canyon, but there was a lot of it. Luckily it was moving slow, and I caught up to it a couple hundred yards down the wash. I took some video (seen here on YouTube) and pictures, and then we returned on our merry way home.