We went camping this weekend expecting the weather to be a bit on the cool side, but it turned out to be pretty warm. Other than that, it was a great time. Here are some pictures from our trip. We camped at what could barely be considered to be a part of Cedar Mountain, just before the road begins climbing the north slope of the mountain. Traci and I rode a short distance down a trail near there a couple of weeks ago and we loved the scenery, so we picked that spot to camp this weekend. It wasn’t a great spot, but it was close to a lot of excellent ATV trails. Mark and Samantha hauled our other ATV down for us, and we spent a lot of time riding the ATVs near camp. After dinner on Friday night, Mark and I set off to place a night cache. We rode an ATV a few hundred yards from camp and began placing reflectors in the trees so that, with a bright flashlight, you can follow them along a route that will eventually take you to the final location where the cache container is hidden. It was a lot of fun to place it, and the next evening we had Traci and Samantha run through the course to make sure everything worked as we’d intended.
On Saturday after breakfast, Mark and I rode my ATV out to The Nipple, which is simply a big hill (that doesn’t even come close to resembling a nipple) out near Cow Flats. We hiked to the top and I placed another geocache there. That evening we had a lot of fun sitting around the campfire watching some presumably drunk ATVers riding around on the main road. We could only see headlights and taillights and hear their engines, and we watched them apparently get lost and turn around several times, including twice that some of them began riding down the road toward our camp before turning around and riding back out to the main road. We also got divebombed by a bat, and listened to coyotes howl throughout the evening.
Sunday morning Mark and I again set out on ATVs and rode across Cow Flats to an awesome trail up Cedar Mountain to Ware Spring. I expected the trail to be rough based on what I could see in Google Earth, and I got exactly what I expected. It was nice riding a trail without Traci and the kids because it allowed me to drive a bit more aggressively. There were a couple of obstacles that I probably wouldn’t have tried if I’d had my family along for the ride. We made it as far as Ware Spring, almost to the top of Cedar Mountain, even though the trail continues farther up the mountain to some private property just past the top. The spring itself was very interesting. It had been developed a long time ago to water cattle, with a lot of watering troughs carved out of large logs that were fed by a pipe coming in from the spring. There was surprisingly a lot of water coming out of the spring, enough that were were actually small wetlands and marshes downhill from it. I shot a little bit of video on the trail which you can view here.