After the previous weekend’s trip to Bowknot Bend, this past weekend I needed to take it easy. Traci and I spent a few hours on Saturday cleaning junk out of the garage. We filled the truck bed to nearly overflowing and took the load to the landfill. That evening, I took the family to the picnic area at Cedar Mountain. We ate a simple dinner of assorted crackers, meat, cheese, sardines, and fruit. As the sun set, the full moon was rising almost 180-degrees on the opposite horizon. Here’s a quick video panorama moving from the moon to the sun, showing the nice view south into the San Rafael Swell from Cedar Mountain:
The kids and I did a little scrambling on and between the boulders below the picnic area as darkness fell. Once it was fully dark, we drove down the road a short distance to the overlook, which has the same basic view as from the picnic area, but there was a geocache there that I wanted to find. Traci and the kids waited in the truck while I went to find the cache, which was only about a hundred feet from the parking area. I hadn’t planned on finding it in the dark, and all I had was the backlight from my GPS screen to aid in finding the cache. The GPS zeroed out at the top of a ledge, and I stepped down off the ledge and found the cache hidden under a fallen tree trunk. I kept smelling something that smelled like paint, but I didn’t figure out what it was until I felt the ants crawling all over me. I must have been standing right in an ant pile, and for some reason they smelled strongly like paint. I hurriedly threw the cache back in its hiding spot and jogged over to the truck, where I stood in the light of the headlights and brushed and picked the ants off me. I’m pretty sure I got them all off, but I still would occasionally feel like they were on me. I took a few long exposure photos from the overlook before we left, then headed home after a relaxing evening with the fam.
Beautiful.