I got bored and made some pretty substantial changes to the Nutty Putty Cave site. I haven't been out there since before I got my GPS, and I'd like to go out there in the next month or so and hit the cave, then find the many caches that have been placed in the area in the past year or two. With as busy as it is this time of year, I'll need to take a day off work to make it worth my while, though.

Things have been dead this week. I think I left the house twice during the week, but I managed to get out a bit this weekend. I went on a relatively short hike today (compared to what I've become accustomed to in the past few weeks), and saw a lot of deer on my way to the Gordon Creek falls. I got FTF on the cache out there--the same one that me and my sister's family got to within a few feet of a couple of months ago. I realized today that I'm glad we didn't try any harder back then, because somebody would have surely gotten hurt trying to go after the cache with as much snow as was there. I expected it to be muddy today because of the snow/sleet we had during the week, but it was quite dry--my boots made it home lightly dusted instead of caked with mud.

It looks like the weather will be dry for the rest of the week and next weekend, but the forecast will surely change before Saturday rolls around. Even if it's dry Saturday, one storm during the week could ruin my plans to go hiking with Mike in the Swell. We could always just go somewhere else and not be bothered by the water, but I've had my mind set on this particular place for awhile now.

Finally...I've gotten a chance to relax. The weekend seemed very long, but after being away from home the entire time, it seemed like I hadn't sat still at all before having to go back to work yesterday morning. We got home pretty late Sunday night, so late in fact that I didn't have time to log any of the geocaches we found until last night.

We spent Saturday in Lehi, cruising around with three families in three vehicles, and found a total of nine caches. I didn't really enjoy the urban caches--driving around the city isn't my idea of fun--but there were a few along the Jordan River Parkway that were enjoyable. I think the kids liked being away from town as well, because they could get out and roam around without us worrying about them too much.

Sunday we spent in West Valley City. Despite being on the road most of the day, we only found two caches and placed one. We drove to Stansbury Island first, and I'd never been anywhere near that area before. Parts of the island were beautiful, but most of it is private property--otherwise, I'd have loved to do some hiking. We also passed the Morton salt plant. It was interesting to see all that future table salt piled up on the ground. We placed a cache in an easily-accessible place, since the other four on the island were hard to get to (especially with kids).

After that, we left and ate lunch in West Valley, then drove around for the rest of the afternoon, but only found two caches. Mike and I spent quite a bit of time looking for one, which is so small that you need tweezers to retrieve it from its hiding place, but we never found it. I think it's no longer there, because we looked everywhere it could possibly be, and even went back to Mike's house to re-read the cache page before returning to look more. It's supposed to be on the pedestrian bridge over Bangerter Highway at 4100 South, and it was cold and windy up there, and not at all worth it.

I don't think I'll be getting out much in the next two weeks, but I've got plans to hit the Swell again with Mike at the beginning of April. It's almost time to gear up for some overnighters--Sid's Mountain and Upheaval Dome sound good right about now.

Holy crap. Somebody posted an 1800 word essay detailing why Utah sucks to the comments section of my site. You should check it out.

For the past few months, I've been checking out the Where Is It? feature in the Outdoors section of the Salt Lake Tribune each Thursday. I've sent in the answers when I knew them, or guessed a few times when I wasn't sure. Last week, the picture was of the "P" on a hill above Parowan, which I'd seen a picture of last year at this locationless geocache. I said as much in my contest entry email (saying that I sort of cheated by not actually having been there), and got a reply (in jest, I think) back from Brett Prettyman saying, "Sort of cheated!!! How do you live with yourself."

Anyhow, my name was drawn from the correct entries, and I won a copy of this book. It looks like something the kids (well, at least Michael) will enjoy, and I'm sure I'll have some fun visiting some of the places listed in the book. There are apparently no rules dictating how many times you can win the contest, so I think I'll keep trying for a copy of Fishing Utah. Unfortunately, I have no idea where the location of this week's photo is. Well, not no idea, just not anything specific.

Been a long day. I put in eight hours at the office today (which meant getting up damned early), then after work I headed out to get FTF on two geocaches. I'd originally planned on buying all the stuff I need to put a new roof on my garage while I was in Provo, but I didn't feel like it after work. Besides, with the bad weather we're supposed to have in the next week or so, I'd have just had to store the stuff anyway, which is more hassle than going back up to get it when I'm ready for it.

The two caches I found were on the west side of West Mountain, along a road that follows the shore of Utah Lake. It was pretty nice out there. I'd never been in that area, and it was pretty tricky just getting there--the road zig-zags through a bunch of fields, and I had to do a little back-tracking a couple of times to find my way there.

I'll probably work again in the office on Friday, since I didn't finish everything that I needed to do today. We were planning on spending some time up there anyway sometime during the weekend, so it'll work out fine. I think I'm going to do nothing except caching while I'm up there--I'd like to hit 200 finds next month.

Yesterday was great--in a way. I managed to drive the Mazda to within 0.52 miles of The Wickiup, and I was able to hike to the top and find the cache. The bad news? I didn't get first to find. A gentleman from Mount Pleasant, who, like me, had been out there twice before finally finding it, managed to get FTF on Thursday. He still hasn't logged the cache on Geocaching.com. I was pretty excited when I made it to the top, at least until I opened the cache and saw that he'd left his mark already. Here's my log and a few pictures (scroll down to my March 12 entry).

After leaving The Wickiup, I drove north on the Buckhorn Wash road, and right before I got to the turnoff for the first cache I'd planned on finding, I got a flat tire. A sharp piece of limestone punched a hole in the left-rear tire, and the hole is big enough that I don't think the tire can be repaired (it's about a ½" long puncture). I spent about half an hour changing the tire, and just after I got done winching the flat back up under the Mazda, an Emery County Sheriff's deputy pulled up alongside to make sure everything was alright. We talked for just a few minutes, then he headed back down the road (south toward I-70).

I kept going north and found a bunch of caches along the way. After finding the last one for the day, the same Sheriff's deputy pulled up alongside me again, making sure I didn't have another flat or something. I explained to him that I was just geocaching, which he had heard of and was aware of the locations of all the caches in the area. We bull-shitted for quite some time, mostly about different places in the Swell, and a few of the caches and cachers he's had experience with. I kind of envy him--his job is to patrol the Buckhorn Wash road, and I can't think of a better workplace than that.

Ok, I'm going for another foray into the Swell tomorrow morning. I've put a lot of miles on the Mazda in the past two weeks, and this will just make a lot more. With fuel prices going up (I paid $1.97 for regular yesterday), this is getting to be expensive. I'm hoping to come home on the Buckhorn Wash road this time, mostly because I'm getting bored of US-6 between here and Green River (and secondly because there are a few caches there that I haven't found). But that all depends on where I go near I-70 and how long I spend there.

I'm bringing food and water for an entire day again, and even enough to spend the night if necessary, though that's very unlikely. I'm still somewhat worried about getting stuck in the mud, even though it's had one week of dry 60° weather to help out with that problem. I'd feel bad to be that far away from home and have to call somebody to come pull me out. I think several hours of digging myself out with my e-tool would be better than that, and would probably take less time.

Ok, so I finally got rid of that ugly-ass default Movable Type layout. I love this new one. I took the picture standing right next to Crystal Geyser at sunset. I've still got to apply the new layout to a few pages on this site, but I've got pretty much everything else worked out.

I'll no longer be doing the "Quickies" (they were too difficult to work into a design), but I did merge the old ones into my regular blog entries, so they're still there for your viewing displeasure.

I went on a short hike today, above the Castle Gate subdivision. I had to pretend not to see a couple of "No Trespassing" signs to get where I was going. I was going after a geocache on top of a huge cliff, and I thought I could work my way up the hill past the cliff without endangering my life too much, but strong winds stopped me short about 700 feet from the cache. That, and there was still a lot of snow on the ledges that I'd have had to climb, and I think that would have been a bit too dangerous as well. I was hoping to get a quick FTF on that one, but no such luck. If I'm lucky, nobody else will dare going after it before I can make it back there during better weather.

It feels like I went everywhere in the San Rafael Swell yesterday. I started out at 8:00 am, hoping to climb The Wickiup again and finally find the cache up there. Well, the road was still pretty muddy, with snow in some spots, so I decided to pass. After that, I went to the Eagle Canyon overlook, and hiked one mile round-trip to find a cache nearby. I'd hoped to cross I-70 from there and find a few more on Justensen Flats, but that road was extremely muddy--there was even runoff from melting snow flowing right down the middle of the road.

From there, I headed back east and tried exiting I-70 onto a dirt road at the Head of Sinbad, but either UDOT or the BLM has fenced off that road and placed a sign saying to use exit 129. I headed several more miles east to that exit, then drove back west on a dirt road for about five miles, but I eventually ran into a mud bog that I don't think the Mazda could have made it through. So scratch another few caches.

I knew the road going north from I-70 on the east side of the San Rafael Reef was dry, since I'd passed it earlier in the morning, so I drove there and found one cache and did a little more hiking. After that, I drove south on UT-24 and did a lot more hiking, and found three more caches.

Finally, I drove back to Green River, then headed south to Crystal Geyser. It's a cold-water geyser, powered by carbon dioxide, much like the geyser at Woodside (about 25 miles north). This was really the highlight of my day--the minerals that have built up around the geyser are just awesome, and it's right on the banks of the Green River. I stayed there for a couple of hours (until well after sundown), hoping to catch the geyser erupting, but it never did--it only sputtered a bit. I fixed something to eat while I waited, and took a lot of pictures. Considering how amazing this place is, and how close to the town of Green River it is, I'm surprised I'd never heard about it before a cache was placed nearby. I'd like to go back sometime when I can wait it out--it supposedly only erupts three times a day.

My hiking boots have a nice, thick coat of red dirt on them. I had a lot of fun hiking yesterday, and now I can't wait to go back to the Moab area for more. Pictures are here.

I met Matty in Green River early in the morning, then we headed down to Moab in the Mazda. The drive wasn't nearly as long as I remembered, but the last time I was there I must have been about 13 years old, and being a bored kid riding in the back seat can make any drive seem long. The dirt road that led to the trailhead basically followed a narrow wash (Ida Gulch) most of the way, but about .25 miles from the trailhead, there was a steep, loose climb that I don't think the Mazda could have made. We parked there and started hiking.

The trail was well-marked by rock cairns, and it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd expected. The cache page says the elevation gain was around 2,000 feet, but it was more like 1,400. And since it was well-traveled, and switched back and forth a lot, it made for pretty easy going.

We reached the base of the cliffs on top after a couple of hours, and spent a lot of time searching for the cache. I finally managed to dig it up (literally) after exhausting all the obvious hiding spots. After we signed a log and placed it in the cache, we took a break and ate something, then headed back down to the car.

The hike down took about half as long, but it was still pretty slow going because of the sheer steepness of the slope. Matty hid another geocache at the junction of the dirt road and UT-128, since there are so few easy caches anywhere near Moab.

I'd really like to go back to Moab and do some more hiking/caching. I wanted to go again today or tomorrow, but I couldn't talk Traci into letting me. I am, however, going hiking somewhere tomorrow, but I'll wait until afterwards to write about it. =)

As I was lying in bed two nights ago, unable to get to sleep, I started thinking about the Subaru again. Could it actually be something other than the engine?

I went out yesterday and started it up again, and paid a little more attention to the noises it was making and its mannerisms when stomping on the gas. I let it get up to operating temperature, which it did just fine without blowing up. When the engine is warm, it'll get up to 4,000 RPM before starting to fizzle, but it seems to me now that it's some other problem causing it. Maybe the carburetor, possibly one or more bad plug wires or something wrong in the distributor. I'm not sure I'll even be able to troubleshoot the problem, since I was never good at figuring out an engine that just runs bad. Hopefully a few questions here will point me in the right direction.