My new GPS receiver arrived today. So far, I'm very impressed. The only disadvantage that the Garmin GPS 60 has, compared to my old eTrex Legend, is that it's substantially larger and heavier. However, there are two things that offset that. One is that the GPS 60 gets much better satellite reception than the Legend, and I can put it somewhere less obtrusive (such as in my breast pocket) without losing the signal. With the Legend, I had to carry the damned thing in my hand all the time, holding it slightly away from my body, in order to get a good signal. This was a big pain in the ass whenever I needed both hands to climb, take pictures, or just to pick my nose. The second thing is the belt clip that came with the GPS 60--I can clip it just about anywhere and the size/weight issue isn't really noticeable. It should fit just fine on the chest strap of my hydration pack next to my cell phone. Now I just need an excuse to get out and use it.

Instead of placing a new geocache yesterday, Mark and I spent almost the entire day just finding a single cache. We left Price at 7:00am and arrived at the base of the Big Flat Tops more than two hours later. I knew we were in for a steep hike before starting to plan the trip, but actually looking at the hill leading up to the top of the plateau gave me second thoughts. It appeared much steeper than the topo map showed, but that wasn't the worst. The entire north slope was covered in snow, which I didn't expect at all. On the drive south, I kept thinking that anytime now, all this snow will give way to dry desert, but it never happened.

I drove my truck as close to the base of the hill as I could, but cross-country driving isn't as easy as I expected. I only got 400 feet from the main road before giving up and parking. We hiked another half-mile to a place where we could clearly see what the uphill hike would entail, and promptly turned around and went back to the truck. It would have been ok if the ground was dry, but the snow was just too much.

Instead of placing a cache there, we drove another 35 miles further to Moonshine Wash to find the Sheep Bridge cache. We hiked in from the east side, crossed Moonshine Wash, then hiked north along the west side of the canyon until we reached the sheep bridge and the cache. I'd never actually been this close to Moonshine Wash before, and it reminded me of the Black Box, only on a smaller scale. I found the Moonshine Wash cache last year, but it's in a side canyon, and Mike and I couldn't make it further down into Moonshine without climbing gear.

The sheep bridge was interesting, and I was really tempted to cross it. Moonshine Wash is about 60 feet deep and only 10 feet across at the bridge. It seemed stable enough, and logic was telling me that I'd have no problems just walking across, but my instincts were telling me no way. Mark and I spent about 10 or 15 minutes standing around the bridge, trying to decide if we were stupid enough to try it. In the end, it wasn't worth it just to shave a mile off our return trip, so we followed our footprints through the sand and the snow back to the truck.

It's been snowing pretty good all evening, and I'm lovin' it. I'd really like to be outside doing something. Even shoveling snow in this weather is better than staying inside. If it wasn't so late I'd be with the kids, outside sledding or building a snowman. I enjoy the quietness of everything in the snow, and how bright it is around town with the light reflecting off the low clouds. I don't know how this will affect my weekend plans, but I suppose I can expect some mud. It might be entirely different down in the Swell, though. I can only hope.

So, it's looking like the Wedge on Saturday, and the San Rafael Desert on Sunday. The weather forecast has gotten much colder, so I'll have to keep moving and push myself a bit harder in order to keep warm. The San Rafael Desert is quite a bit farther south of Price than the Wedge, so maybe it'll end up being warmer there.

I've had this idea of hiding a cache in a different manner from any other cache I've seen, and Sunday I'm finally going to do it. It's taken me a long time to find the right place, but I think the Flat Tops area of the desert ought to do. I plan on hiking at least a mile from the nearest road, then just dropping my flourescent orange ammo box on the ground and leaving it there. I've never seen a cache so exposed as that, and hopefully it won't be discovered by anybody who isn't looking for it.

I finally ordered a new GPS receiver today. It was stupid of me to wait for prices to drop, because instead the price went up by $30 and hasn't come back down. I could have gotten the same GPS cheaper from somewhere other than Amazon, but after actually having to pay for shipping it would have cost about the same. I also got the windshield and handlebar mounting brackets, both of which should save some wear-and-tear on the new GPS.

I'm still planning on hiking Saturday, though the weather forecast shows a high temperature of between 35° and 40°. It was probably around 10° warmer than that the last time I was out on the Wedge, so I'll have to wear an extra layer of clothing.

This weekend was fairly unusual for me because I stayed home pretty much the whole time. The only time I left was to take a short drive up Nine Mile Canyon yesterday afternoon to log a virtual geocache that I've been wanting to do for a long time. It was boring staying in the house all day Friday and Saturday, but I was watching the kids while Traci did some scrapbooking stuff with her family. This coming weekend will make up for it--I'm not sure I'll be home at all. :)

There is currently a bill under consideration by the Utah Legislature that would change the way handguns may be carried in vehicles. Right now, unless you have a Concealed Firearm Permit, you may only carry a weapon in your vehicle if it would require two manual actions of the firearm in order to fire. In the case of a semi-automatic handgun, that would mean racking the slide (or dropping an open slide on a full magazine) then pulling the trigger. The new bill would require only one manual action--in other words, simply pulling the trigger.

Now honestly, this bill won't have any effect on me, but I would like to see it passed because it would basically extend existing firearm laws so that your vehicle is regarded in the same way as your home.

The thing that really gets me is the attitude of the bill's opponents. From the Salt Lake Tribune article:

"But having a ready-to-fire gun in cars could escalate road rage incidents from an obscene gesture to gunfire, said Heber Police Chief Ed Rhoades, president of the Utah Police Chiefs Association. Officer safety would also be jeopardized by a suspect's ability to just grab a handgun and pull the trigger while stopped by police."

Ok, maybe I'm crazy, but I'm not entirely happy with my cache placement mentioned in the previous post, and I want to go back and move it. I'm not sure if it's appropriate to move the existing cache, 'cause one person has already told me it's on their to-do list, but if I do move it it'll be that much more rewarding a find. The only reason Mark and I left it there is that we were both saving just barely enough energy to make it back to the truck, and a lot more wandering around looking for a way east would have been too much. Now that I've had time to recover, and now that I can take the most direct route to the existing cache, I think it's doable to make it all the way to the southeastern tip of the Wedge. There's only one avenue that we didn't explore to go further east, and that was up higher and over a big Navajo sandstone cliff. We tried going around either side of the plateau, but we didn't even consider the direct route over the top. I think in two weeks I'll give it a shot, weather permitting.

Luckily the weather held up for today's hike, and it couldn't have been more perfect. I really think winter is the best time for hiking the Swell. Mark and I left Price around 8:00am, and it probably took us well over an hour to reach the trailhead. We took the road leading to the Wedge overlook, but turned off a side road well before the overlook. That road eventually dead-ended, and that's where we began our hike.

The hike involved a lot of route finding--luckily I brought a topo map with me, which I normally don't do. I started out wanting to place a cache on the far southeastern tip of the Wedge, overlooking Buckhorn Wash, but I don't think that's possible without climbing gear. We came up about a mile short of our destination, but the hike there was pretty amazing.

There were two places along the route where you absolutely could not proceed further southeast without going past a specific point. One involved a mile-long sheer cliff that only had one place to descend onto the flat below, and another was a big hill where only one route over the top would take you to the other side. Every other way that we tried getting around these obstacles was a bust. That should make it a difficult cache to find, because I didn't give out specific information on the cache page.

Round trip, the hike was 5.5 miles, which was surprising to me because we were never more than 1.5 miles from the truck. There was just a lot of zig-zagging and backtracking in order to get around obstacles. That country is very rough and remote, and it was great to do some exploring there. The Wedge is a big place to explore, but I'd like to do a lot more. The eastern half is where all the exciting stuff is, away from the touristy overlook. It looks like there's some good trailer camping spots closer to the main road, and I'd like to camp nearby and do more playing around this spring.

Yeah, nothing is going on lately. I get up in the morning, work eight hours, do some house cleaning, watch TV, eat dinner, waste time on the internet, and sleep. I ordered some prescription sunglasses last weekend, which is a first for me. But with all the outdoors things I do, I've needed them for a long time. I've got plans for a hike this weekend, and the weather forecast for then has actually improved over the past couple of days, and I'm hoping that it holds up, and this is a run-on sentence. That's about all I've got to look forward to for awhile--well, that and some warmer weather. This 40° stuff is irritating. I'm ready to hook up to the trailer and drive.

I finally broke down and bought a Linksys wireless router today. I also got two Linksys notebook adapters which each cost as much as the router itself. So far, the whole damned setup is flaky as hell. My old router was a Linksys as well, so I figured setting up the new one would be easy. My first problem was that I couldn't get the router to connect to the internet through my DSL modem. The crappy Linksys auto-setup software didn't work, so I manually configured the router through my web browser. After playing with my settings for a long time, then resetting the router to factory defaults and playing with the settings some more, it finally worked even though I hadn't done anything differently the second time around.

After installing the notebook adapters and making sure they worked (even after rebooting a couple of times), I took my laptop to my mom's house to see if I could get a signal from my router. Her computer is about 350' away from my router, and I was hoping she'd be able to use my internet and do away with her dialup connection. I couldn't get a signal anywhere inside her house, but I could from her patio. So I went back home, but when I got there, I had no internet access. The Linksys adapter utility said that my laptop was connected to the access point, but that "the internet cannot be found." I found some help on Linksys' website, which said to use winipcfg to release and renew my IP. That didn't work (the existing IP wouldn't even release), and rebooting several times didn't work. Finally I physically removed the wireless adapter while the computer was turned on, then replaced it, and suddenly I had a connection to the access point and the internet. I'm almost afraid to turn the computer off now. Good thing I bought everything at Wal-Mart so I can easily return it if I keep having problems.

It felt good to leave my house and my kids behind for a weekend alone with my wife. Because of the snow, it took us more than three hours to drive to Mike's house. After we all grabbed a bite to eat, Mike and I took off and braved the freezing cold wind and tried our luck at finding a geocache on the pedestrian bridge over Bangerter Highway on 4100 South. The cache was a "nano" cache, meaning that only a tiny piece of paper could be rolled up inside the container, so I was prepared to spend a lot of time looking for it. The wind was blowing so hard that the concrete bridge was actually swaying. It only took us a few minutes to find the cache, but the container was broken and we had to walk back to my car so I could dry the paper out in order to sign it.

For the rest of the night and into the morning, Mike and I played Splinter Cell. I'm not big into video games, but I didn't want to stop playing this one. We played for about eight hours total over the course of the last two nights, going to bed after 4:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. respectively each night. I hope I can get my sleep schedule straightened out before I have to go back to work Tuesday morning.

The New Year's (does the apostrophe really belong there?) party at Matt's house was good, and probably the only New Year's in my entire adult life where I didn't drink at least some alcohol. I kicked ass at all the trivia-type games, as usual, but otherwise I was rather reserved, what with being in an unfamiliar place with some people I'd never met before. It wasn't as loud and rowdy a party as we usually have, so I'll have to make up for it next year.