I took the kids out to Paint Road to place a new geocache this evening after I got off work. This one required a little bit of "engineering" because the road signs are made of aluminum and the magnets wouldn't stick to it. :) I had to screw a steel plate to a signpost, and about froze my ass off out there with as cold and windy as it was. It was quite a contrast to last weekend's warm and sunny weather. I still can't figure out why they call it "Paint Road."

I'm starting to get a little worried about next week's weather--if it rains or snows a day or two before Saturday, then the trailhead will be unreachable and the hike will have to be postponed. The weather forecast is never accurate up until a day or two in advance, so I have no choice but to wait until the last minute to make the call.

I completely deleted the Nutty Putty Cave site that I've been maintaining for the last eight years or so. Since SITLA closed the cave to the general public, there is no longer a reason to keep the site going. I may still make it back to the cave someday, but I'm not very enthused that I won't be able to take my kids until they turn 14. Stupid rules.

Speaking of kids getting older, Michael turned six years old last week. The day before his birthday, he got his first loose tooth. It just doesn't seem as though I should have a kid old enough to be losing his baby teeth. I don't really consider myself old, but compared to the friends I grew up with, I'm the first one having to deal with this kind of stuff. Haha suckers--that means I'll be kickin' back in my empty nest while they're still dealing with driver's ed and "Dad, can I borrow the car tonight?" :)

I came home today with reddish colored mud on my hiking boots, a sunburn on my face, and I even made it home before the liquor store closed! Yeah, that's my idea of a good day. :) I drove down to the Sid's Mountain trailhead with my sister and her hubby to see what kind of shape the road was in. We found a few new geocaches along the way, but the majority of the time was spent bumping along the rough dirt road between Ferron and the trailhead. We stopped to look at some rock art in Horn Silver Gulch that I'd never noticed before, even though it was right alongside the road. Mark and I hiked 1/2 a mile down into North Salt Wash to see how much water was there, and to see if we could make out the trail that goes back up the other side. After that, we drove to Fuller Bottom to see if the San Rafael River was crossable--it wasn't. Mike and I tried the same thing in October 2004 and the water was too high to cross then, and apparently February isn't a good month either. Being able to cross the river would have shaved a lot of time off our drive home.

I wanted to place a new cache out on the eastern tip of the Little Wedge, but the damned road that's visible in the aerial photos is actually barricaded. I'm not sure how they can call it a "wilderness" area if it's criss-crossed by roads. I suppose that'll make a nice hike someday, but I'm not sure when I'll be back in that area and still have time for the hike. Although, hiking along a nice, driveable road, all because of a silly wooden barricade erected by the BLM, is pretty ridiculous.

Is it really just February? It felt like April today, hiking around in just a t-shirt (well, and pants too) and still working up a sweat. I'm sure the weather will turn bad at least one more time before spring really sets in, and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened right before the big hike in two weeks.

I've been dreading the work I needed to do on my truck, but yesterday I managed to fix the front-end in about two hours. I had to remove the u-bolts that connect the front axle to the leaf springs, then replace what my repair manual calls the "u-bolt spacer," but which is actually the lower mount for the shock absorber. I figured that, since the leaf springs are the only place where the axle is solidly connected to the truck frame, removing the u-bolts would be easy. Instead, when I started backing off the nuts, the leaf spring started pulling up and away from the axle. I'm not sure how that happened, because the entire weight of the truck is resting on the springs, which rest on the axle. I had to put a jack under the axle and lift it several inches to keep the springs from coming all the way off the axle. After that it was a simple matter of cleaning the mud off everything with a wire brush and putting it back together with the new part. The bottom part of the shock absorber must have been bent because I had to really fight it to get the bolt back through it and the mounting bracket. I've just got to borrow a torque wrench later today to finish tightening the u-bolts. My torque wrench only goes up to 75 ft-lbs, but I need 120 ft-lbs on those bolts.

Now I've just got to fix the fuel leak that's been happening for the past several months. I had previously thought it was a leaky rear-main engine seal, but since then I've figured out that fuel is leaking somewhere from the top-end and running down between the engine and transmission. Since diesel is so oily, I just assumed that it was engine oil, but after my last oil change I realized that whatever was leaking should have been much more black. Eh...maybe I'll get around to fixing it in another six months...

I don't think a week was long enough for me to recover from last weekend's hike, because this weekend didn't go so well either. Mark and I hiked from my house up onto Wood Hill and along Luke's Trail, but after about seven miles or so I just didn't feel like pushing on any further, so we had my sister drive out to pick us up. It didn't help that I had a headache. Yeah, that's a good excuse. ;) I'm still not too worried about the Sid's Mountain hike--there'll be enough people there that I'm sure I won't be the most out of shape person there. As long as we take it easy, everyone should be alright.

I wanted to drive down to the Sid's Mountain trailhead on Sunday but it started raining, so that plan was out. I may do it this weekend if the weather stays dry for a few days beforehand. If I make it down there, I'd like to do some exploring and place a geocache while I'm there. It would really be nice just knowing what the road looks like before we head down in a big convoy in a few weeks. I suppose if it's not raining the next couple of days, I ought get busy replacing that broken shock absorber mount on my truck.

Since I'm planning on a 13-mile hike next month, and I've never hiked that far before, I decided today to go for a long walk to see just what 13 miles feels like. I never got a chance to find out because after 8.6 miles I was beat. I started at my house and worked my way to the east end of 800 North, and from there I'd planned on walking along a dirt road until the odometer on my GPS read 6.5 miles, then I was going to turn around and head back home. By the time I got to 5.5 miles, I knew that I couldn't make it the whole way. I turned around and started for home, but after another 3 miles, my legs were ready to give out, so I called Traci to come rescue me in the car. Below is a screenshot of my GPS with the trip data. By the way, I grabbed that using Garmin's xImage, a pretty nifty little app that does some cool stuff if you've got a Garmin GPS.

I'm sure my problem was that I didn't stop to rest. I was walking for a little over three hours, and I kept a pretty brisk pace for the first two hours. Since I was walking on mostly level ground, I never got the blood pumping and never ran out of breath, so I didn't have any reason to stop and rest until my leg muscles started hurting near the end. I also should have been wearing my hiking boots, but I left the house wearing tennis shoes and by the time I realized that I'd forgotten to change shoes, I was too far away from home to bother going back. I ended up with a blister on my foot, and up until now I've never gotten a blister from hiking.

Tomorrow, if my legs aren't too stiff and sore, I'm going to take the kids for a walk of about two miles or so. Next weekend I'm going to try for 13 miles again, this time taking regular rest stops whether I need them or not.