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.

My wife went up north for two days to scrapbook with her fam, so I asked the boys what they wanted to do today while she was gone. They unanimously agreed that they wanted to go to Hamburger Rocks in the northwestern Swell. I've been pretty much everywhere in that area, but I spent some time this morning looking in Google Earth and found a few roads that I hadn't been down before. We started off by going to Fuller Bottom, and I stopped at the river crossing to let the kids play near the river and skip some stones. I took a road leading west-northwest from near there that leads to the base of the Red Ledges near Cat Canyon. There was a steep hill with a series of ledges that I didn't want to try driving up, so I turned around about 0.4 miles short of where I'd intended to go.

From there I headed back up to Buckhorn Flat and then down the Hambrick road. We stopped at Hamburger Rocks and ate lunch, then Michael and Bradley played on the rocks for a long time. After that I drove a short distance northeast and took a road that I'd seen before and always wondered about. It heads southeast in a perfectly straight line for 1.3 miles across Sand Bench until it reaches an overlook at the top of the Red Ledges. I stopped at the overlook for a bit, and even found a steep talus slope that allowed us to scramble halfway down the Entrada Sandstone cliffs. When I got back on the road again there were some ominous clouds off to the west, and it was clearly raining in Castle Dale about 10 miles away. I stepped on the gas and hurriedly followed the road as it skirted the eastern rim of Sand Bench, and as I drove north I realized that the storm was also moving mostly north. It never moved very far over the Swell, so we got sprinkled on a few times but the roads stayed dry.

The Sand Bench rim road eventually spit me out onto the Green River Cutoff Road near Red Knoll, and in order to get to the next road that I wanted to check out I had to circle back around to the Hambrick road again. This time I turned off to the west of the Hambrick road and followed a couple of two-track roads in the Favorite Hills. One of the roads dead-ended at a fascinating area covered by exhumed river channels in the Morrison Formation rocks. Another fork of the road almost connected me with another road that follows Red Seep Wash that I'd driven on a few months ago, but I got stopped by a rough spot in the road a mere 800' from where I'd been before. I was bummed about that because I didn't want to drive back the way I'd just come. It was getting late by then, and I parked the truck and let the kids play and eat a snack before we started the drive home.

I had a good time, though it would have been better with some adult company. Both of the roads in the Favorite Hills and the road that follows the rim of Sand Bench were fun 4WD roads, and there were a lot of areas just off the roads that would be good to explore on foot. I wasn't up for any hiking today, but I'm filing these areas away in my head for future reference.

I took today off work so I could go hiking with Jason to check out some rock art near the Sid and Charlie rock formation in the San Rafael Swell. I'd been in that area three years ago, but I didn't realize there was rock art there until after I'd gotten back home from that trip. Today we saw several petroglyph panels and a couple of granaries, but we weren't able to find some pictograph panels that we knew were in the area. We also hiked to an alcove that was likely used as a Fremont dwelling, and in the general vicinity of that were a lot of chert arrowhead chippings. I brought home a couple of pockets full of jasper that I picked up on our return hike from the alcove, and I eventually hope to tumble and polish them into some nice stones. I'll have to go back to that area to try finding the pictographs again, and hopefully it won't take me another three years to make it out there.

My family and I went on another ATV ride yesterday on Cedar Mountain, just a few miles from where we rode last weekend. Here are some pictures and video. We parked near the corral in Bull Hollow and followed a trail that parallels the west rim of Bull Hollow. I expected it to be as challenging as last weekend's ride because it crosses the same kind of terrain, but it was actually pretty easy on an ATV. A full-sized 4WD could probably have handled most of the trail with little trouble. After going down one dead end trail, we followed another trail that ended at a nice overlook of Bull Hollow. We ate lunch there, then backtracked to the corral and began riding along the road in the bottom of Bull Hollow. We checked out the left and right forks, the riding was easy, and the scenery was nice. At the end of the right fork road there was basically a cow trail that looked as though a few people had ridden their ATVs over, and we followed it for only a tenth of a mile before it became way too difficult for us. We turned around and headed back to the truck, and when we arrived there at around 4:30 p.m. I wasn't ready to go home yet. It had been a decent day, but not as much fun as I'd hoped to have.

I knew there was a turnoff another 1.5 miles farther down the Cedar Mountain Road that leads to Cow Flats, but I'd never been there before and didn't know what to expect. The Cow Flats area turned out to be a big surprise. The scenery was gorgeous and the trail riding was a lot of fun. Due to time constraints we passed up a lot of side trails that looked fun, but we did ride past The Nipple to a cow pond near the head of Soap Wash. We didn't spend a lot of time in that area, but it was the highlight of the day. There's a place to camp right next to the turnoff to this area along the Cedar Mountain Road, so Traci and I decided to return in a couple of weeks to camp and spend the weekend riding our ATVs.

I'm in the market for a new camera. I didn't realize it's been so long, but I've had my Canon PowerShot A95 for four years now! A month ago while I was standing on a boulder and taking some pictures on Cedar Mountain, the boulder shifted and I dropped the camera while trying to keep my balance. Ever since that moment, each picture I've taken has had some spots on it that are especially noticeable when the upper half of the picture contains a lot of blue sky. I cleaned the outside of my lens with no effect, and I learned yesterday that taking the camera apart to clean the inside of the lens is nearly impossible. I've taken almost 15,000 pictures with my current camera and it's been great, but I'm ready for a new one anyway. It only takes 30 seconds of video at a time, and even then the exposure, focus, and zoom level are set at the beginning of the video, so changes in lighting and distances during the course of a video pose a problem. I'm considering either the Canon PowerShot S5 IS, SX110 IS, or TX1 models. Video has began playing an important role in what I need out of a camera, so the TX1 is looking good to my impulsive side, but the SX110 is appealing to my cheap-ass side. Whatever I decide to get, I think I'll take another week to think about it, and I'll be stuck with my A95 for at least this weekend.

Yesterday I got one of those stupid looking sunburns where my face was red from just below my eyes all the way down to my neck. Yeah, we went on an awesome ATV ride. :) Luckily the redness has faded today and I don't look quite as retarded.

I'd read about this trail a while back, and it's been on my to-do list for a few months. When we were pulling out of the driveway to head down there yesterday morning, I noticed that the parking brake light and the ABS light on the truck's instrument panel were lit up. I'd had this problem before a couple of years ago, and the problem then was a couple of broken springs inside the brake assembly. I didn't feel any drag on the brakes this time, and I just assumed that it was a problem similar to what happened last time, so we pressed on with our plans to ride ATVs in the Swell. When we got to the staging area near Buckhorn Reservoir and started unloading, I could smell burning brakes. The smell was coming from the right-rear, and when I felt that wheel it was extremely hot. I knew that I would probably have to do something about it before we drove home, but I didn't want to deal with it then so we decided to continue with our ride.

The trail started off easy and relatively level, wide enough for a full-sized vehicle, and it was a mix of gravel and conglomerate rock outcroppings. It soon got more twisty and rough, and it wasn't long before we started having the kids get off the ATVs while we negotiated the gnarly spots. There were some technically difficult obstacles that were tough to get over, but they were a lot of fun and I never felt like I was going to tip over. Eventually the trail crested above a big valley that's filled with huge conglomerate boulders, several of which are precariously perched atop thin supporting columns of dirt or shale. I'm fascinated with balanced rocks such as those, and we ended up spending about an hour there while we ate lunch and took photos.

Our next planned stop was at a point overlooking Buckhorn Flat to the southeast of where we ate lunch. The trail getting there was pretty boring compared to what we'd already ridden, though the view from the overlook wasn't bad. We didn't spend much time there, but instead returned to the valley with all the boulders, then took a different trail leading southwest. This trail was a lot of fun. It had obviously been created by a bulldozer, probably for uranium exploration purposes a long time ago. The trail was cut into a steep hillside, and there were a lot of old rockfalls across it. We got pretty far along the trail before we reached some really tough sections that we weren't sure we could get past. I took a hike up the trail for about a third of a mile to check things out, but decided it wasn't worth pressing on. Even if we could pass the obstacles directly in front of us, there would be no guarantee that we wouldn't run into worse obstacles. The trail would have eventually spit us out onto the main road on the northwest end of Buckhorn Flat, just a couple of miles from where the truck was parked. We had to turn back and follow the original trail back to the truck instead, but I wasn't complaining--that was a fun stretch of trail.

We got back to the truck late in the afternoon, and I'd had all day to think about what I was going to do about the brakes. I ended up taking the wheel off and, after some difficulty, finally got the drum off. Everything looked fine inside the brake assembly--no broken springs this time. I backed off the self-adjuster far enough that the brake shoes probably wouldn't even touch the drum with the brake pedal depressed, then put everything back together. When I started the truck, the ABS and parking brake lights stayed off, so whatever was wrong was apparently fixed (at least temporarily). We made it home without incident. I suspect that the brake piston got stuck open, so when the self-adjuster eventually gets the brakes back into adjustment, I may end up having the same problem again.

Both Traci and I agreed that the trail on Cedar Mountain was one of the best we'd been on, with the only exception being the Behind the Reef Trail. I would do it all over again soon if given the chance, though I'm sure if we plan another ride we'll want to see some new country. It was still fairly hot during our ride--between the four of us and the dog, we drank two gallons of water--but soon enough temperatures will be perfect for day trips like this.

Edit: I've added a Google Earth .KML file here, containing my GPS tracklog and some points of interest along the trail, including links to pictures for each point. I just linked directly to the pictures in my Picasa account to keep the .KML filesize down. I think I'll start doing this for a lot of my trips to interesting places, and perhaps even some of my most memorable trips from the past.

I've been working on the Castle Country Forum for the past week, and I think it's finally ready for public release. I've been wanting to do something like this for two years, but there was some sort of snafu with Solo hosting it. He registered the domain name for me in 2006, but never got it set up on the same server as udink.org. The domain name expired recently, so I grabbed it myself and found a host for it.

Check it out, register and post if you want, and let me know if you notice any problems. Hopefully it'll be something useful for those who have an interest in it.

Yesterday I had another amazingly good time in the Swell, but this time my wife and kids were with me, and my sister and her family came along too. We'd been planning this trip since late last week, but at first it seemed like the weather was going to keep us from going. I woke up at 2:30 Monday morning to the sound of thunder and rain. I slept sporadically the rest of the night, all the time worrying that we wouldn't be able to go on our trip. My alarm went off at 6:45 a.m., though I was already quite awake. I got out of bed and went outside to check out the storm that was still rolling through. It was raining very heavily, and for as far as I could see was a flat, gray blanket of clouds. The storm appeared to be pretty set in and there was no clear sky on the horizon.

My sister called me a little after 7:00 a.m. to see if the trip was still on, but I had to concede defeat. I was sure that there were spots in the road that we wouldn't be able to pass if it was raining this heavily all morning. So, with the trip canceled, I was left wondering what I was going to do with my day. I got on my computer, and for the hell of it, decided to check out the current weather in Green River. Perhaps there was a chance that this storm was isolated to the Price area. According to the National Weather Service it wasn't raining in Green River, so that was somewhat promising. After mulling it over for a little while longer, I decided that I'd regret at least not trying to go ahead with our plans, so I called my sister back and we talked about it for a minute, then decided it was on.

We left town an hour later than we'd originally planned, but at least we were going. We ran rain for most of the drive on the highway toward Woodside, but by the time we turned off the highway there was quite a bit of patchy blue sky visible over the Swell. The clouds were still black and raining over the Book Cliffs just a couple of miles away and to the east. As soon as we hit the dirt road, Mark and I both had to stop to lock in the hubs and shift into 4WD. We kept a slow and steady pace as we drove west and climbed up the eastern edge of the Woodside Anticline. The road was snotty and muddy, but the rain had stopped and, to my surprise, we hadn't gotten stuck yet. At one point where the road follows the bottom of a relatively deep canyon through the Cedar Mountain and Morrison formations, the leading edge of some red muddy water began flowing pretty heavily through the canyon bottom. It wasn't exactly a flash flood, but it was some pretty swift moving water. We had to cross it several times as we continued the drive.

We made our first stop at a place I'd seen about a month ago when I drove through there. It looked like a good place to go camping, and I wanted to make sure I could get my camp trailer there if I ever decided to try that spot out. It was a nice spot, and we stayed there for a bit while the kids played around on the enormous conglomerate boulders. Mark had taken a short walk and found a big pile of cut firewood, so I decided to back my truck up to it and load it all into the bed. It saved me from having to go cut wood before our next camping trip. :D We pressed on for several more miles, and the road gradually dried out as we moved west. The rain must have only hit the outer edge of the Swell because the interior was barely wet. After a fun 4WD drive through Summerville Wash, we arrived at our first major destination, the ruins of an old stone cabin. There was a geocache nearby that was placed there in April, but nobody had yet found it. It was a very interesting place, and I wish I knew more of the history behind it. After the cabin, we backtracked a bit and made our next stop at Entrada Point. We ate lunch there, then I placed a new geocache. Then we headed off to Summerville Point and placed another geocache. The road to Summerville Point was pretty gnarly, and we had to drive right through somebody's camp to get there. A family on dirt bikes looked like they were just getting ready to leave their camp trailer as we began approaching them, and they must not have expected anybody to drive up the road next to their camp because they just stared at us with bewildered looks.

We made another stop on a road that runs parallel to an uplifted ridge of Morrison Formation, and we looked for dinosaur bones for about an hour. Nobody had any luck finding fossilized bones, but Traci and I loaded up quite a few interesting rocks to use for landscaping our yard. Our last stop for the day was at the bottom of a hill of Summerville Formation to look for jasper. We didn't spend as much time there as I'd have liked, but we did take home several pocketfuls of jasper, mostly red with some yellow mixed in. Traci and I eventually hope to buy a rock tumbler to polish our rocks, and this was our first purposeful collection of polishable stones.

We got home well after our normal dinner time, but we had brought enough junk food to keep the kids from complaining during the drive home. We barely had time to hurriedly feed the kids and bathe them before their normal bed time, since it was a school night. Normally even after long weekends it doesn't seem like it's been long enough when it's time to go back to work, but this weekend was very fulfilling and it actually felt longer than it was. It'll be hard to top this one.