I had Thursday and Friday off work last week, and I originally figured I'd pack a lot of fun into the long weekend, but I ended up doing very little. My ATV is at the Honda dealer getting a leaking front differential seal replaced, so on Thursday I took Traci's machine up near the end of Airport Road and puttered around a couple of canyons in that area. I had to park and unload on the side of the pavement near the cattle guard just before the mine, then I rode along the pavement for a short distance to reach the road I wanted to ride on. The first canyon I rode up was unnamed, and I vaguely recall driving part of the way up it when I was a teenager, then hiking the rest of the distance to the road's end. I don't remember much about it from back then, but last week I checked out an old buried mine and some ancient rusting equipment. The canyon was short and I soon headed to the next canyon east, called Straight Canyon. This one was longer and more interesting, with several mining prospects along the way. One of the prospects had an old cabin next to it, signifying that somebody lived there while they labored to dig away the hillside to reach a coal seam. I found it funny because back then it must have been worth building a cabin because the prospecting work took a long time, but by today's standards the same amount of work could be performed in a couple of hours by heavy machinery. It must have been a hard life. Anyhow, the road ended in a large stand of ponderosa pines, and it was a pretty place. It had been cold and windy all morning while I was riding, but there in the pines it was calmer and relaxing.

I don't really remember what I did with the rest of my weekend. I spent it at home, except for some much needed grocery shopping on Friday. The whole family stayed in Saturday night and watched a movie, and I also started reading a new book, which is something I haven't had the time for (or haven't made the time for) in quite a while. It was a good weekend, but it was a different pace than I'm used to.

Yesterday was a perfect day for an ATV ride. It's a short drive through Wellington to Farnham Dome (or the Farnham Anticline) and I've been wanting to ride there for a couple of weeks, so that's where we decided to go. We'd ridden in that area once before right after we bought the ATVs, but we didn't really get to explore it well. Our ride was pretty short, only 6.5 miles, but we spent almost four hours there. There are a lot of old gas wells in the area (I believe they're either natural gas or carbon dioxide, or both), and we stopped at nearly every one that we saw. After seeing a few of them, I was able to figure out how they used to work. There used to be brick furnaces (none of which remain standing) that heated water in a boiler, and the steam was used to power the well pumps, which were supported by enormous wooden timber frames. Only one of the timber frames remained, so all the rest must have been hauled off.

The first half of the ride went slowly because of all the stops we made. After we reached the south end of the anticline, we stopped to eat a quick snack. Then we hit another trail that looped around to the west and then back north toward where the truck was parked. Before heading off on this trail, I mounted Traci's camera to a bracket I'd made on my ATV so that I could capture video of us riding. The trail roughly follows a wash, sometimes crossing the wash and other times following the bottom of it. It was a really fun ride, and we did it pretty quickly. The ride south had taken about three hours, and the ride back north took about 20 minutes. Here's a video of the ride:

The next time I shoot video of a ride, I'll try to get a combination of ATV-mounted shots, helmet-mounted shots (I have yet to try the helmet cam out), and handheld shots. I may even try to make another mounting bracket somewhere else on the ATV where I can get a better view of the trail ahead of me. I hope that Traci's camera can stand up to the abuse. I hit a few bushes with it yesterday, and my tires flung some mud on it, but it's a pretty inexpensive camera so it won't be too painful to replace, if it comes to that.

Today turned out to be strike two in my search for the supposed airplane wreckage near Kenilworth. The hike up the mountain took me a little more than an hour, but when I reached the top all I found was some canvas fabric that had apparently been used as a target for an aerial survey. It was still a worthwhile hike, if for nothing else than for the exercise. At this rate, I'll eventually have summited all of the peaks around Kenilworth.

Five months ago I though I'd found a plane wreck while looking over some aerial photography of the area surrounding Kenilworth, Utah. I made the hike up the steep and rugged mountainside only to find out that the "airplane" was just a boulder. This week, I once again found what I think may be the crashed airplane, visible in the center of this Google Maps image. Here's a comparison of the aerial imagery of the two sites in question:

Airplane Rock

Airplane?

The second one looks much more promising to me, especially considering the "whiteness" of the object pictured. There are no boulders visible anywhere nearby that are that bright, unlike the first location. I've got tomorrow off work, so I think I'll drive up there sometime and hike up the mountain. It should be a short hike, only 1/4-mile from the road, but there's 700' of elevation gain and I'm sure that will translate into a lot of zig-zagging. Hopefully there are no bears up there.

All of this past week I had been trying to talk Traci into going for an ATV ride on Saturday, and she was trying to talk me into going to Provo for a geocaching event and some shopping. It wasn't until Friday night that one of us gave in, and we ended up going to Provo the following day. We went straight to the event at a park in Provo first. Several of our friends were there, and we spent some time just hanging out and looking for a geocache. After the event we drove to Orem and hit Sconecutter for some lunch. We had our dog with us, and instead of leaving her in the car while we ate in the restaurant, we drove around until we found a park where we could eat lunch. After lunch we did some shopping, most notably for new coats, ski pants, and gloves so that we can ATV this winter without freezing to death. We did some more geocaching on the way home and found several fun caches, including a couple at the Tucker rest area that we found in the dark. It was a long and tiring day, and we all went to bed early after getting home.

I got a slow start this morning. Traci went to church, and though I was feeling lazy, I was still itching to go for an ATV ride. Finally, a little before noon, I decided to just do it and I got all the kids' and my gear ready and loaded my ATV into the truck. We left town around 12:30 and got to my intended parking spot about 10 miles northeast of Wellington at around 1:00. I parked just off the road to the Dugout mine and then piled myself, the two boys, and the dog onto the ATV and headed north toward the Book Cliffs. I'd noticed in Google Earth that there were a couple of canyons up there with old mining/prospecting tracks leading up into them, and it looked like a great place to ride and possibly do some hiking where the roads ended. The first part of the route was along a rough jeep trail that would have been doable (but annoying) in a 4WD, but it wasn't bad on an ATV. It wasn't exciting, but it was better than being at home. After about six miles we'd reached the base of the Book Cliffs, and I started seeing piles of very fresh bear crap along the road. At first I just saw a small pile, but we pressed on up the road and eventually came to a few more, each just a few hundred feet from the last. Either there are a lot of bears up there, or just one bear with a profuse bowel problem. No matter the case, I got really nervous and decided to puss out and turn around. Perhaps if I'd had another adult along I wouldn't have been so skittish, but being with two young kids and a dog who's scared of cats wasn't a reassuring feeling. After we'd turned around and ridden a couple of miles, we eventually stopped to eat our lunch and just relax for a bit. For the rest of the ride back to the truck, I let the boys take turns steering the ATV and working the throttle. They're both too young to reach the shift lever, but at least I can get them started learning how to drive. Our ride only lasted a couple of hours, and it wasn't the most fun place I'd ever been, but it was worth going just to get out.