This was a much-needed lazy weekend. I was surprised when the winch for my ATV arrived on Thursday, and I spent a little time that evening installing it. I only got the winch itself installed when some high winds and rain started up very quickly, and I had to hurry and put all my tools and the ATV back in the garage where it's too cluttered to do any work. I wasn't feeling up to working on it more Friday, but I spent most of Saturday wiring everything up. I wanted it to look factory-installed, and I was very particular about where and how I routed the wires. I used about eight feet of wire loom and almost two rolls of electrical tape. Space was very limited in the compartment behind the battery, but that was the only space at all to mount the winch relay, and mounting it and routing the wires was a tricky prospect. I didn't get finished until about dinner time, then I tried the winch out in the back yard. I attached the winch cable to a tree, locked up the front and rear brakes on the ATV, and reeled the cable in. It dragged the machine effortlessly with all four tires locked up. I still need to get some real-world experience with it, but I'm confident that it'll get me out of most situations that I get myself into. I just need to make sure I don't use it as an excuse to get into bad situations in the first place. :)

I took the boys out for a short hike today in one of the forks of Cordingly Canyon. I'd seen what looked like a hiking trail up the left fork from the end of the road in this canyon the last time I was there on my ATV, but there was still quite a bit of snow on the ground at that time and I only hiked about 100' before turning back and making a mental note to try it again later in the year. I finally got around to it today. The road was rougher today than I remember it from a couple of months ago, and one part in particular was definitely more washed out, probably due to the rain we had all last week. I found myself wishing that I'd ridden my ATV today instead of driving the truck. The hiking trail that I thought I'd seen only went a few hundred feet farther than I had hiked along it earlier, but we kept going up the canyon after the trail petered out. It was very slow-going, with a lot of downed trees and boulders to negotiate. There were also a lot of burned trees from a wildfire two years ago, and I think we all got a bit of charcoal on our skin and clothes. We hiked almost exactly 0.3 miles from the truck as the crow flies, but the round-trip distance came out to 0.9 miles due to all the zig-zagging around obstacles. I might try the hike again without the kids some other day. There's a mountain peak at the head of the canyon that I want to hike to, but it's not somewhere I would try bringing my children. I would also like to explore the right fork from the road's end--I'm hoping to find clues up there as to why the road was built in the first place (presumably prospecting for coal?), because there sure weren't any indications up the left fork.

I finally pulled the trigger and bought a Warn RT25 winch for my four-wheeler. I've been thinking about getting one ever since, oh, about the middle of January. ;) Warn is offering a $50 rebate on that winch through the end of the month, so I figured the timing isn't going to get any better. I chose the free shipping option, so it'll probably be nearly two weeks before the winch and mounting kit arrive. I plan on installing it myself--the instructions make it look pretty easy, though I'm not looking forward to cutting part of the front fascia off.

Despite the rainy weather today, I went for a drive in the car and did some geocaching. My primary motivation for getting out was to check out this canyon, but there also happened to be some caches along the way. I've been eying the road up that canyon for some time. I first noticed the road in Google Earth near where it ends, which is only three-quarters of a mile from the end of the road in the left fork of Cordingly Canyon, and only two miles north of Kenilworth. I had been thinking of hiking from Cordingly Canyon up to this road, but it would be a steep hike through some very thick trees. Instead, I'm now thinking about just riding my ATV along the road, even though most of it is on private property. CEU owns the property where the road begins just off US-191, the Blackhawk Coal Company owns most of the rest of the property that the road passes through, and there are some BLM parcels in between and at the very end. Today I hiked about a third of a mile up the road, past CEU's property line and well into the Blackhawk property, and I was pleased not to see any gates or signs. It was raining lightly when I started hiking, but it came down harder the longer I hiked, and Torrey and I ended up drenched. The canyon was beautiful in the rain. Low clouds obscured the tops of the mountains, and the wet sagebrush smelled great. If it stops raining long enough this weekend I might just drive the truck up there, because most of the road that I hiked along looked like a good 2WD road, with only one part at the beginning that requires 4WD. I'm not feeling up to an ATV ride all the way to the end of the road yet (especially not in the mud), but a drive in the truck would do me some good.

I rode my ATV hard yesterday for a little more than two hours and covered 25 miles, and the noise I was hearing on Saturday never returned. I hope that whatever it was doesn't come back at an inopportune moment when I'm riding out in the middle of nowhere.

Riding the past two afternoons was nice practice using the maps in my new GPS. I'm used to planning my route out at home, in advance of a ride, so I usually know exactly where I'm going and I can simply follow the waypoints I created at home while I'm on the ride. Now I can go somewhere and just start riding, and whenever I hit a fork in the road, I can consult the map and determine which one I want to take. It might be fun to start doing things a little more spontaneously.

After twice going through the trouble of loading my ATV into the truck and hauling it such a short distance to the staging area at the baseball fields on the north end of town, I decided I ought to check into whether Price City has an ATV ordinance that allows ATVs on city streets. There's an ATV route map on their website, but there's absolutely no other information (not even a map key) that explains what the blue lines mean. Contrast that to Helper City's site, which has a very easy to understand map and the full text of their ATV ordinance. I e-mailed Price City's police department asking about the map, and for a copy of any ordinances related to ATV use within the city limits, and this is the full response I got from the Chief: "You can use the access roads to get to the dirt and back home again if you are off-road legal. Must obey traffic laws when on the street." That fell very short of what I asked for, but I suppose I can take it to mean that it's legal for me to ride from my house (using the shortest route possible) to one of the designated ATV routes, and from there to any of the dirt roads that leave town.

Actually, I could ride from my house into the San Rafael Swell (assuming that I can legally pass through Wellington, which seems likely--I'll have to check on it), but it would be a 25-mile ride before I hit the Swell just south of Mounds. I would have to refuel in Cleveland or Huntington, or carry extra fuel along. I think it would be fun to try, but perhaps just once.

Before taking my ATV to the dealer today, I decided to try to pinpoint the noise so I could be very specific when I described the problem to them. I took the machine over to my mom's yard, where she's got a lot more room than in my yard, and rode it around a bit, pushed and pulled it with the engine off, bounced up and down on it, and I never could get it to make the noise that it was making during the ride on Saturday. I thought that perhaps it needed to be ridden for a while to get it warmed up before it would make the noise again, so I went for a ride up on Wood Hill. I don't really know what I was thinking (other than that I probably wasn't thinking at all), but there were some dark clouds rolling in when I left my house, and I didn't even consider that I might get cold and wet on this ride. I was planning on sticking to the gas well roads north of town so that if something catastrophic did happen to the ATV, I'd easily be able to pick it up with the truck. Once I topped Wood Hill, I saw lightning hit the ground about a mile away. Shortly after that, the wind really picked up and it started raining. I was wearing only shorts and a t-shirt, and my entire left side was soaked while the right side was dry. I pulled off the road and found a pair of pinyon pines large enough to shelter me and the ATV, and I hunkered down for 20 minutes until the worst of the rain cleared up. There was another wave of dark clouds behind the first, so instead of continuing on the ride, I just headed back to the truck and called it a day. The ATV never did make the noise again, and once on the way back I found a long steep hill to roll down with the engine off, but the only sound was that of the tires on gravel. I only got about 10 miles in, but I think I'll do it again tomorrow and try to ride closer to 50 miles, possibly with some more weight on the rear, and definitely more prepared for the weather. If I can't get the noise to recur after that, I guess I'll have to write it off as a fluke, though I'll be pretty wary of riding in remote areas in the near future.

A couple of weeks ago I started having problems with my GPS. It would turn itself off whenever it got jostled around too much, sometimes doing so whenever I would clip it into the belt clip or the windshield mount. It was getting to be a hassle, so I broke down and ordered a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx. It got here late last week, and on Saturday's ATV ride I got a chance to try it out for the first time. It wasn't terribly different from my GPS 60, except that it has a built-in basemap, barometric altimeter, and an electronic compass. The basemap only has major highways, which are useless to me where I tend to recreate. The altimeter and compass proved to be useless on my first ATV ride--I had to turn the compass off altogether because it kept pointing the wrong direction and I didn't want to stop my ATV to recalibrate it.

I had planned on "acquiring" some topo and street maps for the new GPS to make it worth the additional cost, but today I remembered some free maps that I'd seen mentioned before, though I'd dismissed them at the time because my GPS 60 didn't accept maps. I downloaded and installed the free maps for the 60CSx today, and I'm frankly shocked at their usefulness. Not only are they vector maps that look great at any scale, but they have great detail (1:24,000) and show a lot of roads and trails that don't show up on any other mapping products. Did I mention that they're free, and I didn't have to, *ahem*, borrow them from a friend? ;)

Now, I'm just waiting to scratch the screen up so I don't have to worry about it anymore. :D I first scratched the screen on my older GPS within a few months of owning it while hiking through Moonshine Wash and squeezing through a narrow part of the canyon. After that, keeping it in like-new condition wasn't a concern. Perhaps that's why I just had to replace it...

I had a pretty ambitious route planned out for riding four-wheelers yesterday in the northeastern San Rafael Swell, but we didn't even get through half of it. We parked at the staging area about four miles south-southwest of Woodside, and the plan was to cross over the Woodside Anticline, then cross the outer flank of the Swell (the same formation that, farther south, is much steeper and is called the San Rafael Reef) four times through different washes (Middle Fork of Summerville Wash, then the main Summerville Wash, Neversweat Wash, and finally Camel Wash).

Traci and I had stayed up way too late the night before, and we slept in the next morning and got to the staging area two hours later than we'd planned. We crossed over the Woodside Anticline easily, and riding down the western slope was a lot of fun. I'd done that trail before so I knew what to expect and we didn't have any problems. Here's some video that we shot on that section of trail:

Next came the Middle Fork of Summerville Wash, and we ran into a few minor problems. There are a lot of motorcycle trails in the area, though some of them are shared with ATVs. Twice we started up forks in the trail that were wide enough for our machines but shortly afterward they narrowed up or got too steep. We backtracked and found other trails that got us where we wanted to go. After making it through the difficult sections of the wash, we found a shady spot and ate lunch. It was pretty hot by then, and we were grateful for what little shade there was.

After lunch, we rode some pretty flat terrain a bit farther west, then turned north and rounded Entrada Point. I've heard this section of trail referred to as the Whoop-Dee-Doo Trail, and it's very aptly named. There are a lot of consecutive short up-and-down hills in the trail and it can get quite obnoxious at times, but the trail had its redeeming qualities as well. We stopped at the stone building at the north end of the trail where it meets up with the main fork of Summerville Wash. Here's more video from that trail:

From that stone building, we rode farther east down Summerville Wash to another stone building a mile away. I found this building the last time I rode in the area, and this time I placed a geocache nearby. From there, the plan was to follow Summerville Wash until we hit Neversweat Wash, and then follow it west through the uplift once more. However, shortly after leaving the stone building, I started hearing noises coming from my ATV. I stopped several times to try to pinpoint the source of the noise, but I couldn't definitively tell where it was coming from. I was pretty sure it was the rear driveshaft binding up and making a popping or tapping noise. I didn't want to risk breaking down in the middle of nowhere, so we decided to cut our trip short and take the easiest route back to the truck. Luckily most of that route was a graded road and we were able to stay in fourth of fifth gear most of the way, which not only made for a quick trip back, but also made the heat more bearable. I was worried that the faster speeds would cause the driveshaft to fail, but it was actually quieter the faster I went.

I've still got plenty of reasons to go back to that place. There are trails through two washes that I didn't get to see, plus we had to skip out on seeing some abandoned mines closer to Chimney Rock that I just found out about on Friday. The area is filled with interesting scenery and history, though with the heat of summer getting worse and my ATV in need of repairs, I'm not sure I'll get back there until this fall.

I am really beginning to get to know the Coal Wash area, and I'm really liking that place. I first rode Coal Wash on my ATV in December, when I did the lower part of the canyon and the north fork, then took the Devil's Racetrack trail. Again in January I rode the north fork, just before crashing my ATV in Eagle Canyon. While we were camped near Horn Silver Gulch a few weeks ago, Traci and I rode along the lower end of Coal Wash. I never really stopped to explore off the trail any of those times, but on Sunday and again yesterday, I did just that.

Last week I was chatting with Cortney, and he asked if we wanted to ride Coal Wash with his family to see the sights mentioned in Mark Williams' book, Utah's Scenic San Rafael. I managed to talk Traci into going on Mother's Day, so that morning we met up with the Hunt family at around 10:00 a.m. at the staging area near Horn Silver Gulch. We made many stops, including The Drips (a natural spring that flows out of an overhanging cliff), a large sand dune for the kids to play on, some rock art, natural arches, and an old copper mine. We rode as far as Slipper Arch, where we ate lunch and climbed around on the rocks under the arch. I hiked nearly all the way to the top of the arch, but turned back because we were short on time and still had a few stops left to make on the ride back. One of those stops was at the ZCMI mine, where a hundred years ago somebody had tried mining copper from the Navajo Sandstone. It doesn't look as though they had much luck, because there are only two short prospect shafts in the hillside. We went, with our dim flashlights, all the way to the end of both shafts, then Cort and I placed a geocache nearby. I had spotted another natural arch in a cliff on the ride up Coal Wash, so on the ride back down we stopped briefly so I could check it out. I never did see through the arch--I could only see sunlight on the cliff below it that seemed to indicate that there was an arch. It was yet another hike that wasn't on the itinerary and would have to wait until a different day.

That day came sooner than I expected, and yesterday I decided to work earlier in the day so I could spend the afternoon and evening riding Coal Wash again and doing some more exploring on foot. I got to the staging area at around 4:00 p.m. and rode straight through to the North Fork of Coal Wash without making any stops. About three miles into the north fork, I parked alongside the trail and hiked to what I was pretty sure would be a natural arch. After hiking away from the trail for a short distance, I was able to see the arch from a different angle and, sure enough, I could see the sky through a big hole in the top of the cliff. I placed a geocache nearby, then headed back to the trail and my next destination, Slipper Arch.

I was pretty sure from Sunday's hike that I could get on top of Slipper Arch, but I didn't summit the plateau that time and couldn't tell for certain. Yesterday, I hiked through the arch and then up the steep, rocky, and bouldery slope behind it and made it to the top of the plateau. From there, it was an easy and relatively level walk to the top of the arch, with only one small downclimb. I had planned on placing another geocache directly on top of the arch, but the downclimb could be tricky for some, and the dropoff on either side of the arch was huge, so I hike a few hundred feet southeast and found a good hiding spot for the cache.

It was about a quarter past 7:00 when I got back down to my ATV. I had poor cell reception there, so I sent Traci a text telling her that I was done with my hikes and would be back at the truck in one hour. I wasn't sure that I could actually make it that fast, but I sure tried. I don't think Torrey enjoyed the ride back, since she bounced around on the front of the ATV while I kept the throttle pinned for most of the ride. I made it to the truck in about 55 minutes, and the sun was already down by then.

With as many times as I've now been through Coal Wash, I still haven't been over Fix-It Pass or through the South Fork of Coal Wash. Someday (perhaps not until after summer) I'll do the ride through the North Fork of Coal Wash, over Fix-It Pass, across Cane Wash, around Locomotive Point, under I-70 to Swasey's Cabin, down into Eagle Canyon and under I-70 again, then up onto Secret Mesa and down into the South Fork of Coal Wash, and back to the truck. That would be an epic 55-mile ride, probably without much time for stopping to enjoy the scenery, unless I camped overnight along the trail and made it a two-day trip. I'm sure that during that trip, I'll see yet more places that will leave me wanting to come back to explore. A place like that could keep somebody busy for years just trying to get acquainted with it.

It's been a surprisingly good week. Usually after a long and exhausting weekend, I end up spending the following week being lazy. This week I've done some yard work, gone geocaching three times, and I've still got a day left in the weekend to do something else. On Tuesday I went hiking and geocaching with my family near Pinnacle Peak. There were two new geocaches there, and judging by the descriptions they sounded fun. We had to hike down a canyon to get to one cache, and the other was at the top of a cliff overlooking Pinnacle Peak, but it also had a very nice view of Price and most of Carbon County. I spent most of Thursday evening with just Michael and Bradley in Huntington finding a few caches there. We didn't even try looking for two others because they appeared to be on private property and I didn't want to drive past the "No Trespassing" signs that we encountered.

Today I took the boys out again to find some geocaches in the Consumers area. It was raining when I woke up and it continued throughout the morning, and I had all but given up on getting outdoors. To top it off, Michael was complaining about not feeling well and he had a fever. After lunch, however, the sky cleared up and things started drying out rather quickly, and Michael was feeling quite a bit better. I figured it would be worth the risk of getting stuck in the mud while finding a few caches, but we saw very little mud the entire afternoon. The first cache we found was on a plateau near the golf course. I had been there once before about six years ago, but I'd driven in from a different direction and came across a locked gate and had to hike part of the way. Today I drove in on a different road and was able to park right next to the geocache. The next three caches were up Consumers Road, and all were easy to find. We did get rained on during the drive to one area, but it stopped before we parked the truck and started the short hike to the cache, so we were lucky to avoid getting wet.

I'm really enjoying the longer days and warmer weather of late, but I'm not enjoying either the yard work or my allergies. It's been nice getting outside a lot more, but I'm already looking forward to fall.

The geocaching event last weekend was great, and it was a nice break from work and the everyday grind of life. We left town Wednesday afternoon as soon as the kids got out of school and arrived at our campsite just in time to set up camp and fix dinner. After we ate, I took the kids for a ride on my ATV and accidentally locked mine and Traci's keys in the truck before I left. It took some doing, but eventually I was able to unlock the truck using a piece of wire. It was lonely the first night since we were the only people there, but we kept ourselves entertained and had a good night. We didn't have a campfire because it was a bit windy in the evening, and we didn't want to use up too much firewood and not have enough for the rest of the weekend.

On Thursday, we knew many of our friends would be showing up that afternoon and evening, so we spent the morning driving the truck out to a remote geocache in Red Hole Draw. It was a long and bumpy road which the truck wasn't well-suited to. ATVs would have been a better way to reach the cache, but we only brought one with us, while Sam and Mark wouldn't be bringing our other ATV down until later that evening. It was worth the drive though--the cache was fairly easy to find, and the scenery along the way was excellent. We returned to camp, ate a late lunch, then left again for a short drive to check out a nearby road that followed the bottom of the Red Ledges about half a mile from camp. While we were hiking around on some rocks there, we saw the first of our group pulling into camp. We went back to meet them, and spent the rest of the evening at camp just hanging out. Sam and Mark arrived that evening too, and some others got there after we'd gone to bed. It was windy again all evening and into the night, so we skipped the campfire again and didn't spend the night socializing like we normally do.

Friday morning we set out with Sam and Mark and the Cowboyz to see the Eagle Canyon "crash site." Chris placed a cache along the road when we were on our way back from retrieving my wrecked ATV back in January. We went to find that cache and the one I placed after I wrecked. Traci and I were riding with the kids on our ATVs, Cowboyz were in their Teryx, and Sam & Mark and their family were in their truck. On the way back, we parted with Sam & Mark so we could ride Coal Wash back to camp, which is an ATV-only route. It was a fun ride, and although we stopped at The Drips (a spring dripping out of a cliff) for a while, we still managed to catch up to Sam & Mark when our trail connected back to the main road. When we got back to camp, there were more people there, and even more showed up that evening. Mark and I went for an ATV ride south of camp and found an interesting and very old steam boiler that I think was used to power a drilling rig. There was also the remains of a wooden building there, but what it was used for I couldn't tell. I placed a geocache there, then we rode back to camp where we spent the rest of the day. It was still a bit breezy at night, but we had a campfire and I stayed up pretty late talking to all the friends I hadn't seen in months.

Everybody spent Saturday doing different things. Some people hiked to Sid's Mountain, others went for an ATV ride, and Traci and I went geocaching with Sam and Mark. There were only a few caches in the are that I had yet to find, so we went looking for them. A pretty ugly storm was moving in from the west, and we were hurrying to find the caches before the ground got wet, 'cause the clay roads would be impassible and we'd get stranded if it rained hard enough while we were out there. We managed to find all of the geocaches that we wanted to before the rain hit, but the storm wasn't as bad as we'd expected after all. It was another nice evening around the campfire, and I stayed up even later than I had the night before.

A few people left camp early on Sunday, but we stuck around and went for a hike into North Salt Wash to see some petroglyphs. I passed within a couple hundred feet of the petroglyphs when I hiked to Sid's Mountain two years ago, but I was too exhausted to hike up the steep hill to see them at the time. I was amazed to see how high up the cliff face the rock art was. Some of it was 40 feet or more straight up a cliff, and I can only imagine that the Fremont Indians had built ladders in order to reach that high. Michael and Bradley went with me and the others on the hike while Traci waited in the truck at the trailhead. I was surprised that the boys did so well on the hike considering the 400-foot elevation change over a very short distance.

After the hike, everybody returned to camp and started packing up to go home. As is usually the case, we were the last ones to leave. We got home just in time to clean up, eat dinner, unload a few essentials from the trailer, then crash in our beds. It was a fun weekend for us all, and I'm excited to go back in October to do it again.