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Traci and I planted our garden on Saturday. We’ve got mostly tomatoes (a few varieties), some squash, strawberries, and lettuce. I got some other yard work done that day, and this evening I enjoyed the coolness of an early summer storm (that hasn’t produced any rain) and finished weeding the flower beds in the front yard. Sunday was Mother’s Day and I had a nice surprise for Traci. I bought her an air mattress so she could go camping more comfortably with the boys and me, but I removed the mattress from the box and replaced it with a Kindle Fire. When she pulled the mattress box from the gift bag on Sunday morning she seemed to like it, but I told her I slipped the card into the box. She opened the box and cried when she realized what was inside. I suppose that means she liked it.

I made breakfast for everybody–bacon, eggs, and toast–then brought my mom’s gift to her and visited for a while. That evening after a dinner of ribs and corn on the cob, we went for an ATV ride–at Traci’s request, even!–with the Gravett family. They have a Polaris Ranger Crew that holds their entire family, and Traci and I followed on our two ATVs, each with a kid on the back. We rode up toward Kenilworth then took the Diff Hanger trail which follows a bouldery wash, and is coincidentally where my dad’s ashes are scattered. Doing the trail on ATVs presented a few challenges but made some parts easier than in a full-sized vehicle. Traci and I took bypass routes in two spots but Chris took his Ranger through the entire trail, having to winch up one tough spot. It was a fun ride, and we finished up just after the sun went down. I feel lucky to have a wife whose idea of a fun Mother’s Day is to do a difficult rock-crawling ATV ride.

Yesterday was mine and Traci’s 14th wedding anniversary. Fourteen years doesn’t seem like too long a time unless I start to think of it as almost fifteen years. We didn’t exchange gifts–we rarely do. We spent our anniversary at home with the kids and fixed a hugely obscene dinner of ribeye steak, shrimp, lobster tail, crab legs, and corn on the cob, which we ate while watching Deadliest Catch. It was typical of our anniversaries, but I think next year we’ll do something special.

On April 17th I drove down early for the semi-annual San Rafael geocaching event. I got off work that day at 1:00PM and got a few last-minute things ready just as Dave showed up so we could convoy to our campsite. I’d been having problems with the engine in the truck momentarily cutting out in the weeks before the event, but it always went away when the engine warmed up. During the drive south it cut out often and jerked violently each time due to the added drag from the camp trailer, but other than that it was an uneventful drive. We arrived at the planned campsite near the Temple Mountain Road/Goblin Valley Road junction, but there were three trailers already set up there. We parked our vehicles and walked over to the camp and spoke with the occupants for a while. They were “full-timers” from out of state who had been camped there for a week and said they’d be camped there for another week or more. I asked them if they’d send any geocacher traffic over the hill, then Dave and I drove west a short distance on the Temple Mountain Road to the large BLM campground, or, as it’s affectionately known, the “people pasture.” After we each set up camp, we went for an ATV ride to Taylor Flat to find a geocache whose coordinates were more than 20 miles off due to an error by the cache hider. I’d figured out roughly the correct coordinates and Dave and I found the cache pretty easily. We then returned to camp for dinner and turned in a bit early.

Dave drove in to Green River on Wednesday to find some oil because his ATV needed an oil change. I went for a hike up Wild Horse Creek to find some pictographs that I’d seen photos of online. I was planning a group hike up Wild Horse Creek on Saturday, but I wanted to find the rock art before the hike so I wasn’t fumbling around for it with a large group. The coordinates I’d estimated from looking at photos turned out to be dead-on. I had walked right past the rock art alcove five years ago without knowing it was there. The pictographs there were absolutely amazing. There were some large figures with interesting shapes and small figures with very fine details. I spent about half an hour there enjoying the rock art, then rode my ATV back to camp. Dave still hadn’t returned, so I hiked up and back down a small canyon near camp.

Dave was at camp when I returned from my short hike and I helped him a little bit with his oil change. We went for a ride to check out some pictographs I’d discovered a year and a half ago. Lighting conditions weren’t ideal for photographing the pictographs, and Dave and I split up to do a little hiking around the sandstone hills. Not long after we split up, I heard the sound of a snake rattling behind me. I swore under my breath. I was no more than a couple hundred feet from the place where I’d seen a rattlesnake a year and a half before, and Torrey was running loose this time as well. I called Torrey over to me and put her leash on, then walked about 20 feet to where I’d heard the snake. It was starting to crawl under a bush, and I got a single out-of-focus photo of it before it disappeared into the brush.

Late that afternoon I rode my ATV to Iron Wash and hiked up the canyon to look for some pictographs that I’d heard of from a couple of different people. It had become overcast and I could hear the wind roaring over the top of the canyon, but I was fairly well protected from it in the canyon’s bottom. I scrambled up to an alcove to check it out, but found nothing interesting there. A large group of dirt bikes passed by going down the canyon. I expected to see them again after they reached the fence at the WSA boundary because when I parked my ATV there I didn’t see a way around the fence. I found the pictographs just about where I thought they would be and spent only a few minutes there taking photos. I returned back down the canyon but never saw the motorcyclists, so when I got to the fence I looked for their tracks. Curiously enough, the tire tracks went right through the fence in the center of the drainage. I lifted the fence and realized that, even though it was freestanding, it could be lifted up about five feet–plenty to allow an ATV or motorcycle to pass under. On the ride back to camp I got hammered by cold, stinging, wind-blown rain. The short-lived storm was nearly gone when I got back to camp, though, and I was treated to a more sunny evening and a nice rainbow to the east. I returned to the pictographs where I’d seen the rattlesnake and got some photos with better lighting, then retired back to camp for the night.

Thursday was an awesome day. I wanted to ride my ATV and cross over to the east side of Highway 24 to look for some rock art near Crow’s Nest Spring and Cottonwood Wash. Getting there wasn’t easy. The official travel map shows a legal route through Temple Wash starting at a gravel pit near the Temple Mountain/Goblin Valley junction and going east to UT-24. From there there’s a short jog along the highway to a dirt road on the east side that would eventually lead us along the rim of Cottonwood Wash and to Crow’s Nest Spring. As Dave and I rode east through Temple Wash we came upon a fence at some private property. Frustrated by the BLM’s map issues, we rode cross-country to reach the paved Temple Mountain Road and continued east to Highway 24. After a short ride south, we turned east and finally made it to the other side of the highway. Since we’d had to alter our route, it took a long, roundabout route to the south, then east, north, and finally back to the west to reach Cottonwood Wash. The terrain along the way was mostly flat and uninteresting, but we did stop at Rattlesnake Butte and found some names carved into the sandstone from the early 1900s.

We reached Cottonwood Wash but since I didn’t know where to even start looking for the rumored rock art, we just checked out the spring and an old corral, then moved along to Crow’s Nest Spring. We parked the ATVs below the spring near the lone Cottonwood tree and hiked up to look into the three small canyons that merge just above the spring. I assumed the rock art would be in one of those three canyons because I couldn’t see any after a cursory look near the spring. We hiked up the more easily accessed left fork first. It was shallow and narrow and quite interesting, but there was no rock art. We reached the top of the canyon where Dave turned around and returned to the spring while I crossed over into the middle fork. I had to walk the rim up-canyon for a while before I found a spot to drop into the canyon, then I followed it back to the spring. The middle fork was longer and more interesting than the left, and a light rain fell as I walked along the easy bottom. I got back to the confluence of the three canyons and found Dave at the top of a slope looking at a cliff–he’d found the rock art! There were several small petroglyph snakes that appeared to be emerging from natural holes in the cliff, one large snake petroglyph, a few interesting pinkish-orange pictograph figures, and a rake figure that was lightly scratched into the rock. After a pretty thorough check of the cliffs to make sure I wasn’t missing any rock art, we took a much shorter and direct (though still not completely legal) route back to camp. We returned to find a few people had joined us at camp, and spent a nice evening around the fire with some old and new friends.

On Friday morning I went for a short two-mile hike just north of our camp. I was just wandering around hoping to find some rock art or anything else of interest. There were chert flakes littering the ground all along the sandy bottoms of the cliffs in the area, so I spent much of the time with my eyes on the ground. I saw one flint flake half-buried in the sand and flicked it with my finger, and it turned out to be a nice arrowhead! I normally like to take an in-situ photo of arrowheads before I pick them up, but I had to move this one to even realize what it was. What’s surprising is that there were plenty of footprints in the wash–many people had walked right past it without realizing it was there. I turned around when I reached an impassible canyon just south of Temple Wash, but it looked interesting enough that I made a mental note to return another day and hike up the canyon from the east. I got back to camp and found Dave and his wife getting ready for an ATV ride. They invited me along, and Dave’s wife borrowed Traci’s ATV and we rode up North Temple Wash. We went as far as the old cabin on the east side of Temple Mountain, then returned to camp the same way we’d come in. On the way I was very surprised to spot some pictographs in North Temple. I’d been past that spot a few times without noticing it. We got back to camp and found even more people there. Traci showed up with the kids that afternoon, and slowly the rest of the group trickled in that night until quite late. I spun some steel wool on the Temple Mountain Road after sunset, had some drinks, and hung out around the fire until well into the morning.

It took everyone a while to get going the next morning, but several of us set up a vehicle shuttle for the hike up Wild Horse Creek, then a large group of more than 20 of us started up the canyon. There were all different ages and hiking abilities represented in the group, so naturally we were strung out all along the canyon. I stayed somewhere around the middle most of the time, trying to keep an eye on my kids ahead of me while making sure nobody fell too far behind. There were three somewhat technical sections along the way that were easily bypassed, but several people chose the challenge of climbing up them. The first two weren’t too difficult–I was able to lift Torrey up each of them and then haul myself up. The third was the most difficult. Traci took Torrey around, and I think Chris and I were the only ones to climb it ourselves, though Chris helped a few of the kids up it. Torrey was also happy to find a couple of water-filled potholes in the canyon. We reached the top of the canyon after about three and a half hours. After making sure everybody was accounted for, we drove back to camp.

That afternoon Chris found a wheel missing from his Element with a note attached to one of the lugnuts. Jeremy had taken the wheel and hidden it, leaving GPS coordinates in its place. Chris and I rode ATVs over to the coordinates and found nothing but some reflective tacks in a wooden fencepost. Well played, Jeremy. We had to return at night with flashlights to follow a series of reflectors until we found more coordinates written on a fencepost, and those led us to the tire. We retired around the campfire, but most everyone turned in relatively early (meaning, after midnight).

Most people had a longer drive home and pulled out of camp on Sunday morning. Chris and I went for a quick ATV ride toward Goblin Valley to check out Molly’s Castle. I’d never been there and wanted to see what it was like, but it turns out I wasn’t missing much. I was hoping to see a way to scramble to the top of the formation, but the cliffs looked pretty vertical around the top. We hiked around the base of the main formation for a while, and Torrey managed to catch a lizard. We rode back to camp and Chris headed home while Traci and I got the trailer packed up. She followed me home just in case I had any major problems with the truck, though besides the occasional sputtering it never completely died on me.

Yep–another trip to the San Rafael Reef, and my fifth since Christmas. In typical fashion, after my last trip there I learned of some rock art in the same area that I wasn’t aware of at the time. A very knowledgeable friend read my last blog post and generously offered up some waypoints to visit the next time I’m in the area. With Traci being out of town this weekend I didn’t want to spend it lounging around the house, so Michael and Bradley and I set out on an overnighter to visit some of this rock art. The low temperature was forecast to be 46° on Friday night, so even though the kids don’t have good cold-weather sleeping gear, I was sure they’d be comfortable at night. On the way to camp at Garvin’s Chimney at the mouth of Old Woman Wash, we stopped at two pictograph panels. I’d been close to both of them on several occasions and never knew it. The first one had some historic names painted and scratched into the canyon wall. The pictographs consisted of several hand prints and figures and many, many lines. The interesting thing about the hand prints is that they were made by child-sized hands–very cool! The second set of pictographs were in a small alcove that was partially buried in sand, hence the name Buried Site. Some of the figures had been buried further by sand since the photos I’d seen of the panel were taken, and I didn’t try digging any of it away.

Those were the only rock art sites I planned to visit that evening, so we moved on to our planned camp spot. It was fairly windy, so much so that I didn’t want to try setting up the tent until it calmed down. After lazily sitting in the bed of the truck while the kids ate a snack, I realized it was foolish to just sit there waiting for the wind to subside when there was some beautiful country nearby begging to be explored! We started up Old Woman Wash but quickly took a side canyon and started scrambling up the slickrock. I started seeing a lot of lithic flakes, and Bradley began collecting them as we hiked. We passed a pothole full of water that had two thick iron bars embedded into the sandstone just above it. I’m not sure what the iron bars were put there for, but I assume it had something to do with the old mining activity farther up the main canyon. Later we also saw a couple of 4-inch pipes embedded in the sandstone. One was sticking up out of a pothole full of water, and both had iron caps screwed on tightly so I couldn’t tell how deep they went. We hiked until after the sun went down, about a mile and a half overall, and when we returned to camp the breeze was calm enough to start a camp fire and pitch the tent. The fire burned down to coals while we set up camp, then we threw some ham, turkey, and cheese wraps, wrapped in foil, into the fire for our dinner. It was 8:30 by the time we ate, and we stayed up another hour and a half before turning in for the night.

As we settled into our sleeping bags we heard coyotes yipping in the distance. Michael and Bradley didn’t seem concerned by the sounds, which I was glad for. It’s such a common occurrence and I actually enjoy the sounds of coyotes while camping, but I didn’t want the kids to be afraid during the night. It got a bit colder than the forecast, down to 38&deg outside and only 42° inside the tent. With two sleeping bags each the boys stayed plenty warm, and I was comfortable in my single bag this time–all my previous trips this year I needed both my sleeping bags to keep warm. Having gone to bed early, I was awake well before sunrise. I kept watch on the light hitting the east side of the tent, and when it was sufficiently bright I got up and went outside for a few photos as the sun broke the horizon. The boys were awake shortly after me, and we had a breakfast of oatmeal and pop tarts, with hot chocolate for them and coffee for me. We took down camp and packed everything into the truck, filled up our hydration packs, and drove up the road to our first canyon hike of the day.

There were again many lithic flakes in the canyon. We stuck to and scanned the north side of the canyon just in case there was rock art which I wasn’t aware of, but I didn’t see anything before coming to the first set of petroglyphs. The rock art here was different in style than most in the area, though both sites in this canyon were similar. On the way to the second set of coordinates, about 600′ past the first, I first heard then smelled (but never saw) a skunk at a spot where some trees would have forced us through a choke point between some trees and a few small alcoves. We gave that area a wide berth and came back to the canyon wall at the second set of petroglyphs. A rock rolled out from under Michael’s foot while he scrambled up the steep canyon wall and he hurt his knee, so while he sat in the shade and waited for the pain to subside, Bradley and I checked out the rest of the cliff face. Finding nothing, we gathered Michael on our way back to the truck.

It wasn’t a long drive to the next canyon I wanted to hike. The canyon itself was very interesting, with dozens of water-filled potholes that Torrey enjoyed thoroughly. The few petroglyphs weren’t terribly interesting. The kids wanted to stay near the rock art and play in the pools while I hiked another third of a mile up the canyon just to check it out. I’m glad we didn’t simply turn around at the rock art because I found an arrowhead lying in the bottom of the wash. Even more interesting is that there was one set of very recent (probably less than a week old) footprints heading down the canyon, and their maker stepped right over the arrowhead apparently without seeing it.

We’d seen all the rock art that I knew of in the immediate vicinity. We ate lunch at the truck then got back on Highway 24 for a few miles before exiting on another dirt road to check out one last pictograph panel. I’d ambitiously wanted to see this panel plus a few more in Straight Wash, but by this point I knew we didn’t have time for the latter. On the way in, and after a couple of rough and sandy stretches of road, there was a car parked just before a really rough spot. It was an older Corolla (I think) with Colorado plates, and I admired the owner(s) for making it that far and presumably hiking farther toward the San Rafael Reef. I parked the truck near the drainage that contained the Rey Lloyd Hatt pictograph site, and just before we started hiking, an attractive woman in a white Explorer pulled up and asked if there was any good hiking in the area. I told her about a nearby canyoneering route we were planning on checking out after the rock art, but for some reason I didn’t think to tell her about Straight Wash and Eardley Canyon which were also not too far away. She thanked me and drove off, then the kids and I hiked down the wash. It was a short jaunt to the pictograph site. The rock art was amazing! There were two beautiful figures side-by-side on one side of the canyon, and many other figures and lines on the other side.

We moved along to our final stop, a hike up Zero G Canyon. Just as we were starting to hike, the woman in the Explorer came back down the road heading toward the highway. I guess she didn’t find any worthwhile hiking. We waved at each other, then the boys and I continued up Zero G. The canyon was first rocky, then sandy, then finally just bare slickrock. After three quarters of a mile of hiking we reached the end of the canyon at a huge pool, pouroff, and tree. There’s an interesting canyoneering route above the pouroff that I’m hoping to do this year, but we couldn’t visit it this time because it required either a longer hike or a drive on a closed road, neither of which I wanted to do right then. We spent some time admiring the box canyon and pool of spring water. It was a beautiful spot to relax after a warm spring day of hiking. We hiked back to the truck and played around a bit, hopping over pools of water and catching lizards. I loaded the kids up with snacks and we started the drive home. Just before reaching the car parked near the rough spot in the road I encountered a younger couple walking along the road. They were coming back from Straight Wash, and I inquired about the water situation there because of the mild and dry winter, and they said it was plenty wet still. That gave me hope that it could be a nice destination for the next time the kids want to go camping and hiking.

My Grandpa O’Neel passed away on Friday. He was 90 years old, and for the last several years he had been slowly deteriorating. A couple of weeks ago he fell down and cracked some ribs, and I guess that was the beginning of the end. He went into the hospital last week because he was no longer able to support his own weight. I only visited him once while he was still conscious in the hospital. A nurse came to draw blood while I was there, and as she was leaving with a vial of blood he called after her, “You have fun with that now.” He always had a good, though sometimes dry, sense of humor. On Tuesday he began to have problems breathing. The nurses in the ICU said he probably wouldn’t make it through the night, and they were keeping him medicated in an effort to keep him comfortable. I visited him late that night with my mom, aunt, and sister. He wasn’t conscious, and it was difficult watching him struggle to breathe. I don’t think he ever fully regained consciousness after that night, which I suppose is a good thing. His father, my great-grandfather, died on Christmas Eve a long time ago, and my mom was half-expecting Grandpa to last until the 24th, but he died on December 23rd, only a few hours after being moved from the hospital to a nursing home. My family was never very openly emotional, and I think his passing was met with relief that he was no longer simply enduring the end of life. I wasn’t super close to Grandpa, but I always felt a connection with him–I notice a lot of traits in myself that came from him and that side of the family. I’ll miss him.

I performed the marriage ceremony for my sister Samantha and her fiancee Mark on Friday. I’ve long considered Mark to be a part of the family, ’cause he and Sam have been together for so long. Several months ago when Sam asked me to perform the ceremony, I was a bit freaked out and wasn’t sure if I could do it. After some thought, though, I called her back later that day and told her I couldn’t not do it. When Chris was in town for the 4th of July, we both got ordained in the Universal Life Church. It took until this month for her divorce from her ex to be finalized, and she and Mark wanted to get married as soon as possible. I kept thinking that as the day got closer, then as the hours and minutes counted down, I’d start getting nervous, but the jitters never happened. I performed the ceremony, and the wedding (a small gathering of family and close friends) was very nice. I filed the marriage license with the county clerk today, and now it’s official. Congratulations to Samantha and Mark!

After the previous weekend’s trip to Bowknot Bend, this past weekend I needed to take it easy. Traci and I spent a few hours on Saturday cleaning junk out of the garage. We filled the truck bed to nearly overflowing and took the load to the landfill. That evening, I took the family to the picnic area at Cedar Mountain. We ate a simple dinner of assorted crackers, meat, cheese, sardines, and fruit. As the sun set, the full moon was rising almost 180-degrees on the opposite horizon. Here’s a quick video panorama moving from the moon to the sun, showing the nice view south into the San Rafael Swell from Cedar Mountain:

The kids and I did a little scrambling on and between the boulders below the picnic area as darkness fell. Once it was fully dark, we drove down the road a short distance to the overlook, which has the same basic view as from the picnic area, but there was a geocache there that I wanted to find. Traci and the kids waited in the truck while I went to find the cache, which was only about a hundred feet from the parking area. I hadn’t planned on finding it in the dark, and all I had was the backlight from my GPS screen to aid in finding the cache. The GPS zeroed out at the top of a ledge, and I stepped down off the ledge and found the cache hidden under a fallen tree trunk. I kept smelling something that smelled like paint, but I didn’t figure out what it was until I felt the ants crawling all over me. I must have been standing right in an ant pile, and for some reason they smelled strongly like paint. I hurriedly threw the cache back in its hiding spot and jogged over to the truck, where I stood in the light of the headlights and brushed and picked the ants off me. I’m pretty sure I got them all off, but I still would occasionally feel like they were on me. I took a few long exposure photos from the overlook before we left, then headed home after a relaxing evening with the fam.

I had a great time at the Potter’s Ponds geocaching campout this year, despite (or perhaps because of) the low turnout. It was a relaxing trip, and for once I didn’t feel like I needed time to recover from my vacation before returning to work. I had Friday off work, and my family and I left Price late Friday morning and arrived at campsite #5 at Potter’s Ponds early in the afternoon. As soon as we got camp set up, I hopped on my ATV and rode up to Skyline Drive because I’d heard it was closed by a landslide just south of where the Potter’s Canyon road tops out. Sure enough, there was a “Road Closed” sign and a small laminated paper warning of a fine for ignoring the closure, so I didn’t venture south to check out the landslide. That put a damper on my plans to hike North and South Tent Mountains the following day, which would now have required at least 40 miles of detouring to get to the trailhead.

Back at camp people were beginning to show up, and by nightfall there was a group of close friends staying at my campsite, and a few others at nearby sites. We sat around the campfire and had a few drinks, then a few of us hopped in Jeremy’s truck and drove to a few geocaches. I had been taking some night shots and at some point I dropped my camera and got a big scratch on the lens, which I didn’t notice until the next day. A few of us froze our tails off in the back of Jeremy’s truck, but we had fun wandering through the trees in the dark and trying to find Jeremy’s keys at one of our stops.

On Saturday we hiked the Left Fork of Huntington Creek Trail. It was a little longer than the North/South Tent Mountain hike I’d planned, but there was an actual trail and less elevation gain, so it was easier overall. Michael and Bradley came with me while Torrey stayed at camp with Traci because her foot still hadn’t healed. Chris, Kim, Jeremy, and an older gentleman from Fountain Green also went on the hike. We found three geocaches along the trail, the first of which was near a nice waterfall in Miller Flat Creek. We took a break at the last cache, then turned around and hiked back up the trail to our vehicles. The hike was about 6.5 miles and took us three hours to complete. We returned to camp and had a very nice potluck dinner with several others who had arrived during the day, then had a quiet night around the campfire.

It rained a bit during the night, which is probably why fewer people camped Saturday night than Friday. Sunday morning things were a little damp, and we had a few light showers. I hiked up to the old sawmill at the top of Fly Canyon with Chris, Terry, and Kim, and we got rained on, but it was a fun hike. We dodged mud holes while riding ATVs on the Lowry Water Road heading south from camp and parked under some pine trees at the Fly Canyon trailhead. The “trail” is actually an old logging road which would be perfectly rideable if the Forest Service hadn’t torn it up and closed it to motorized vehicles. Or, I should say, it would be rideable if it weren’t for all the new deadfall since I last hiked up there five years ago. It took us almost two hours to get to my geocache near the old sawmill, and about 40 minutes to get back down to the ATVs, totaling about 3.6 miles. When we arrived back at camp, everybody started packing things up while it rained, and Terry and I were the last ones to pull out. I got home early enough in the day to get the trailer unloaded, and I even had some time to mow the lawn and relax in front of the computer in the evening.

This was my first holiday weekend camping in the San Rafael Swell. It was a great time! My family normally doesn’t go camping on holiday weekends, ’cause the weekends of Easter, Memorial Day, and Labor Day are usually extremely crowded in the desert. The weekend prior to Memorial weekend, however, was so wintry that we canceled our trip for that weekend and decided to hang out with the huge crowds the following weekend. Luckily for us, our friend Dave Huntsman was also looking to do some camping that weekend and drove down from Utah County on Wednesday to save our spot. After my niece’s high school graduation on Thursday (boy, does that make me feel old!), my family hopped in both vehicles (me in the truck and Traci and the boys in the car) and drove down to meet Dave at the northwest end of Buckhorn Flat at the base of Cedar Mountain. Dave was out geocaching when we arrived, but he showed up while we were setting up camp. After Traci and I got things set up, Dave and I went for a 4-wheeler ride to see some nearby rock art and an abandoned bus.

On Friday, we all went for an ATV ride down Buckhorn Wash. We stopped to see the Buckhorn rock art panel. I’d never been up Calf Canyon or Pine Canyon, so we turned up both canyons and rode to the end of each. In Calf Canyon, the trail appeared to end at a small pond, though at home later I looked at the imagery in Google Earth and discovered that the trail may keep going up the canyon. We ended our progress at the pond, however, and I spotted a bat crawling on the ground there. When I got close with the camera to take some photos, it began chirping at me. After I took several photos, the bat flew off up the canyon and landed in the grass a few dozen feet away. I assumed that was the last we’d see of it, but a short while later it flew back down the canyon and landed in some tree branches. It stayed there for a while, but before we left the area it fell to the ground again, which is where we last saw it. Here’s a short video clip of the bat as it flew off the first time:

Friday’s ride was just a warm-up for Saturday. We took our time getting ready in the morning, then we set out for a ride along the old railroad grade that follows the base of Cedar Mountain. We stopped at several geocaches along the railroad grade, all of them at geocaches that draw attention to the real points of interest. There’s a lot of rock art all along the grade, and I even saw some that I hadn’t seen before. After reaching the Green River Cutoff Road, we left the railroad grade and rode to Box Flat. We’d hoped to meet a friend there, but she had ended up staying in town, so we ate lunch on Box Flat and set out to look for a cave.

Last month, somebody e-mailed me to tell me about a cave he found near Box Flat. He hadn’t explored the entire cave because it was too deep to explore fully without a flashlight (a rarity in the San Rafael Swell), so I went fully prepared. After a quick lunch of PB&J sandwiches at the same spot where we Eastered in 2009, we hiked over a hill and scrambled down some boulders to the cave entrance. I’d actually seen this canyon before, but hadn’t seen the cave entrance, and I had no idea what to expect. There was an obvious water course flowing out of the cave entrance, and I dropped all my bulky gear there and walked inside with only a flashlight and camera. Torrey followed me while Traci and the boys stayed at the entrance and waited. I followed the sinuous water course into the cave. Eventually I was far enough from the entrance that I couldn’t see daylight entering. I cautiously and curiously followed the water course until it curved back toward the entrance. It turns out that all the water runoff from Jackass Flat flows down a wash, enters the cave through a jumble of boulders, then flows several hundred horizontal feet under the cliff before flowing back out not far from where the water enters. It was very cool inside the cave compared to the heat outside, and it was still damp from recent rains. After exploring the entire cave, we walked back down to the ATVs and took the main road back to camp. The kids and I hiked up Cedar Mountain above camp that evening and wrapped up a long day of exploring.

Sunday was supposed to be our last day of camping, but with the heavy winds that picked up throughout the day I was unsure whether I wanted to pull the trailer home. We set out for a ride to Hambrick Bottom, with a quick stop at Hamburger Rocks where the kids got to play on the interesting sandstone formations. I’d never been to the end of the road at Hambrick Bottom, so we checked out a couple of dead-end roads there. We followed a side road that ended at the San Rafael River, and it would make a nice place to camp (already duly noted for a future camping trip ). The river was running high and swiftly, and my desire to float the river faded slightly after seeing how quickly it was running. We also followed the main road to its end, and where the road crossed the normally-dry Red Seep Wash, we drove through water where the high-running San Rafael River had backed up into the wash. The road ended at the northwest end of Hambrick Bottom, where it pinched out between a steep hillside and the river. From there, we reversed course, but instead of following the main roads back to camp, we took a detour over to Sand Bench Rim where I’d hidden a couple of geocaches two years ago. We stopped for the first geocache so Dave could sign the log, and the wind had picked up and was very intense. Just before reaching the second geocache, I saw a gopher snake and stopped to take some photos. Traci stopped right behind me, and when I crouched down to snap a photo of the snake, it turned back toward the road and climbed right up into Traci’s ATV! It wrapped around the bottom of the front differential, and no amount of prodding or pulling could get it out. We left it alone for a while as we found the geocache, but upon returning to the ATV, it was still snuggled up securely under the front diff. I finally prodded it in the head enough to get it to unwrap itself from the ATV, and it slithered off apparently unscathed and we continued on our way back to camp.

The wind storm picked up that afternoon and rocked the trailer heavily while we debated whether to head home that day. I went for a solo 4-wheeler ride despite the weather. I rode along a trail that climbed up Cedar Mountain just above and north of camp. It’s the same trail that Traci and I rode a few years ago, but we came in from the other end and weren’t able to ride the entire trail that time. This time I made it to the summit along the trail above camp, so now I can say that I’ve been on the entire trail. I turned around at that point and rode up the old mining track near the abandoned bus near Little Cedar Mountain. The first part of that trail was also pretty rough and steep, but eventually it reached the main road up Little Cedar, and I rode all the way to the summit. The views were awesome from there, and I radioed to Traci back at camp and she could see me at the summit from about 1.3 miles away. When I got back to camp, Traci had already started to pack things up, so apparently that meant we were heading home that evening (I was still torn between enjoying an entire day at home before returning to work, or spending an extra night camping). We got home in plenty of time to get the trailer backed into the driveway and partially unloaded before sundown, while Dave spent an extra night at the campsite and returned home the following day. For spending the long weekend in an area I thought I was familiar with, we sure saw a lot of stuff I wasn’t expecting.

Last weekend began early for me. As soon as I got off work at 3:00PM on Wednesday, I did a few last minute things before jumping in the truck and pulling the trailer down to the San Rafael Swell. The campsite I’d chosen was near South Salt Wash just off of exit 108 on I-70. It was windy when I arrived, and I set up camp quickly while keeping the trailer closed as much as possible to keep the dust out. Dropping the ramp to unload the ATVs let plenty of dust in, however, and after that you couldn’t even tell I’d swept and mopped the trailer before going camping. I’d hoped to do some ATV riding that evening, but at times visibility was only a couple hundred yards because of all the dust being kicked up by the wind, so I stayed holed up inside the trailer and started reading a book (The Split Sky by Tom McCourt). I’d planned on grilling some kielbasa for dinner, but instead I stayed in the trailer and pan-fried it. I turned in to bed early and slept well most of the night.

On Thursday morning I woke up early. It was cool, but calm and sunny outside, and I finished setting up camp after a light breakfast of banana bread and coffee. At 9:30AM I left on a 4-wheeler ride with no particular destination in mind, other than that I wanted to travel south and possibly find a nice overlook of Muddy Creek. I crossed the Muddy on the bridge at Lone Tree Crossing and eventually found myself riding east on Lone Tree Wedge. I passed through what appeared to be an old gypsum quarry, and just east of there the road turned into more of an ATV trail, though there were recent tire tracks from a full-sized vehicle. I stopped at two overlooks with nice views down into the incredible scenery of the upper Muddy Creek gorge. The trail simply ended at the second overlook, and I turned around there and rode back toward camp. I stopped briefly about 1.3 miles south of Lone Tree Crossing to hike across the exposed Entrada Sandstone, hoping to find some interesting goblin-like formations. The topography was interesting there, but nothing like I was hoping to see.

I got back to camp and ate lunch, then went for another short ride south of camp toward an old gravel pit that was used when I-70 was being built. On my way south I saw some horsemen herding a large group of cattle north directly toward camp. They were in a wash bottom but nearly to the road when I passed them, and I decided not to take that way back to camp (lest I get stuck behind a slow-moving group of cattle with no way around). I had to ride in a wash bottom to connect the two roads that officially dead-end (according to the BLM travel plan) near the gravel pit, then took a different road back to camp. When I got there, Terry and Karen had just pulled in, and so had the group of cattle. Terry told me he’d had truck problems on the drive down from Ogden–the engine had lost power and was blowing black, sooty smoke out the exhaust. The guy apparently in charge of the cattle-gathering operation came over and let us know that they planned on watering the cattle at the pond just across the road from our camp, then they’d turn ‘em loose nearby for the night, then gather them back up in the morning and ship them out by the truckload. Slowly throughout the afternoon and evening people started showing up at camp. That night we had two trailers, a motorhome, a camper, and two tents in the site. We had a nice, quite evening around the fire.

The following morning Eric and Sherie set out in their Jeep, along with Craig in his Jeep, to go to Colonnade Arch and do some other exploring in that area. Chris and I hopped on the ATVs with the kids and rode out to Horizon Arch, and Ken and Jan came along in their Jeep. Traci stayed at camp and enjoyed some time without the kids. I’d driven the truck to Horizon Arch five years ago, and though it was a fun drive, it was long, and we didn’t spend much time hiking around then. This time it was a pretty quick jaunt from camp, and on ATVs it went even more quickly. We parked at the end of the road near Horizon Arch and hiked around to three geocaches, only one of which I hadn’t found before. When we were finished hiking around, Ken and Jan headed back to camp while Chris and I took a side road that led to the head of Pancho Wash. The travel map showed the road ending after less than a mile, but I was hoping it would continue farther and possibly get us closer to Muddy Creek from the north side. Unfortunately it did indeed end where the map showed, near a strange reservoir that had been dug out and lined with plastic, but had no inlet and was completely dry.

Back at camp, several more people arrived that evening–one more trailer and a bunch of tents. We threw a 1-gallon can of green beans in the fire and blew it up better than anything else we’ve tried. The partially full can of butane/propane wasn’t even as explosive as the green beans. I got a text from Eric saying that he’d broken a u-joint on his Jeep and was limping it back to Green River with Craig following him. He made it to town alright, then he and Sherie crammed into Craig’s Jeep for the drive along the interstate back to camp. They arrived after all the campfire fun, and we got to spend some time around the fire enjoying the evening.

Eric and Sherie left the next morning (Saturday) to tow their Jeep to Moab to get fixed, and I was bummed that we didn’t get to spend much time with them. Traci and I took the kids on a 4-wheeler ride that day through Kimball Draw and Cat Canyon. We stopped to find one geocache in Kimball Draw and ran into some geocachers from Colorado who’d stopped briefly at camp earlier in the morning. We ended up running into them a couple more times later in the day, and I learned later that they’d gotten their Jeep stuck in a sandy ditch near Link Flats and that Terry pulled them out with his ATV. Anyhow, after finding that first cache, we stopped at some pictographs in Kimball Draw. As we were riding along the wash I noticed an alcove with what looked like just graffiti, but some of the circles didn’t look quite like spray paint. I stopped to check it out and realized that the circles were genuine pictographs, and there were smaller and fainter pictographs all over in the alcove. I had no idea any of that was there, and it was really too bad that it had been so badly vandalized. We very briefly checked out a very old drill site, then continued along Kimball Draw until eventually the road climbed out of the wash and over a pass, then down into Cat Canyon.

Cat Canyon and the area surrounding it were just awesome. It was my favorite place to visit all weekend. The road drops into Cat Canyon at about the point where the Navajo Sandstone becomes exposed below the Carmel Formation, and then the road follows the wash bottom all the way to Link Flats. We only went as far as an old steel dam where there was a geocache, and we ate our lunch there. We all hiked up the shallow, narrow slot canyon above the steel dam, stemming over the parts where the bottom narrowed down to a point too small for our bodies to fit. I hiked alone up one side of the canyon, around the head of the canyon, then back down the other side to where Traci and the kids were waiting. There were ponderosa pine trees all over the area, and a lot of flat, sandy areas surrounded by large seas of rolling slickrock. I’ve already decided that I need to ride my ATV back to the area and spend a couple of days camping and hiking around. We returned to camp and had an awesome potluck dinner that evening, and spent a crazy night around the campfire (Torrey got really crazy). We blew up a 1-gallon can of corn, had some drinks, and a few even stayed up ’til almost daylight (not me, I turned in early–around 2:00AM).

Everyone was slow to rise on Sunday morning. Traci and I started taking down camp, then I went for a quick ride with Michael (and Terry for part of the way). We rode north along South Salt Wash to the Moore Cutoff Road, then headed west for just over a mile, then turned north again and followed the road along Sand Bench. We ended up working out way east to the Sid and Charlie rock formation and stopped to find the geocache there, then we headed back to camp. Some had already left by then, and everyone else was getting ready to go. Terry had decided he was going to try driving his truck home despite the engine troubles, but he asked me to pull his trailer to Price and leave it there until he could come get it. Traci and I were the last ones to leave camp. I pulled the trailer to Price and dumped it at the RV dump, then dropped it in the driveway and unloaded the back of the truck. I fueled up and left for the Swell again, picking up Terry’s trailer and bringing it back to Price, dropping it in the dirt lot next to Traci’s parents’ place. It made for a long day, and I slept well that night after having had such a full and long weekend.

Yesterday the kids and I went to the San Rafael Desert and hiked around a bit, hitting Colonnade Arch, Three Canyon, and Chaffin Geyser. It’s really too bad that my wife would rather sit at her mom’s house and cut out scraps of paper than get outside and explore the amazing natural world that we’re so lucky to live near. The drive was about two and a half hours, and we started hiking to Colonnade Arch at about 11:30AM. The hike was a little more than a mile, and navigation was pretty simple. I just tried to stay within sight of the rim of Twomile Canyon without losing too much elevation, lest we have to scramble back up to higher ground as we approached the arch.
The approach to Colonnade Arch, at least for a first-time visitor like me, is pretty exciting. I’d only seen photos of the arch, and they can’t prepare you for how truly amazing the place is. You can’t even see the arch until you’re right below it–we just rounded a corner and there it was towering above us. I took a couple of photos of the front of the arch before letting the kids scramble up inside the alcove. They explored the inside of the arch while I took a lot of photos from inside. It was refreshingly cool in the shade of the alcove, and the breeze which had been picking up all morning was flowing through nicely. After thoroughly exploring the inside of the alcove, we scrambled around to the top and looked down inside the two skylights.
We took a slightly different route back to the truck. I was keeping an eye out for this rock formation that Bill had seen on his trip to Colonnade Arch. I could have spent hours exploring and searching for that rock, but I don’t think the kids would have had the patience for it. We got back to the truck about two hours after starting the hike, then drove about two-tenths of a mile south until I found a place to park that was secluded and sheltered from the wind. Even so, it was still too windy to eat lunch sitting on the tailgate, so we ate inside the truck with the windows cracked to let a slight breeze through. After eating, we returned to the main road and headed back north and parked at the Saucer Basin turnoff and started the hike into Three Canyon.
I really had very little idea what to expect in Three Canyon. From looking at it in Google Earth it appeared that it might slot up a bit, but it obviously had some large vertical drops and eventually widened up quite a bit. It was a relatively flat one-third of a mile hike to the canyon, and we entered right where the sandstone layer became exposed. There were a few small drops that were easily downclimbable, then the canyon narrowed up. The narrows were very short, however, and after that section the canyon widened again and the bottom was sandy/gravely. A little more than a third of a mile after entering the canyon, we reached a huge dropoff. There were two sets of bolts with webbing attached for rappelling farther down the canyon, but it didn’t look like there was a way for us to hike farther down. We returned back up the canyon, and the kids stopped several times to climb the walls.
Once back at the truck, we headed north again and made a final stop at Chaffin Geyser. It was my third time there, and I hadn’t yet seen the geyser erupt the previous times. There was a Toyota Tacoma parked near the geyser but I didn’t see anybody nearby. I parked much closer to the geyser, and by the time the kids and I were standing at the small opening, I noticed a guy walking over from the other truck. He was from near Calgary and was traveling to see a friend in New Mexico, and was going to camp for the night at the geyser. He said it had erupted earlier in the afternoon, and I was disappointed because I assumed that I was too late to see it erupt again anytime soon. We chatted for a while, then he walked back over to his truck.
Just after he left, the geyser began to sputter. At first a slow stream of water flowed silently from the opening, then it began to gain some altitude and eventually it was shooting up 15+ feet into the air. Between the angle of the geyser and the strong winds, the water was landing 25-30 feet away from the opening. I told the kids they could run through the spray, as long as they didn’t get too soaked. The water is so heavy with minerals that they came away with a white film on their skin, hair, and clothes after the water dried. The eruption lasted about 20 minutes, and it was still sputtering slightly when we left. It was a great way to top off an already good day.