Phew. We spent nearly all day getting ready and going to Monument Peak. We woke up later than we’d hoped to (not that I’m complaining about getting to sleep in ’til 10:00 am), and we didn’t even leave town until 1:00 pm. We drove past Scofield and headed up Eccles Canyon, then turned onto a dirt road at the Carbon/Emery county line. From there it was a beautiful drive to the summit, but damn, it was cold and windy once we got out of the car. We still hung around for quite a while, but we were all frozen by the time we left–didn’t even think to bring jackets. When we got back to the paved road, we continued west and went to Huntington Canyon. We found two caches there, one on south Skyline Drive and the other near Electric Lake. Traci had a lot of fun playing with the GPS–she had to be my navigator, because I weave all over the road if I try to pay attention to the map on the display. We got home well after dark, and both mine and Traci’s mom had called our house and left messages on the answering machine wondering where in the hell we were.
I’m pretty glad that we didn’t go camping, ’cause this was much better than just sitting around a campground, and a lot easier than loading the trailer up and hauling it up the canyon. It’s not likely that we’ll go camping again this year, but we’ll certainly go on a few more day-long drives like this one. The first weekend in October, I’m going with Mike and Matt for two hikes in one day. We’re going to hit an unnamed peak in Wasatch County, but since it’s such a short hike, we’ll try another one later in the day–either Thurston Peak in Davis & Morgan counties, or Deseret Peak in Tooele County. I’m going to have to keep hiking between now and then, because I’d really like to get accustomed to it enough that I won’t be dead-sore by the end of the day.