Final Adventures in Utah

Pando, the biggest aspen grove in the world, from the slopes of Mt. Mytoge.

 Resulting from a discussion of BIG things (a fully loaded 747 is like 36 school buses duct taped together and flying through the air at hundreds of miles per hour!), Jan-Man and I decided to spend our final weekend in Utah at Fish Lake, home of the biggest aspen grove in the world.  Pando is one organism, one that's like 7 Walmart Supercenters all next to each other!  In taking vantage of Pando, I had the opportunity to scale a 10,000 ft mountain.  The peak of Mytoge reaches 10,097 feet.  We camped on BLM land on the backside and then walked up the trail.  Fish Lake is a popular summer destination, but we didn't see a single person on the trail that day.  In a stunning example of how averse people are to hiking when they can fish, boat and car-camp, ospreys decided to nest right on the trail because it gets such little use.

One of the ospreys that lived next to the seldom-used trail around the Lake

 Pando is incredible, but it is hard to spend a whole weekend there, given that there are no advertisements to avoid adding extra human traffic to the stress it is already under from the vacation homes being built in it.  Aspen groves share a root system, so all the trees are clones.  This most massive of groves is ancient, and a simple view from the slope across the lake is plenty.  After hiking and looking we found ourselves at Saturday afternoon with nothing to do, so we decided to drive to Spiral Jetty and go looking for ghost towns Sunday morning on our way around the Great Salt Lake to the Salt Flats.  About 8 hours later, in the middle of the night and in complete darkness, we reached the end of the line on the gravel roads on the Promontory.  Miraculously, we awoke to find ourselves at Spiral Jetty.  And we had it all to ourselves.  The northwest side of the Lake is some of the most barren land of the desolate state of Utah.  We awoke to see no souls, no lights and no buildings.  It's a beautiful way to experience Smithson's piece of environmental art from 1970.  He used construction equipment to place sand and boulders to make a jetty in the shape of spiral in such a way that it would spend half it's time submerged and half it's time exposed and salt-crusted.

Spiral Jetty is just that, and it's huge too.  1500 ft long

 There was a lot of snow this year so even in August the jetty was still submerged.  The basic shape is visible above, and the haunting quality of the piece and location is apparent below.  The water is a reddish purple from the bizarre, salty creatures that live there.  It's all very to odd to find in a desert, and it's even weirder when it wakes you up in the morning.

Janet enjoying a quiet morning at the Jetty

 After leaving the jetty, we happened upon a creepy man sitting by an abandoned spit.  As we walked by he asked if we had any water.  I replied that I did in the car and I inquired if he would like any.  He declined and then in the most cryptic manner anyone has ever talked to me he said, "You should go get it.  You'll regret it if you don't.  There's no water out there."  He lingered on 'regret' and 'no water' like he either knew something I did not or else he was some supernatural being.  Regardless I forgave water on the fifteen minute walk around the spit, and the creepy old man didn't murder me.  This interesting exchange made up for the lack of a ghost town across the lake.  The road around followed an abandoned railroad track to Nevada.  From there we circled back to I-80 and the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Mr. Whitney may not approve of this blur, but by no fault of the Buffalo.  Odyssey was haulin'.

 The Salt Flats are maintained by the BLM, which more or less means anything goes.  As long as there is not an official speed test going on, people are allowed to drive their own vehicle anywhere they damn well please out there.  Flat, white salt stretches in all directions, cones outline the course for speed tests, and mountainous islands rise out of the salt.  It was a perfect occasion to drive at breakneck speeds with no hands on the wheel and your head out the window and to take glamour shots of the charging Buffalo.  Check and check.

Cedar Breaks National Monument

Sophia looking out from the top of the breaks.

The second to last place we worked was at Cedar Breaks National Monument.  The view is breathtaking, as are the views at many of the nearby parks, such as Zion and Capitol Reef, due to whatever geological happenings took place to create a zone of abrupt 5,000 foot transition from basin floor up to the Colorado Plateau.  A "breaks" is the most abrupt, as it is what remains when you replace a gentle mountainside with a canyon wall.

Beautiful red rocks and hoodoos fill up the breaks.  A breaks is when a mountainside is removed and instead there is an amphitheater like canyon wall.  Cedar Breaks has high altitude bristlecone pine that precariously rest on red rock cliffs and arches. Hoodoos are the spires in the picture above made famous by Bryce Canyon.

In southern Utah, canyon wall means dramatic red rock.  We were repairing fence along the edge of the park to keep the sheep out.  Lucky for us, the edge of the park goes to the edge of the break.  It's tough to beat a summer job of relatively easy work in a place with a view that stretches for hundreds of miles.  We were the last UCC crew to come through, so our boss didn't have very much for us to do.  We spent our time repairing washed out steps in the campground, digging up boulders, and chopping up wood.  It was good times.  Our last night we pulled out the dutch oven, prepared a feast, and went to bed better fed than any other souls in Iron County that night.

Civilian Conservation Corpsmembers built this structure on top of Brian Head (11,300 feet) to make digesting the view a more comfortable experience (Arizona, Nevada, the Great Salt Lake, and miles out on the Colorado Plateau are visible).  They did this by hand.  They probably built the road up there too.. by hand.

Hillary telling the story of The Colossus of Clout calling his shot while in character as Squints.  The story mostly contained the following happy refrain: "And he liked it!  A lot!!"

Two weeks in Wyoming ending in the great Oyster Ridge Music Festival

This is Wyoming every direction you look as long as you aren't on I-80 or behind a camper in Yellowstone

On the way back from Yellowstone, Mitch, Janet, Sophia and I stopped for some pizza at Studebaker's in Montpelier, Idaho and caught an opening weekend showing of Harry Potter.  As a town situated in the lonesome part of the crowded West, Montpelier numbers among that distinguished municipal fraternity for the victims of crimes by Butch Cassidy for which he was never caught.  In 1896 Butch and his Wild Bunch robbed the Bank of Montpelier and lit off for the hills on horse.  Strangely, the sheriff grabbed his gun and pursued on bicycle.  He never caught up to them.  The Bank of Montpelier had the last laugh however, as they still serve the financial needs of the good citizens of Bear Lake County and no doubt they helped erect the historical signage on Washington Street about the heist.

The sky is incredible in Wyoming, especially west of Jeffrey City on SR 287/789

The next morning, my crew set out for two weeks in Wyoming.  Our first week we collected seeds for the Lander office of the Bureau of Land Management.  We drove around a lot, and we saw a lot of sky, hills, antelope, sage grouse and sagebrush.  It is some of the least traveled country of the lower 48.  On our way out to a collection site, we drove past a place called Lost Cabin---named after a Scottish settler presumed to be lost by the Shoshone after he set up shop in a place they saw no reason to ever live in.  Beyond that lay a fracking area, where ConocoPhilips kindly alerted us of the possibility of lethal levels of Hydrogen Sulfide gas.

After traversing to the remote side of all that, I pleasantly collected seeds and gazed out over the "range," and I tried to figure out how it was that I came to be in the windswept, forlorn heart of Wyoming combing the ground for the seeds of specific ground-hugging plants.  The answer was never made clear.  Although recently I took stock again as I sat in Morton, WA trying desperately to find a reason not to pursue a career as a middle school English teacher in some destitute school district.  I guess moments of life-course lucidity happen from time to time, and the perspective that they grant usually leads to thoughts such as "Oh gaawdd, this is not what I signed up for!"  Considering I signed up for the UCC to schlep chainsaws through blizzard and bear den, things seem to be unfolding in my best interest.  And should I hazard to divine what slouching heathen of a situation approaches to be confronted the next time I audit my life, I find the prospect slightly less dreadful when I remember I no longer collect seeds of obscure plants in central Wyoming.

We surveyed the River for possible swimming holes as we hadn't showered in a week

 The weekend after Lander, we checked out the Popo Agie River in Sinks Canyon.  I've never seen anything like it.  The river crashes along before it flows into the ground: the Sinks.  A quarter mile later, it reappears out of the rock: the Rise.  It's a big river, and it does not go through a tunnel.  It literally flows through rock.  At the Rise there are trout who try to swim upriver but cannot because they are unable to swim upstream through rock.  Oddly enough, they are not allowed to be fished, but they can be fed, so they have become real tubbers while waiting patiently for the rock to somehow disappear so that they might continue upriver.

The Sinks: where the river either drops down through Limestone bedrock or gets swallowed whole by a gargantuan sedentary terrestrial whale.

Our second week we again worked for the BLM, but this time in the fabulous town of Kemmerer (like Jimmer, or dimmer).  We again picked seeds.  The following weekend was the Oyster Ridge Music Festival, so I was able to stay and do fun things too.  Kemmerer is already notable as the location of the original JC Penney, and the museum/home of James Cash himself.  Apart from that Oyster Ridge is free.. and in Wyoming, a music festival is a guaranteed Big Deal.. and on top of that a free one with affordable food and beverage?  Yet Kemmerer is a small town, so even during it's big weekend, events were low key.

A charming house in Kemmerer, Wyoming, where all the houses are in a neighborhood, and there is only one neighborhood.

The view of the tracks from under the bridge.

 During acts we had already seen, we adventured around the town.  I don't understand how America developed her romantic fascination with trains, bridges and the hobo lifestyle, but I'm a sucker for that sort of sentimentalism. Relaxing under the bridge in Kemmerer was a highlight of my summer.

Sunset on the cargo train

Extra pic of Surprise Lake

Surprise Lake in Teton National Park

I am glad this picture of Surprise Lake in Teton NP popped up in my last roll of film because it is a useful guide for describing the epicness of the vista.  We had just hiked five miles up to the thing with the last half mile being through the snow.  The saddle in the snow is actually a snow bridge over a waterfall that is the birth of a stream down the mountainside.  It drops into a canyon that opens out into Jackson Hole.  You can stand directly over the shiny white water as it spills out of the frozen-over, glacially-deposited lake.  You can also climb out on fallen trees and rock ledges to look directly over the water as well.  Not only is the beauty of the scene is too intricate to corral with words, this was also one of those sights that could barely be enveloped by the frame of a slide of film.  This sight could never be reached by a car.

Teton National Park

Janet and Sophia at an overlook from Jackson Hole.

Sunset on the Tetons

We strolled into Teton National Park from Yellowstone on our way back towards Logan.  We were greeted by this vista as we blasted "Blame it on the Tetons" by Modest Mouse for no apparent reason.  We came in Sunday night, stayed at a campsite on Jackson Lake.  We got up early to see the sunrise.  We found this view and similarly stunning views of the mountains as those of the night before, but with a near-mirror-like glass over Jackson lake.

Early morning twilight on Jackson Lake.

The view of Jackson Hole from the slopes of the Teton front.  That oblong mound in the background is a glacial moraine: rocks and rubble transported in a glacier only to be deposited en masse as the ice recedes.  At one point, this glacially carved landscape was covered in ice up to all but the tallest peaks of the Tetons.

We left early Monday morning before the rangers showed up.  This is a great way to save money if you don't care about supporting the maintenance of our beautiful, cash-strapped national parks.  We decided to do a day hike up to Surprise and Amphitheater Lakes.  To Amphitheater Lake it is about 5 miles from the 6,000 ft valley floor up to the 9,700 ft lake.  There were 17 switchbacks.  The Tetons are sheer.  We were greeted as the first ones out on the trail to a black bear at the trailhead.  He went along on his way and we on ours.  Luckily the huckleberries along the trail were not ripe yet or we probably would have seen more than just one busy black bear.  We climbed most of the way with two climbers setting out to conquer all 13,775 ft of Grand Teton.  Any later in the season and the peaks start creating their own afternoon thunderstorms--a vicious obstacle for such exposed rock faces.  The trail up to Surprise Lake is one of those incredible trails that is doggedly tough but totally worthwhile and rewarding at the end.  Both Amphitheater and Surprise Lake are outstanding alpine lakes.  They expressed impossible shades of blue: from black hole dark on to radioactive-bright antifreeze.  Both lakes were still covered in ice and surrounded by spring snow.  The views out onto the valley were too big to photograph and the tobogganing was in season.  A capstone hike to a mammoth weekend.  Actually, deep-dish pizza in Montpelier, Idaho (the site of a Butch Cassidy where the sheriff gave chase on bicycle into the mountains.  They were never caught.  The bank is still open.) followed by Harry Potter on opening weekend was pretty great.  "Come on Harry, let's take a walk."

Surprise Lake, nearly 9,700 feet up in the Teton Range.

PS if you make it up to the Tetons and Yellowstone, you have to try Huckleberry ice cream.  A flavor not to be forgotten.

PPS "Hey, what should we do for the epilogue?"  "How about we let Ron and Harry grow a couple days of stubble and we put Hermione's hair up?"  "OK. that should work." = Harry Potter easy button.

Yellowstone National Park

Mitch in full mullet soon after entering the park.

On a three day weekend, Mitch, Janet, Sophia and I decided to road trip Yellowstone and Teton National Parks.  We left about an hour after getting back for the weekend and stayed friday night in Bridger National Forest in Wyoming, near Alpine.  After driving through Jackson Hole and past the Tetons we entered the park and headed straight for Old Faithful.

Old Faithful erupted in minutes after we walked up.  I've never seen a dog so politely excited and so thoroughly ignored.  It was the only dog around a thousand people and no one cared.

She blew about two minutes after we arrived.  Feeling up on our luck, we pranced around deriding all the other tourists.  Many instantly dispersed back to their lodges and RVs after Old Faithful erupted.  Others stayed to peruse around to other geysers.  They had saved up their life's earnings to get an RV with which to visit all the great highway-accessible sights of the continent.  Yellowstone is built for that tourist and that tourist was getting his money's worth on this day.  Still others were awkward adolescents and showed up with their parents for Roadtrip Cringefest 2011.  Our favorites were the few who possessed an unquenchable sense of wonder.  Overheard on the matter of the steam coming out of hot springs: "Does the heat make it rise?" "Yep." "Ooh."  A close second were those tourists with checklists, who would cruise right past hot springs like the one below without even a glance as they rushed on to their next destination.  I like to think these tourists needed to use the restroom.  I mean who is legitimately blasé about forbidden hot springs?!?  Not even a glance??!?  We hiked the half mile out to Solitary Geyser (which is so ridiculous and appropriate for Yellowstone) and saw it practically blow us off the mountain.  We waited the 5-8 minutes for another in order to take a picture, but it just so turns out that the first eruption was the biggest in the last 15 years and the lil' bubbler for which we waited was grossly underwhelming.

Superheated sulfurous death, but still tempting.

After Old Faithful we drove on through to the Madison campground.  As expected it was packed, but after dinner we walked to the Purple Mountain Trail.  It was evening and it was dark for most of our descent back down the 8,433ft hill.  We did not see a single person on the trail, which, given our location as a haven for cougars, grizzlies, wolves, moose, etc, was as troubling as it was refreshing.  Yellowstone is advertised as and feels like a safari through a time portal into a fictitious version of North America in 2,000 BC.  It is primal and manufactured at the same time.  Still, it is incredible to get on a trail, be alone, and see the prodigious growth amid the still apparent wreckage of the Fires of 1988.  The place almost feels like the heart of the continent given its location on the continental divide, its geothermal activity and its high altitude for a flat area. The mosaic of young lodgepole forest and soft meadows adds to the feel of a newly forming territory entirely distinct from the nearby Tetons.

Yellowstone from the slopes of Purple Mountain.  Washed out in afternoon sun, but all the standing dead from the fires of 1988 are still visible amid the regrowth.

The album cover for Mitchell Fosnaugh: The Album.  A lazy sunday afternoon on our way back to Teton National Park.

We often lunched at picnic areas.  The Sunday picnic area bordered a huge grassy field that was great for relaxing, digesting, and listening to music.  Mitch has taken to calling his guitar a shirt, as this seems to help him get around those "no shirt, no shoes, no service" regulations.

Ensign Peak and the City of Salt Lake

Sloppy Sophia looking like the real deal while cutting tread for a trail.

We got a taste of trailwork before we again succumbed to the curse of the SLC City Council.  The project fell apart and we got banished to a third week in the dog park.  Oh well, I got a view of Salt Lake City from above.  Mormon pioneers who came from the East (left on the picture below) at what is now This is the Place State Park climbed Ensign Peak to survey the headquarters of the empire that they would create in this newfound region that they called Zion.

The City of Salt Lake from the peak where it was planned.

The Wasatch front along the Salt Lake City metro area

While in and around Salt Lake for the week, I had a chance to spend an hour downtown.  I walked through Temple Square on my way to the Family History Museum.  I found two of the vaunted sister missionaries (many girls who do missions get sent to Salt Lake to be present around the LDS headquarters.  Interestingly, young men generally do not, as far as I know, get sent to Salt Lake.  That, to me, is indicative of some bizarre gender norms, or worse.  But that is the Church's trip, not mine.)  I wanted to forever remember SLC bizarro, so I asked my two new friends, one from Malaysia and one from Singapore to take a picture with me.  Being obligate helpful souls, I gave a third an opportunity to help me out by clicking the shutter.

Two sister missionaries, Sophia and I in Temple Square.  They are obligated to be happy and nice.  It is their mission.

In the Family History Museum I found that my great great great great grandfather William Coe Critchlow moved his wife Harriett and children William Fuller, Benjamin Chamberlain and Scharlot out west to the Ogden/Brigham City area north of Salt Lake in the 1850s to farm.  They were Mormons from Pennsylvania.  William Fuller married Mary Eliza who gave birth to William J in 1868.  William J would meet a very special Anna C (she was Danish) who would give birth to my great grandfather Victor David Critchlow in Ogden in that fateful November of 1898.  Victor David's brother, William J Jr. would go on to become a high priest, stake president and general authority within the Church of Latter Day Saints.  Victor David divorced my great grandmother Jesse and was largely absent from the lives of the subsequent line of the Critchlow clan except for one occasion when he showed up to a family barbecue and happened to drop dead in the backyard, or at least that's how my own father describes the imprint on his ten-year-old brain.

In any case, I am not Mormon, and after that tragic exit and dramatic encore in the lives of us non-LDS Critchlows, I will remain dubious towards a comeback by the Mormon church in my family.  As far as I know, there are still Mormon Critchlows in the Ogden area.

The City of Rocks and User-created "Social" Trails

Angélica and Boris, two friendly locals who introduced themselves to Janet and I.  The other locals were too shy to introduce themselves.

The City of Rocks is a valley full of granite boulders in Southern Idaho.  To get there from Logan, you head west out of Cache Valley through Riverside and then onto I-84 in Tremonton.  You then cross into Idaho through some windy antelope country.  After exiting at Malta you cut through Elba and Almo to the "city." It is far away, and it is beautiful.  Most people would describe the encompassing Raft River Valley as a barren and exposed valley of sagebrush dissected by lonely roads that connect dreary towns that are colloquially referred to as "rusting piles of farming equipment."  The pioneers on the Oregon Trail called the place "paradise" because there was a river and some grass for their teams in the sagebrush.

Part of the reason The City of Rocks is designated a National Reserve by the Park Service is the cultural history of the area.  There was a main intersection of routes of the California and Oregon Trails in the Raft River Valley.  Misspelled frontier names scrawled in charcoal with dates like '72 or '63 are still faintly visible on the slowly aging granite boulders that line the old trails.  In some places, tire ruts are still visible.  That fact is a powerful one to me.  The trail of the California Trail was made by traffic--just the same as any unofficial, user-created "social" trail.  Wheels and footsteps compact the ground and squeeze out any air in the soil, rendering the ground sterile.  Vegetation stops growing.  The compacting process lowers the trail relative to the ground on either side.  Depending on the topography this lowered ground can short-circuit water drainage in the area.  The trail becomes a seasonal stream.  Water-caused erosion occurs and the trail becomes permanent.  After 150 years, the tire ruts are still visible pretty much only where water drainage occurs.  The lesson is to stay on the trail and leave the social trails alone.  If you don't, your tracks could be there for decades (if they don't lead to washouts and promote total erosion) as all those footsteps squash the vitality out of the soil.  If on a trail on a hillside and the social trail cuts a more direct route through switchbacks, then it creates a slide for water to wash away the whole trail right down the slope.  If you like the trail, stay on it.

The skyline of the "city"

The City of Rocks is a result of the weathering of granite.  Granite is tough, and the initial weathering just adjusts the top layer to form a protective cap that over the granite lying underneath.  Then the whole column weathers even slower.  The surrounding rocks erode away leaving natural granite spires jutting from the ground.   Today, rock climbers drawn to the intricate granite formations make up nearly all of the visitors to the "city."  I would wager (a lot of money) that The City of Rocks has more climbable granite faces than permanent residents.  As an aside, amateur rock climbers are amusing to watch as they slowly pull themselves up an otherwise unremarkable granite face, relaying announcements of intentions from the climber to the various safety personnel at the top and bottom.   The effort and difficulty doesn't show itself to the spectator very readily and it seems an unrewarding and overly complicated endeavor at first glance.

Two mediocre pictures of a climber in City of the Rocks.  I promised his wife I would email the pics after standing under her husband looking up through a zoom lens.  But I misplaced the email address, so if anyone knows it, or knows where I put it, please let me know.  Here's to hoping that he reads my blog.

Field of wild iris between Sawtooth National Forest and City of the Rocks

From The City of Rocks we went up into the hills around the "city" to camp.  The hills are part of the Sawtooth National Forest.  We had incredible views both as the sun set and again when it rose of the valleys on either side.  Marmot and mule deer frequently crossed our paths.

The view from the Sawtooth forest out over Idaho in the late afternoon.  The haze added to the dreamscape feel after a long day.

On Sunday morning we made our way down the dirt roads back towards Burley and around on to Logan.  We took the long road because we were low on gas and Burley is the closest gas out there.  However dirt roads are more like rock roads on top of hills, and rock roads in The City of Rocks are made of granite.  As we rolled down in neutral we noticed we had gotten a flat.  The tire had ripped an unrepairable hole, because her tires were bald and we were driving down a granite road in a minivan.  We pulled out the compact spare and changed the tire, still about ten miles of dirt road from pavement and then another 15 miles from gas.  Several people drove by us, and most of them slowed, although only to make sure that we had indeed suffered a flat tire.  One person even stopped, although only to ask us to move more into the ditch at the side of the road.  The amusing part of the story is that this occurred on Sunday morning.. on July 3rd.. in Southern Idaho, which is better described by the term "Mormon Country."  Luckily, Wal-Mart's global conquest is nearly complete and we were able to find a tire.  For various reasons, Janet could not tell her parents the whole story, so they would not agree to buy a whole set and so Janet maintained the lie and only purchased one tire.  She has since gotten her parents to pay for a full set, so now in the back of her clean-shoed home she has a compact spare and a brand-new full-size tire.  The buffalo is built to roam.

The view down on The City of Rocks the morning of Sunday, July 3.

To Tony Grove we go!

A nice little trail into the Mt. Naomi Wilderness area

Over the river and through the woods... is the way to most everywhere in the Bear River Range.  Back on Saturday, June 25, Janet and I embarked on the Jardine Juniper trail planning to take the Cottonwood Canyon trail into the Mt. Naomi Wilderness Area. The Jardine Juniper trail is a five mile trail up to an 1500 year old Juniper tree.  I signed the visitor book at the tree, ate lunch, and took a picture of a similarly grizzled and charred old battle-ax of a tree because it was more photogenic.  This is a story of two young fools who wandered into the wilderness in search of adventure.

Junipers grow slow, and they get to be inconceivably old

The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh... We went over the ridge into the wilderness area and quickly entered a new environment: no more horses or mountain bikers--there was hardly any more path at all.  No one had been in to maintenance the trail and remove the fallen trunks from the fire that blazed through the canyon last year.  Still disgruntled about walking around the Dog Park all week, we salivated at the thought of hiking five miles up to the start of wilderness area with axe in hand (no power tools in a wilderness area) with the job of chopping all the fallens and widowmakers away from the trail all the way through to Tony Grove.  Around 3pm we made it down to the South Fork of the Cottonwood Creek--which was swollen, splashing and fast with snowmelt--and decided that instead of camping here in solitude near the willows we would cross the creek and try to go through the wilderness area to Tony Grove.  If we were true tragic heros, this would have been the decision of tell-tale hubris.  On we went, map in hand, having forgot a compass and water purification.  We ambled up canyon floor,  a breathtaking mile through aspen grove, meadow, and willow-thicketed and boulder-strewn creekbed.  We came upon barn owls silently swooping through the tree tops.  Ever vigilant for moose we eventually reached the head of the canyon.  By that point the trail was invisible under a foot of snow.  We were lost.

The view down Cottonwood Canyon.  From the side close to the trailhead.

Through the white and drifted snow... approached a dark brown, medium sized animal down the valley slope just after the sun dropped below the silhouette of Mt. Elmer with a seemingly aggressive, hunched and lurky gait.  WOLVERINE I assumed.  We quickly retreated and scampered up the opposite slope.  We watched it from partway up the slope to see if it is fulfilling its obligation as part of the wolverine script.  In my imagined worst-case scenario, it is supposed to track our scent and footsteps towards us, across the creek and up the slope to the lara bars and peanut butter in my backpack.  It did not fulfill its obligation and we continued ascending in the hope of shortcutting the trail up the ridgetop as we were too preoccupied with that ominous mystery-animal down by the creek to follow the assumed path of the snow-covered trail.  On our way up we saw another similar animal, but at a much closer distance.  A porcupine, and if not for the fact that I was running low on water and we were still lost and as we climbed the snow only got deeper.  Porcupines are funny nocturnal animals.  They are very slow, and they compliment their near-slothlike slowness with a remarkable lack of coordination.   We stumbled upon a third animal on the ridge and stopped to watch it flee us up into a tree.  After several minutes and the porcupine still only at hip level, both Janet and I wondered whether it still was trying to escape or if it had changed its plans at the first limb.

We seem to go extremely slow...  We make the ridgeline, 800 feet above the creek and over 8,000 feet in elevation (although we didn't know that at the time), set down our packs and explore farther up hoping to see hope that we can make it through to Tony Grove.  We move slower and slower, we stumble, and short distances seem to stretch on endlessly.  We are both dehydrated and fatigued and after seeing little but unidentified slopes and snow, we decide to pitch our tents and hike back the 8 miles in the morning to the Jardine Juniper trailhead and hope we have enough water.

The ridgeline opposite the one we climbed, see from down the canyon.  The peak is Mt. Elmer and to the left is Mt. Jardine, both above 9,500 feet.

Over the river and through the wood–

Now Grandmother's cap I spy!

Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?

Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!

After hiking out surprisingly fast in the morning, we came back to Logan with one goal in mind: a $2.79 Ben and Jerry's pint.

Pipe Spring Arizona

Last week I worked in northern Arizona at Pipe Spring National Monument.  The monument was created in the 1920s when the first head of the National Parks Service Stephen Mather decided it was a good place to situate a rest stop between the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park.  Before that it was an abandoned fort surrounded by miles of sagebrush.  Before that it was a fort run by the LDS church as a place to keep livestock received from tithing.  Before that it was the biggest of several springs in the area used by the Kaibab Paiute, deer, antelope and others and it was surrounded by up to thirty miles in all directions of waisthigh grass--to a horse.  Today it is a property the size of a Walmart on the Kaibab Paiute  Reservation with a very informative visitor center, a couple of little exhibits about the grass that used to be there and traditional Kaibab structures such as a ramada and a kahn (which we worked on and slept in) and the restored two-story fort that comes with an orchard, a vegetable garden, a horse named Princess, two longhorns, a chicken coop, a pond with three ducks, two bunkhouses for cowboy ranch hands, and a short trail up onto the mesa with several edible plants, including currants and lemonadeberries.

Evening view to the west from the mesa (zoomable, like all my pictures)

It doesn't matter where you are, Pipe Springs is far away.  But that gives it its barren look.  In the picture below, you can barely see the highway that runs from left to right.  It is the only way to get to Pipe Springs.  Also, the golden color from the sunset makes it look how it might have been all the time when it was all grass, instead it is sagebrush and tumbleweed, which takes over when grassland is disturbed.  In this case, it was a ten year combination of heavy grazing and drought in the 1870s.

The Arizona Strip to the south

The fact that Pipe Springs is far away and no longer has good grassland (the spring mostly closed up after an earthquake in the 90s and the National Park Service owns the right to a lot of the water that comes out of the spring for the monument) draws the few people who live in the area.  Off the highway past Pipe Spring is the town of Mocassin, which is completely surrounded by the reservation, meaning that the only way in is to wait for someone to die without a will.  It is a Mormon town with no stores of any kind and no police either.  To the west on AZ-389 is Colorado City, which is known for being a polygamist colony (locally known as pligs).  It is a creepy town with huge, simple, unfinished (for tax evasion purposes) homes with several minivans out front.  Neither is an inviting place.  The Kaibab Paiutes are also not very inviting, although the do run a nice, albeit windy campsite, on which we stayed.    Non-natives are not allowed on the reservation after dark, which left us little to do but hope we didn't offend any skinwalkers.  With that said, the nearby Kanab Canyon and Kaibab plateau look like incredibly scenic places to do some backpacking without the crowds of the Grand Staircase areas.

We drove down on Monday, July 4th.  We had the opportunity to stop in Kanab, Utah for their fireworks show.  Small towns who do a big fireworks show are awesome.  And we were lucky because most towns in Utah don't do much on Independence Day and instead save it for Pioneer's Day on July 24th.  Kanab must be a place full of people looking for a reason to have a shebang at the park instead of going to the Pizza Hut.  On the way we drove through Fredonia.  Both are really charming little towns.  We stopped at the Fredonia Fire Department for some fun.  Luckily, my swollen poison ivy-covered face didn't attract too much attention.  At first I just like a skinny fat person.  A few days later I looked like I might be Native American.  People out there don't talk too much to newcomers anyways.

Used the timed-shutter on my camera.  Set the camera on top of the van.

Sophia's bummed and Hillary laughs when they realize they can't steal the old firetruck because the don't know how to drive such an old truck.  This is good news for the Volunteer Fire Department of Fredonia, but probably bad news for the town's good people.

Laughably, our work the first few days was landscaping the yard at a bunkhouse for monument volunteers.  We were accompanied by a 13-year-old juvenile delinquent on a work study project through the tribal court.  We also got to learn a lot about the history of the area.  Interestingly enough, the fort was only built because the first person in charge of the Mormon Ranch was killed by raiding Navajos who were taking Kaibab Paiutes to sell to slavery.  The Ranchers didn't know the difference.  The Kaibab were exceedingly peaceful (to the point of being encaptured by other tribes), but they had a beautiful world-view that couldn't contrast more with the view of Brigham Young that the resource of the spring and pasture must be utilized to supply every want of the future Mormon children.  The existence of the orchard and garden (both of which are open to harvesting by visitors) seem ridiculous in this place, dry as it is with the cattlemen and Kaibab Paiutes stuck on the land they have with limited access to water.  But the people must have a place to rest their autos while visiting other more magnificent places!

Hillary about to throw her nether garments at an oncoming thunderstorm.
It was the ultimate taunt.

One last thing of note about Pipe Springs was the weather and visibility.  At all times while we were there a thunderstorm was visible somewhere.  They usually stayed away after being threatened by Hillary the Harrible but it was so cool to watch the rain or see flashes while driving or even stargazing.  Also the wind was fierce.  Two tents did not survive.  Mine did.  I highly recommend the Marmot Limelight.  It is a beast.

Parley's Canyon aka the Dog Park and trailbuilding

For two weeks after Zion we worked at Tanner Park in Parley's Canyon, which is a dog park in a neighborhood of Salt Lake City next to I-80.  In two weeks I met at least forty different breed of dog, and got to know the many dog-owners who frequent the park.  It was definitely a big change from Zion the week before.  It just so happens that the park has an EPA impaired waterway that is also the only creek in Utah with a native population of Bonneville cutthroat trout, which is used to stock all the lakes and rivers in the area.  Dogs own this park and are obliterating the riverbank and filling the water with E. coli, to the outrage of environmentalists.  The situation playing out in City Council is a smaller version of a huge battle going on right now about public land management.  The Intermountain West has a ton of public land as a vestige of old ranching policies where it was decided that with homesteading it was best for ranchers to own just enough land for a house and public lands would be kept undeveloped to provide for enough grazing for everyone.  Now there is recreation, oil exploration and still ranching on public lands while old ranch houses are being replaced with neighborhoods.  Every different use is ruining it for all the others and no one wants to accept that you can't have it all.  The decisive city council of the city of Salt Lake, however, has decided that dog access will be restricted in Tanner Park to help out the creek.  It was our job to move the trails and designate dog-friendly areas.

Building a new trail is pretty straightforward.  First you clear any vegetation in the corridor of the trail with loppers, saws, and maybe an ax.  If that vegetation happens to have poison ivy vines on it, then you hope you don't get unlucky, I guess.  I don't know I've yet to figure that one out.  Next you cut the walking surface.  You use the pick mattock, the pulaski and the McLeod to break up hard dirt, rip out stumps and roots and to make a smooth surface free of grass and vegetation.  Finally you make the surface level and add in any water control measures to make the trail more durable.  You use the plants that were removed to cover up any side trails to help keep people on the trail.  Then you take a ride on a nearby ropeswing!

The first week we stayed at Legacy Nature Preserve, which is newly designated and does not yet live up to the name.  It is out by the airport near the lake and has buzzing power lines running through it and it gets sprayed regularly with mosquito pesticide by airplane.  It does, however have beautiful sunsets out to the West.  Those are the mountains the Donner Party and thousands of other Oregon trailers and 49ers crossed on their way out west.

Sunset at Legacy

We could also see Salt Lake City and other towns along the Wasatch Front (as well as the oil refinery near our campsite).

The Wasatch Mountains behind Salt Lake City

 The second week at the dog park our project sponsors at the SLC parks and rec let us stay in their conference room.  It was nice to get away from the heat, bugs, and pesticide of Legacy, even if it meant being locked in the compound at night.  We all seemed to be a little more photogenic while we were roughing it at Legacy.

Janepus, Mitchosaurus Rex and Abzilla the Killa wishing they could be part of our crew

Hillary and the navigator from Zion being rebels