Category: Utah
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Needle Nose Fliers
Needles is the definition of the middle of nowhere. When you are standing at Grand View overlook at the Island in the Sky, gazing south over canyonlands, awed by the vast expanse of uninhabitable, viciously eroded land, wondering what it must be like to live down there, go to Needles District because that is what…
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Time Arches On
Someone said, “It’s what we’ve done that makes us who we are.” We think it was Jim Croce. And on birthday weekend, we’re shaking up time in a bottle and letting it rip! Arches National Park was the last of the Mighty Five on our 2019 Utah Spring Tour. We went from Z to A…
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Moab Madness
Moab is a crazy place. Young men named Aaron live out of their van and work odd jobs to enable them to play in this unique landscape in the most extreme ways. Mountain bikers fly through rolling slickrock formations maneuvering a foot or two from huge drops. Rock climbers scale vertical rock faces that jut…
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Get To The (Dead Horse) Point
Legend has it that Dead Horse Point was used as a corral for wild mustangs roaming the mesa. Cowboys rounded up these horses and herded them across the narrow neck of land onto the point. The neck, 30 yards wide, was then fenced off with branches and brush, creating a natural corral surrounded by the…
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Hit and Run to Moab
Life after Zion is starting to feel like a hit and run. Hit the road, run through the sights and hit the road again. Driving Betty is heavy workload in graduating elevations with rumble strip lanes and dish rattling pavement. Exploring in the never-ending cold and rain is tipping the scales to tiresome. We keep…
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Ga-Ga for Goblins
Hoodoos are out. Goblins are in. Where hoodoos have an untouchable magical and mystical aura, goblins are weird and wild and in your face. As we transition from ‘reservations in-hand’ to ‘no reservations – no problem,’ we followed a hunch that the fully booked Goblin Valley State Park 100 miles northeast of Capitol Reef might…
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Capitol Reef – Andacite To See
Our two weeks under Watchman’s eye gave us a new sense of self. We left at day break with a general sense of direction to head east and not much in the way of reservations. It is a lot less structured than what we used to expect from ourselves and our colleagues as college prof…
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YES WE CANyon
When your primary vehicles are two wheels and six, any excursion normally made with four has to be “worth it.” Shower transitions to closet, dinette to living room storage, Comos on the back, slides in, jacks up, Betty barreling along, snarling traffic and the smell of brake dust in the morning. We were among the…
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Wetwalkers
Big hike and bikes require rest and stretch, best accomplished with a good book, laundry and a stroll downtown. After one western omelet, two Motrin, and a few chapters in Eric’s Streets of Laredo and Sheri’s Breaking my Cover – My Life as a CIA Spy, we gathered up our dirty canyon clothes, donned our…
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A Day In The Pits
Since beef and kamut soup takes 8 hours of slow cooking, our best while-we-wait activity was 11 miles outside the park in the Southwest Desert. Kamut is an ancient grain from Egypt that gets frequent mentions from Sheri’s favorite on-line chef, Cookie & Kate. It turns out, we have a pantry full of ancient grains…