Beware the Land Shark

Brenna was off watching some over hyped pop starlet in Atlanta last night and smartly stayed there overnight.  I, on the other hand, was here holding down the fort.  Which Brenna does a great job of handling every day, so her day/night out to catch a concert was well deserved.

We woke on Sunday morning.  Well, I woke on Sunday, with Aiden poking me in the nose saying, "I want to play with you...after you get me a waffle 'cause I can't reach them." I looked at the clock.

6:13 a.m.

Ugh...

The rest of the kids woke eventually.  By saying that, I mean that Bryce was up shortly after Aiden and Ansley dragged herself out of bed sometime around nine...uh...thirty.  Yep, she is a carbon copy of her Mom as a teen...already.

Once they were all up and semi-functional, I made Sunday morning pancakes, and began thinking, what in the heck am I going to do with these little people?  They were scarfing down the pancakes at an alarming pace, and I was quickly running out of time on my first plan for entertaining them.  Food.  I was going to be chased down with the same enthusiasm as they were eating breakfast, if I didn't come up with something fast.

I shouted over the breakfast time din. (Honestly, does anyone know how kids eat, shout, fight, hurt themselves while sitting in a simple chair, and breathe at the same time?  I don't know, but there must be some scientific study on it by now...I'll google it later.)

Anyhoo...I shouted, let's play a game outside before it gets hot.  Yes, I knew it was already too late for the hot part.  I swear I saw a bird on the bird feeder burst into flame a moment before, but I had to do something though.

What do you want to do?  Play knights, kings and pirates?  "Yeeufff!" they replied with mouths full of jelly covered pancakes, and then Aiden said, "and there should be a shark!"

Ok...why not!

They gathered up their shoes, put on swimsuits and got some ideas together on what to do.  Bryce said something about sliding away out of a castle on the zip line and crashing into a wall or something.  I figured, what better than to smash stuff while on a zip line.  Yes, I am a guy and assuredly my poor wife's 4th child.  The next 20 minutes were spent finding capes, swords and a shark costume...naturally.  We also spent a few minutes gathering up all the plastic blocks in the basement that we could load into the wagon in order to build a target...uh...castle.

When I saw how excited they were, I pulled out the GoPro.  Nothing that silly and playful should go undocumented.  Not with today's technology.  Right?

Well whether you agree or not that we should, as a society, spend lots of our time making dumb movies with GoPro cameras, we did it anyway.  And we had a blast!

Enjoy and happy Sunday!

A real JEM -- not apologizing for that one...

Ah, the final Utah mountain bike video that you have been waiting for, or quietly wishing I would accidentally forget about editing...

I can't tell you how much footage that Nathan and I took over the course of the trip to Utah.  The number of hours of video was a little over the top, but it has been loads of fun re-watching some of this stuff and trying my hand at editing together questionably interesting videos for others.  I do like to share these videos because it lets other people see some of the views that we got to see.  Bikes are great in the sense that they are quiet, you still can appreciate the views without the confinement of a car, you connect with the outdoors, and you can ride out into places that it would take many hours of walking and overnight camping to see.  Plus, it's a heck of a fun hobby.

I wanted to ride this loop from the first day we got there, but the rains kept us away and the trail a mess, so I had to wait until the last day before we were going to head up to Bryce Canyon.  Nathan opted to ride part of the ride with me, but wasn't in the mood to put up with the first half which included some grueling uphills to get to the top of the JEM trail.  Hurricane Rim was the first segment and it skirted the edge of the Virgin river and offered up some great views.  This ride also pointed out that I am totally directionally impaired.  I had a map and the map said that the trail turned to the right.  The trouble being that out in the wide open area, there were multiple jeep trails and other random single-track looking trails that were probably cut by animals walking through the tumbleweeds.

I ended up taking the wrong track and heading down into the canyon by the river at one point.  At another offshoot, I found that I was off in no man's land trying to follow the rim of the canyon around.  After about 45 minutes of riding, hiking, and fussing at myself liberally, a vulture flew close over my head.  It wasn't just cruising, it was checking me out.  I decided that was a sign to just find my way back to the original trail and head up a different direction.  I was furious.  I could still even see the house where we stayed out in the distance, but I couldn't get there because of a canyon in the way.  Nor could I call Brenna and say my ride plans had changed because cell service in the middle of the desert is sketchy at best.  I was officially not having any fun, so bailing out and just riding up part of the loop and coming back down seemed like the best way to salvage what was supposed to be a fun ride.

I rode up the JEM trail about a mile and magically found (drumroll please) the rest of the Hurricane Rim trail.  I don't know if that didn't tick me off even more because the map didn't say that the Hurricane Rim and the JEM were the same trail for any length of time.  I can't really blame the map.  I'm a little thick headed sometimes and probably just didn't read the map right.  Anyway, I was off again and had only wasted an hour wandering in the wilderness.  A true Moses ride -- thank goodness it wasn't 40 years of wandering, even though it was beginning to feel like it.

I found Brenna and Nathan an hour later in a parking lot looking worried.  I was after all, pretty late in my estimates of when I would meet them there.  The Goulds climb was looming across the road where I would head up a steep road for quite a distance before linking up with the Goulds trail and then the top of the JEM.  Nathan wisely opted to meet me on a side road where he didn't have to put up with the climb.  I being a little thick headed, as I stated before, wanted to ride up the thing.  The effort is cathartic in a way.

The ride was definitely better once I had a buddy with me.  It meant we could at least laugh at each other if we managed to get lost again.  The Goulds trail wound around the colorful reds, whites and even green looking sand/clay at the base of Gooseberry Mesa, and it was fun, but not the main event.  We were ready for the 8 mile downhill where we had seen signs that bike traffic was one way, and that bikes achieved "dangerous speeds" so to be careful.  That's a great advertisement for mountain biking if ever there was one.  Besides, there was nobody around for miles and we could enjoy the expansive desert views whilst tearing around as fast as we could get the bikes to go.

That's enough typing about a subject that most of you couldn't care less about.  I'll let the video show you more of the ride instead.  I hooked my camera on facing backwards and it worked pretty well, but it worked its way loose on the way down, so the video gets a little floppy in places.  I need to build a better mounting system, but the rear facing view was perfect.  We would get footage of both of us as we went flying through the tumbleweeds.

Enjoy.

They named a canyon for Me? -- Bryce Canyon

My son has been enamored with the place ever since he learned of it.  "They named it after me?" he says.  Perhaps not, but and after hiking around the entire place, I'll have to take him there someday.

I'm glad that he didn't go this time though.  He would have passed out within the first 2 miles, and we hiked until even Brenna stated,  "Not one more step.  It's hot. I'm tired. You can get the car." as she found a heaven sent log bench after climbing back up to the rim of the canyon.

I know I need to wrap up my posts about this trip, and I can't seem to find time to edit together the last big a "Moses Ride"(i.e. seems like you are lost in the desert for 40 years) video. I'll get to that next, but for the sake of getting a story written, I'll jump out of order and write up Bryce Canyon.

Of all the strange geological formations we have seen out in Utah over the past 2 trips, this pretty much tops it.  Arches national park was cool, but Bryce Canyon was something else.  It's high elevations and alien rock forms "hoodoos" are a true miracle to see and explore.  It's actually not a canyon, but a ridge where water has been eroding away the sides for millions of years dissolving the softer rock compounds away and leaving constantly changing spires and deep cuts in the rock.  The hoodoos look like giant drip castles from the beach.  Eventually the erosion will cut deeper into the high ridge and level the whole place out.

What struck me most was the color.  Every hour as the sun would move the colors would be different.  From a deep orange and white in the morning to pinks and tans in the afternoon.  The shadow effects were remarkable and made for photographs that you couldn't really get wrong.  Utah, makes my total hack photography skills better just by being there.

And with that, I see this post turning into one of my literarily (perhaps even literally) lazy posts and more into a slide show.  Hopefully you will enjoy it just the same.  Assuming that anyone even visits this link at all.

You enter Bryce Canyon NP from the rim and hike down into the base.  The trails wind all over among the walls and spires.  The place is actually named after a Mormon settler that famously mentioned that Bryce Canyon was "A heck of a place to lose a cow".  Fortunately for us, we weren't looking for any large animals down there.  The joys of a relaxing vacation...  I'm also glad we were up at 10k feet because I could tell even at the mid day temperatures in late spring that for much of the summer the canyon would be dangerously hot.

I love the twisted gnarled nature of the junipers and pines on the slopes all over the canyon country in Utah.  The environment is so harsh that they are just clinging to life on craggy hills, but they seem to keep growing just the same.

The rain hung over the far mountains, but never made it to us.  You don't realize how small our horizons are here in the southeast until you get to a place like this.  We are always surrounded by tall trees in the Appalachian and you can only see maybe 100-200 yards at any given time?  Out west you can see for miles quite regularly.  Not a bad thing, just an interesting observation.  If you grew up out west and came to the southeast it might be a pretty claustrophobic place.

We got up early to catch the sunrise over the park, and realized that we didn't own enough clothing for the high altitude temperatures.  

We were standing on the rim overlooking sunrise point (aptly named...) with the temperature reading 29 in the car as we pulled up to the park entrance.  The interesting variation is that when we finished the day the car thermometer read 98 degrees.  That's quite a change for one day.

The sun flashed above the horizon and the glow crept slowly down the rock faces as the sun cleared the mountains and mesas in the distance.

May 25th and there were mounds of snow 10 feet high still on the ground.  I have no idea how much snow this area must have had just a month before.

We climbed to the top of a rock outcrop to look back at the tourist laden observation area.  It does amaze me the amount of people that will drive everywhere in these parks and just hop out for a photo and drive on without exploring or even trying to hike around.  They are really missing out.

Hiking shoes got a few miles on them during this trip.

One of the many arches that are found everywhere if you look for them.

Bryce Canyon, a place I highly recommend visiting if you ever make it out to Utah, and as I keep finding out, we could spend years in the state and not see everything that we would want to.  I'll try to edit up the JEM / Hurricane Rim/ Goulds trail ride video for the next post.

Gooseberry Mesa - On and Off the Bike

That poor rental car.  There was a "graded road" that we had to drive to get to the top of the mesa.  I'll assume that when one grades a road, one doesn't grade the parts that seem straight up over rocks.  After finding the road that would get us up on top of Gooseberry Mesa at a non-descript turn off in Rockville, UT.  (pop 247), the dirt road climbs 1,000 feet in a few miles on some pitches where we were questioning the ability of the little red Corolla loaded with 3 huge mountain bikes hanging from the trunk to make it. We were creeping like one of those rock crawling jeeps to keep from bottoming out the car and tearing parts off. 


* Note: Not us -- this is just an example of what people do with their off road vehicles in Utah.  Interesting passtime.  I like the idea but wish they wouldn't tear the whole place up.  It's a free country though, so go for it.

A couple of times people would come down the road past us in their huge pickups with lift packages and they would hang out the windows cheering our progress.  It was slow.  Really slow.  Picking our way over rocks in a car that really only was designed to putter along on properly paved roads in suburbia.

The little car scraped and banged and bounced it's way up and up and up and eventually arrived at a parking lot where we gave it a rest as the sickly-sweet stink of an overworked motor wafted around.

We unloaded the bikes and decided to ride to the "practice loop".  Brenna was going to try her hand at riding the petrified sand dunes, but this was a big mesa and she wisely decided she shouldn't ride some of the trails.

The practice loop, it turns out, wasn't easy.

I keep telling Brenna that guys dig chicks with bike related scrapes and bruises! Well...with those battle scars, she is Ms. USA!

After a few swoops up and down the sandstone, crashing and generally feeling like she was over her skill level, Brenna decided to let us go on and we would meet up later.  There was enough to explore using some of the easier trails and the rutted dirt road down the middle of the mesa that she would be happily occupied without being terrified the whole time. Plus, up on the mesa top, our phones had service, so we weren't out of touch if something should happen!  Having functioning phones was pretty unusual since we spent the week having to drive to Hurricane or Springdale to get a cell signal.

We did meet up again out on the North Rim trail at an overlook, after our own crashing entertainment. Oddly, women don't think guys with bike related scrapes and bruises are quite as cool as we think they are.  They just think we are 8 year old idiots...  Oh well...at least I married the attractively bruised Ms. USA.  She is legally bound to hang out with me, even if I act like I'm 8 and ride bikes around all day.

Successfully avoiding the #1 reason why people fall off cliffs.  Posing for pictures...  The other reasons are listed in this post here.

Group photo - smile everyone!

The bands and layers in the mesa's edges would give you a weird vertigo sensation when you looked at them from a high point.  At varying times this area has been an ocean (and at one point part of the gulf of Mexico...sort of). Layers of sediment that were put down with different chemical compositions create the colors in the rock. 

Glad that Nathan joined me in getting more video than we can possibly watch.  I know the cameras are goofy, but it allows me to waste time and share our rides with people from our point of view.  Besides, we look goofy anyway, so the cameras on our heads don't impact a thing.

The elevation changes were dramatic, and worked us over pretty well.  Especially with the distinctly thinner air than we are used to at home.  I took this picture from the trail so you can see how much the trail would climb, descend, and twist around.

Riding home.

Nathan kept trying to bunny hop the cattle grate, and I kept missing the shot.  The camera wouldn't fire fast enough when he jumped, but I figured I would show this great picture of the grate.  Nathan cleared it and was just out of the shot to the right.  It would certainly be more interesting with him in the picture, but after making him do wind sprints 2-3 times to try to capture him mid jump, I guess we need to show something for his efforts.  Just imagine him there doing something X-games-awesome-super-cool in mid air in the middle of the photo...

A thunderstorm started popping lighting around us at the end of our ride, so we re-grouped and headed for home after spending about 6 hours riding.  On the way down, Nathan decided to descend the "road" we came in on by bicycle vs praying the brakes wouldn't catch fire in the Toyota.  He had more fun I'm sure, and even driving with the car in 1st gear the whole way down the road, the brakes smelled like they were hot enough to roast marshmallows over them.  Very nasty tasting marshmallows, but roasted nonetheless.

I'll save you any more of my long winded descriptions of bike riding among the rocks and ancient sand dunes, and let the video give you an idea of how cool it is to ride in places like this.

Enjoy and have a great weekend!  I'm heading to the beach and then to the lake!  It's a tough life...I know...


Gooseberry Mesa from Brad on Vimeo.

Angel's Landing

As the prophets of old would go to high places to confer with their various gods, they would have done well to climb up to this place.  


Angels Landing.  


The name extends from a story of a minister that said that the outcropping at the end of a fin of rock high above the canyon floor was so inaccessible that “only angels could land there.”  

Fortunately for those of us who as yet are without wings and halos, the park service in Zion National Park found a path, and over years, built a path to get us - mere mortals - to this rocky outcrop.


We stopped for some early evening pictures at one of the lower outlooks of the trail not knowing if we would really have time to get to the top before the light faded.

We had been riding bikes all morning and into the afternoon, so we were somewhat tired, but didn’t want to waste a moment of time since we had only a finite number of days with which to enjoy the beauty of Zion.  




The guide books called the hike “strenuous”, and that it would take us 4-5 hours to complete.  We gauged that the sun would set around 7:30pm and that we would just have enough time to make the ascent before sunset.  


We could then watch sunset, but would have to make our way back across the treacherous fin and onto the relative safety of the switchbacks before it became too dark to see.  I threw a headlamp into my pack, just in case things went poorly and we didn’t make it down before it was pitch black.  

Normally, guide books are very conservative in their assessments of how difficult or how long a hike can take.  By a factor of 2 usually, but in this case they were right on.  The switchbacks were steep and a good hard effort, but certainly not complicated.  Nathan eschewed them and decided to climb straight up the retaining walls for the last 10 or so switchbacks.  It looked like fun, but to keep from smashing my camera, I declined to follow suit.  

Your Safety is Your Responsibility

At the top of the switchbacks we had gained about 1,000 feet of altitude and then the trail began to work its way out across the rocky fin.  Some sections were pretty wide, 30-40 feet, but in many areas we found ourselves on sand covered stone with drops on either side of hundreds of feet if not sheer cliff faces to the canyon floor.  


Falling from that height would give you a good 8-10 seconds of free-fall to think about things before impact.  In light of the chance to make that plunge, I am strangely pleased to note that there were not guard rails and fences everywhere.  There were only minimal chains mounted to the rock in some of the more exposed areas for you to hold onto if you needed.  


The bus ride out to the trail head featured one of the best lines I have ever heard in our overprotective, anti-self-reliance, and pathetically litigious society.  What amazed me was that it was coming from the government run park service.  The narrative stated that this hike was dangerous, fatalities had occurred on the hike, and that “Your Safety is Your Responsibility.”  


It was satisfying and shocking.


I was sure those words had been outlawed in the U.S.  

Finally, A place where it is encouraged that you make your own decision.  


For example: If the last part of a hike is too scary or you are un-fit, make your decision and don’t do it.  There is more than enough to enjoy at anyone's particular skill level.  Do what you can to enjoy the world, but be smart!  The park service didn’t do the normal pseudo-parental thing and shut down the activity, or put fencing , an escalator and elevator access to these high places.  


They gave good advice and let you, the visitor, make the right decision based on your ability.  By the way, I am in favor of the bus system since the tens of thousands of cars that used to jam the single out and back road in Zion would ruin the experience.  Now you can catch a bus every 7 minutes either direction and not have every moron’s stereo blaring, fight for parking and listen to engines revving during your exploration of the Park.

We reached the saddle of the fin before the final climb up to the landing and found a young lady sitting and enjoying the view.  

You can see the young lady that I referred to...just above Brenna...who is just to the right of my thinning hair. @^$%^;*(*&;^%$#!!!!!!!!

After talking for a moment or two, she said she was scared even where she was and had declined to follow her companions to the top.  She was content to enjoy the heights from right where she was and would wait for them to return.  


Ah, an example of good decisions not determined by lawyers.  

Up we went.  And up it was.  Over rocks and sand dusted stone where you had to really think about where to put your hands and feet.  It was one notch off of really needing to know how to climb.  What an experience!

Nathan ascending -- The blur is caused by moisture on the lens.  The temperature change was dramatic as the sun was setting.  Very cool effect on the shot.

Brenna working her way across the fin of rock.

Only a little exposure to her right.  I see her enjoying things like this...


I am so in love.

Looking back from where the switchbacks end and we started to make our way through the rocks on the fin out to Angel's Landing.

When we reached the top we were rewarded with a view that was fitting with the name of the place.  We stayed at the peak until the sandstone had turned from a red tinged tan to deep reds in the setting sun.  

The view as the sun set and the shadows crept up the eastern cliffs...the silence of the space...the wind gently blowing...nothing else.

Heaven simply heaven...

The Utah crew!

Nathan

Finally the shadows on the canyon wall crept high enough to signal that we needed to get going lest we end up clambering down over the exposed sections of rock in the dark.  I didn’t mind the idea of coming down the established trail of switchbacks in the dark, but I had no intention of using our lamp to guide us down the more narrow sections.

We were completely gassed after the hike.  We made our way slowly down the switchbacks as the bug chasing bats flew disturbingly close to my headlamp, and subsequently my face, we drew up plans for the coming days.  


Next: I’ll figure out how much time I can allocate to video editing.  I may do the Goosebery Mesa story and video or a short post on climbing to the rim of Zion.  i.e. The never ending trail to observation point.


I know that this series of posts has taken forever and I hope you are enjoying the stories as much as I am enjoying writing about the memories of visiting these places.  There is more to my writing than Utah tourism for sure, and the 4th of July lake stories will be coming soon, but for now.  You guys are stuck in the desert with me.