I finished laying rocks down in the 40' long irrigation ditch in my back yard today. I lined the bottom with large flat rocks for the water to flow over, and lined the sides with rectangular, blocky rocks to contain the flow of water. So far they ("they" being the water users along the ditch) haven't started running water from the canal down the ditch, but I expect it any day now. Perhaps tomorrow would be a good day? ;)

I also planted 14 tomato plants in the garden plot this evening. Several weeks ago Traci and I planted, from seed, a mix of large tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and yellow "pear" tomatoes. Most of the plants are over a foot tall now, and I had to tear some branches off them and bury them deeply to keep them from falling over after being planted in the soil. We've also got some corn, squash (crookneck and spaghetti), and cucumbers started, but we got a late start and they won't be ready to put into the ground for another week or two.

I've had a fascination with balanced rocks during the past couple of years, especially those which lie upon and protect an underlying layer of less resistant rock, such as this and this and this and this. Today, I ran across this picture in which the same principle is applied, but in a much different manner. It sure gave me a good laugh.

We left Price relatively late in the afternoon yesterday and hauled the ATVs up to Kenilworth to do some riding in the area. I would've rather gone in the morning but Traci had to go to church, though now I'm glad we went when we did--more on that later. Here's a link to some pictures from yesterday.

We parked just off the pavement near the big curve in the highway where it enters Kenilworth and started unloading the ATVs. During the few minutes that it took me to unload both machines, we saw a few other people riding past on ATVs, one of which turned out to be a guy who lives just up the street from me whom I'd never met before. He stopped to chat, and while I didn't recognize him, he knew who I was--he probably just recognized the truck since it's always parked in front of my house.

After unloading and getting all geared up (helmets, gloves, etc.), we started up the road in Bull Hollow. We tried that road several weeks ago but got stopped by some deep snow, but yesterday the road was clear. Our first stop was at some old mining equipment that appeared to be three huge motor housings that had been stripped of everything but the outer metal casings. I'm assuming that they were either for ventilation fans or for pulling tram cars, but so much of the area has been reclaimed that it's difficult to tell what it used to look like. We had only been stopped for a minute or two when a large group of ATVs came up the trail behind us. We were parked in the middle of the road because we didn't expect company, so we had to move our machines off to the side. A few minutes after that group passed, a couple of other people came riding up the road, and that sort of set the pace for the rest of the day--we saw a lot of people in the area all evening long, which was quite a surprise. I didn't realize the area was so popular.

We tried riding to the end of the road in Bull Hollow, some boulders had fallen in the middle of the road and I wasn't confident that I could ride around them without damaging my ATV, so we parked and hiked the remaining 1/4-mile to the end. There were some old concrete foundations and sandstone block walls, but I couldn't tell what they used to be a part of. The upper part of the canyon is closed off on three sides by some enormous and scenic cliffs, and it would be fun to go back to hike around some more.

After Bull Hollow we rode over to Cordingly Canyon, which is the next canyon to the east. I had wanted to try riding up a road that was visible in Google Earth that leads to the Aberdeen Mine, but I didn't see any sign of a road branching off the Cordingly Canyon road. Traci had already ridden ahead of me and out of sight, so I decided to make a stop there on our way back to hike around and look for the road.

In Cordingly Canyon, the road has been improved since the last time I was there. Fire crews bulldozed the road last July to fight a wildfire, and where you could only ride an ATV before, now you can drive an SUV or truck. We saw a lot of snow under the heavy cover of pine trees along the road, and even drove through a couple of small snow drifts across the road. Right where the trail gets steep and starts switching back up the mountainside to the top of the Book Cliffs, there was a gate that hadn't been there at the beginning of last year. Since it was getting late and we couldn't go any farther, we started back for the truck. I did stop again briefly where I thought the Aberdeen Mine road should have been, and I hiked up the hillside and came across what looked like a wash or gully. However, it followed the curvature of the mountainside so closely instead of running downhill, and it certainly appears to be a road in the aerial photo, so perhaps the tram grade has just been reclaimed by nature.

Back at the truck, I had loaded both ATVs and was beginning to tie them down, when the strangest thing happened. Let me start this off with a little backstory. In the last month I've been to Kenilworth three times with Traci and the kids (and once without them), which is normally about as many times as I go there in a whole year. Each time we were there, I always had some story to tell them about growing up there--I'd point out a canyon and tell them how I'd ridden my bicycle up there with a friend, or show them the house I used to live in, or tell them about the time I climbed the mountain above town, etc. Most of the stories involved my best friend at the time, Daniel, who I haven't seen since we were kids. So, as I was tying down the ATVs, it was a shock to see Daniel come down the road on a 3-wheeler. We both immediately recognized each other, and he hit the brakes and pulled off the road next to me. He had his son with him, so his son and my two boys played while we caught up. It was kind of a surreal experience, hanging out in my hometown with my childhood best friend. We talked until the sun was almost down, for probably almost two hours, but he had to get back home to Salt Lake and Traci and I needed to get the kids home for some dinner. The timing couldn't have been more right for our chance encounter, but we exchanged phone numbers and hopefully we'll keep in touch.

It's been nice having ATVs because we can ride for hours and hours (seeming all day long) on a single tank of gas (3.5 gallons). The bad thing is that it takes a lot of diesel to haul the ATVs anywhere using the truck. Diesel is currently $4.19/gallon, so I've been spending a lot of time looking for close-to-home places to ride the ATVs. Last weekend we did some riding a couple miles north of Price and found a couple of trails that were kind of fun, but really nothing special. The nice thing about them is that I only had to haul the ATVs 1.5 miles from home. I found some good looking trails here that are primarily used by rock crawlers, so I'll have to find out if they're suitable for our 4-wheelers--I'm guessing not, but it's worth looking into. I've also been looking around in Google Earth to find trails to ride on. There are a surprising number of old mine roads in the Book Cliffs, and I think we're going to ride a couple of them this weekend. We tried riding up Bull Hollow just north of Kenilworth several weeks ago, but we ran into too much snow to go all the way up the canyon. I'd like to ride it again this weekend, and possibly try Cordingly and Alrad canyons as well (time permitting). There are a couple more old roads near the end of Airport Road that dead-end near several coal mining prospects, but those would take a whole day by themselves.

I'll have to save my pennies in order to ride where I'd really like to go--places like the ATV trails in the center of the San Rafael Swell, like Devil's Racetrack, Eagle Canyon, etc. By the time I can easily afford that kind of trip (or when fuel prices go down), it'll be pretty hot to be riding and hiking in that area, but the change of scenery will be worth it.

On Saturday Traci, the kids, and I went for a drive in the truck to get a few more rocks to put in the irrigation ditch, and we came across a trail sign in the bottom of Mead's Wash just north of town. The sign called the trail Curse Canyon and said that it was rated "Extreme 3" (I still have no idea what that means). We went as far as we could in the truck, but we eventually came to a dip that was too steep to get a long-wheelbase truck through. We decided to head back the next day on our ATVs to check the rest of the trail out. When we returned yesterday, we only got another 1/4-mile past where we'd driven the truck on Saturday before we decided to turn the ATVs around. It was a pretty gnarly trail, with a lot of steep curves and dips that really test your balance. We decided to turn around when we got to a point where one person would have to drive the ATV while another person put their entire body weight on one side of the ATV to keep it from tipping over. I still want to go back to ride the trail all the way to its end, but I'll have to do it someday when Traci and I can find somebody to watch the kids while we ride.

We placed a geocache at our turnaround point because it was such an awesome place. There were concretions all over the ground there, and the centers of them had some nice crystals inside. I got to checking to see how long it's been since somebody placed a cache in Carbon County, and it's been 5½ months! There seems to be a fair number of geocachers around here, but very few of them ever place caches. I've placed more than 60 of them, and probably half of them are in Carbon County. I think that number is going to go up very soon, 'cause if there aren't any caches for me to find, I might as well place some. :)

Guess which state's DMV office isn't full of dumb asses. C'mon, guess. Give up? A relative of mine in California owns a construction company and has gotten license plates for 14 vehicles, and all the plates bear his last name, Udink. It seems that the lights are on over in California, while they're still as dim as ever in Oregon and Utah. I really hope that nobody complains about the Udink plates in California--or at least that their DMV has more sense than most others when it comes to fielding complaints. At least the governor over there might understand the importance of a person's last name.

We came home a day early from camping this weekend due to heavy wind blowing dust everywhere, but it was still a good time. I stayed at camp most of the time because it was just me and the kids, and I couldn't go off hiking with the rest of the group because the kids couldn't have handled that much hiking. Traci came down Saturday evening, and Sunday the whole family went on a drive with several other people to see the Upper Black Box. By Sunday afternoon the wind had been blowing hard for two straight days, so we decided to just pack up and head home.

I was off work yesterday, so I leisurely spent the day hosing all the dust off our camping gear. Bradley learned to ride his bike without training wheels while we were camping, so yesterday evening Traci and I walked while the boys rode their bikes up to the park so they could ride on the old tennis courts for a while. Bradley is fearless while riding his bike, which is just the opposite of how Michael was. Bradley will ride his bike down steep hills and off curbs, and he's only been riding for a few days! When he crashes, he just picks the bike up and keeps going. Michael was pretty cautious when he first learned to ride, and the slightest crash usually caused him to cry a little.

Over the past two years, I'd wanted to either lay culvert or pour concrete in the irrigation ditch that runs through my back yard. I actually bought some culvert last year, but it was too big to fit inside the existing concrete ditch where it enters and leaves my property, so I returned it. I also once dug the ditch out in preparation for pouring concrete, but they started running irrigation water before I had a chance to pour it. Last night, I had the idea of lining the ditch with large, flat rocks and filling the gaps with mortar. Today after I got off work, Traci and I drove up onto Wood Hill and found enough rocks to cover the bottom of the truck bed with a layer and a half of sandstone. After dinner, we started digging out the dirt and laying down flat rocks along the bottom of the ditch, then piled up some elongated rocks to form the sides of the ditch. It turned out looking really nice so far, but we've got a few more days' worth of work to do to get it finished. When we're done, it'll eliminate the mud that's caused me so many headaches since we got a dog last year.

I spent half of yesterday hunched over the toilet. The water leak in the camp trailer turned out not to be a loose clamp on a water line like I'd hoped. Instead, it was the water valve on the toilet that was leaking, so I pulled the toilet out of the trailer and replaced the valve with a new one. The valve itself was $50, which seems ridiculously expensive, but it was something I couldn't do without on such short notice. I found one online for $33, but couldn't wait that long for it to get here. Removing and reinstalling the toilet was pretty difficult because of the confined space, but luckily I didn't have any major problems (like I usually do when fixing any sort of plumbing). The worst part was that when I removed the floor bolts, I could only turn each one 1/8th of a turn before having to flip the wrench around and give it another 1/8th of a turn, then repeating it all over again dozens of times.

Today, I washed the mud off of the ATVs and changed the oil. I hate changing oil, and I thought an oil change on an ATV would be much easier than on a car, but that turned out not to be the case, at least not at first. When I removed the oil filter cover on my machine, oil puked out all over the side of the engine and pooled up in the footwell. When I did Traci's machine, I cut a plastic cup to fit under the oil filter cover so I wouldn't have the same problem on hers. There's not much room under there, and the cup was barely big enough to hold all the oil that came out when I removed the cover. I changed Traci's oil in half the time it took to do mine, and I didn't spill a drop the second time.

I also cleaned all the dried mud off the driveway today. It's been at least a year since I cleaned the driveway, and there were several different colors of mud caked on the concrete. I filled a 3-gallon bucket to overflowing with dirt that I scraped from the front 25 feet of the driveway. There's that much or more mud still caked on the truck, which I haven't washed in probably two years--I'll get around to that one of these years.

The camping trip this weekend turned out great, despite my worries about cold temperatures at night. The first trip of the season is usually when we get all the bugs worked out of the camp trailer--there's always something that doesn't quite work right--and this time there was a leaky water line in the bathroom that I'll need to fix before we go camping again in two weeks.

I took half the day off work on Friday, so we got an early start and left town at 2:00 pm. I hauled my ATV in the back of my truck while Mark and Sam hauled Traci's ATV down in their truck, but they didn't arrive at camp until around 7:00 pm. We did some short ATV rides that evening, but mostly we just hung out at camp and soaked up the heat from the campfire.

After breakfast on Saturday, Mark and I set off on a ride to two balanced rocks, neither of which was more than five miles from camp as the crow flies, but the ATV trail leading to them took us more than five hours and 25 miles round trip. We had a bit of a scare early on during the ride. Just over a mile from camp, I had rounded a corner and topped a hill, and when I looked behind me Mark wasn't there. I stopped just past the bottom of the hill and waited for a couple of minutes, and Mark finally came on the radio and said that Traci's ATV had backfired a couple of times then died, and it wouldn't start again. I rode back and looked over all the wires and hoses but couldn't find anything wrong. As I was puzzling over it, Mark noticed that the fuel shutoff valve was turned off. I felt like an idiot--I had turned it off after loading the ATV into Mark's truck, and didn't remember to turn it back on after they arrived at camp. What's strange is that it had been driven more than two miles with the valve turned off, so that added to my confusion before Mark figured out the problem.

We made it to both balanced rocks without further problems, and the ride was scenic and very enjoyable. We made a lot of stops along the way to take pictures and let the dog rest (she had been running alongside for a lot of the ride). I placed a geocache at the farthest balanced rock--there was already one at the nearer rock--and then we rode back to camp fairly quickly with only one other stop along the way.

On Sunday morning, Traci and I rode my ATV while Mark and Sam rode the other, and we drove along the trail that goes around Flattop Mountain. We'd left the kids back at camp under the care of Sam & Mark's oldest daughter, so we didn't spend too much time on that ride. We made it just a little more than halfway to the end of the trail before turning around, but I'd like to return someday to finish it off. Later that afternoon Mark and I loaded up four of the kids on the ATVs and went on a short ride across Lemon Flats. That also was a very scenic ride, but the trail didn't get very close to the rock formations (mostly Curtis Formation) and I didn't feel like doing much hiking with the kids, so that'll be another great place to go back to when I have more time.

Near the end of last year's camping season, I tried unsuccessfully to get my chainsaw to start. I tried starting it so many times that my arm, shoulder, and neck hurt pretty bad for more than a week. Now that we're going on our first camping trip of the year this weekend, I decided that I'd better go out for some more firewood, and for some reason the chainsaw worked just fine today. I just about filled up the bed of my truck with pinyon pine that had been bulldozed during the creation of a gas well road near Spring Glen. I haven't showered yet, so I still smell like two-stroke engine exhaust and pine sawdust--one of my favorite smells.

I filled up both fuel tanks in the truck today at a cost of $105. Diesel fuel is $3.99 now, and I hope it doesn't break the $4 mark. With prices like this, I don't think we'll do much camping too far from home this spring. Traci is really the one who wanted to go camping this weekend. I would have been satisfied just going for another all-day ATV ride, preferably somewhere in the northern San Rafael Swell. When we woke up this morning at 7:00 a.m. and the temperature outside was 21°, I asked Traci if she was sure she really wanted to go camping this early in the year. I think this is the earliest we've ever gone. The temperatures are only supposed to get down to around freezing this weekend, so I can at least cope with that.

We went on another ATV ride yesterday, this time in the Helper/Kenilworth area. I uploaded some pictures from that trip and from our trip two weeks ago to my Picasa account.

We parked the truck near Spring Glen and rode the ATVs along the old railroad grade toward Helper. I had been out there a couple of times before on my mountain bike and in my '79 Ford truck. We rode up Helper Canyon (also known as Kenilworth Wash) on a short but really fun old mining road. We eventually came to a washed-out portion that was covered in boulders and impassible except on foot. We hiked up a couple of the switchbacks on the old road, but Traci and the kids weren't up for such a steep hike, so we hiked back down to the ATVs and rode back to the railroad grade. I'll have to return to the switchbacks alone someday to see what is at the top.

We rode the railroad grade all the way to Kenilworth, stopping a couple of times on the way to look at some interesting old relics, such as a wooden culvert under the grade and some old stone building foundations near Kenilworth. We crossed the pavement on Kenilworth Main Street and stopped for lunch on the north side of town. After lunch we kept going north and rode another rough old mining road in the canyon directly north of town (I believe it's called Bull Hollow). There are three old mines in that canyon, but we only made it about a mile into the canyon before running into snow drifts that were too deep to cross. The first mine was on the hillside directly above the snow drift, but it would take a steep climb up a huge tailings pile to reach the mine entrance, so I'm saving that one for another solo trip later in the year.

We had a good time on the ATVs yesterday and managed to avoid the Easter weekend crowds. We left town around 10:00 a.m. and drove to Farnham Dome, which is only about 12 miles from home. It was colder (and windier!) than it had been the past couple of days, so we immediately got a campfire started, then took turns riding on a couple of trails around the area. We had lunch, did an Easter egg hunt for the kids, and roasted marshmallows. At one point, the wind shifted while Torrey was lying on the ground near the fire, and the flames singed her whiskers and some hair on one side of her face. The poor puppy--I had to cut most of her whiskers off on that side. Our camp was set up just off the main road over Farnham Dome, and we only saw one vehicle drive past the whole time we were there (six or seven hours), plus two ATVs drove past just a few minutes before we left.

We got home early enough for me to finish wiring the new tail lights I put on the camp trailer earlier this week. A couple of weeks ago I had moved the trailer forward in the driveway to allow the snow to melt where it had been shading it, and Traci asked me to back the trailer up as close to the gate as I could get it so that she could still park the car in the driveway. Well, I backed the trailer up as close as I could get it, then went an inch or two closer. :D It broke the right tail light, but I replaced both of them while I was at it because I'd been having problems with them working for the past couple of years.

I took the Christmas lights off my house today. I kept using all the snow on the roof as an excuse not to take the lights down, but the snow melted two or three weeks ago, so my excuse then was just pure laziness. Another couple of months and I might as well have left them up for next Christmas.

After Traci and the kids went to visit her parents later this afternoon, I went for a short ATV ride with Torrey just outside of Price, on the northeast side of town. There really aren't any good places to ride close to town--most of the roads are nice, smooth gravel roads that lead to natural gas wells. I actually think that the next I want to ride close(ish) to town, I'll head back to Farnham Dome. I saw some interesting stuff on the few short rides I took yesterday, like remnants of what appeared to be old drilling rigs, concrete footings, a concrete dam, and several capped off gas wells (CO2, I believe). It would be nice to ride an ATV in (full-sized vehicles are out of the question) and then hike around exploring the area.

Little did I know that, seven years ago, this post of mine would be such a popular place for people to vent on how badly Utah sucks. There are 68 comments on that post, some of which might as well be novels. I think the main reason for the number of comments is because the post comes up among the first few search results when people search for "utah sucks" on Google.

My stance on how badly Utah sucks has mellowed quite a bit in the past seven years. I still think it's the people that give Utah a bad name (the land itself is wonderful), but I've learned to just ignore them and do my own thing. There are some good things about Utah--relatively low crime rates, liberal (hah!) gun laws, endless recreation opportunities, cheap housing (at least in rural Utah), and low cost of living.

Lately, whenever a comment comes through on that post and the person commenting mentions how happy they are to be leaving or to have left Utah, I just sit back in my chair and grin. They don't know how good they had it. ;)

After we bought the ATVs last week, Traci and I kept trying to plan a day when we could take them out and get the engines through their break-in period. The weather was supposed to have been bad all weekend, so we had resigned ourselves to waiting another week before we could go for a ride. However, the weather on Friday actually turned out to be halfway decent, despite the forecast, so late Friday night we decided to see how the weather looks in the morning and make a decision on whether or not to go on Saturday. It was somewhat clear on Saturday morning, and the heavier clouds were hovering over the top of the Wasatch Plateau to the west and the Book Cliffs to the north and east, but nothing was spilling over into the valleys below. We decided to risk it and just go.

We went to the Grassy Trail Creek/Price River area (centered roughly in this area) because it was fairly close to home and the roads were good but not too good. The Honda recommended break-in guidelines call for slower acceleration and varied RPM operation for the first 15 miles, so we took it really easy and drove on a variety of road surfaces, but nothing too rough or steep. It took us several hours to get in enough mileage to consider the engines "broken in," and while the odometer on the ATV read about 18 miles, my GPS showed that we'd gone closer to 20. I tend to trust the GPS over the ATV because I've got years of experience with it and it's never once been wrong.

We got back to the truck and loaded up the ATVs just as the wind really picked up and a tiny bit of snow started falling. We didn't see any more snow during the drive home, but as soon as I got the ATVs unloaded and put back in the garage, the snow really started falling, and we got almost an inch overnight. I guess our luck held out perfectly as far as the weather went.

Now that the ATVs are broken in, I think the plan for this coming weekend is to head out with my sister and her family to do some riding. Since we'll be sharing two machines among 10 people, it's not worth driving a really long distance just to do some short rides on the ATVs, so we'll have to pick a place close to home, but hopefully far from the huge crowds of people that tend to converge on the desert on Easter weekend.

My website has been messed up most of the weekend. I haven't been able to get Movable Type to load so that I can post until just now--it has given me an error message each time. Trying to post a comment results in the same error message. My e-mail is also not working--when I check it, the server doesn't respond most of the time, and when it does I don't get any e-mail (not even spam), so I'm assuming that most incoming mail isn't reaching the server as well. I'll post again when everything is working again.

Edit: Everything seems to be working normally now. Shortly after I posted the above message, the spam started flowing again and Movable Type has been consistently working. Comments are also now working.

I talked to my insurance agent to insure the new ATVs today, and when the agent called me back with a quote, he informed me that my driving record showed that my driver's license was expired. I was really confused because I was sure it wouldn't have expired without me knowing about it, so I pulled out my license to check. Sure enough, it expired on my birthday, six and a half months ago! I guess I'm lucky that I didn't find out about it the hard way.

The lady at the driver's license office told me that they do normally send out renewal notices, but I sure didn't get one. I was also technically required to take a written driving test because it had been more than six months since my license expired, but I sweet-talked her out of it. I had a nice smile on my last license--a certain friend's mom who worked there wouldn't let me get away without smiling--but my new license picture looks more like a mugshot.

This isn't the first time the driver's license division failed to notify me about something important. When I moved to Provo to go to college in 1998, I sent them a written change of address as required. The address got entered into their system, but apparently they omitted the apartment number. Several months later I got a speeding ticket (one of many that I'd gotten as a teenager), and my license was suspended for three months. However, the suspension notice never reached me, and I didn't find out until about six months later when I got pulled over and ticketed yet again. For some reason, and luckily for me, the ticketing officer didn't run my information through dispatch (possibly due to the remote location in Spanish Fork Canyon). Upon returning home, I called the driver's license division to see how that ticket would affect my record, and it was only then that I was informed that my license had not only been suspended, but that the three months were up and I could get it reinstated that same day!