I'm just barely starting to wind down from my long camping trip. Here are a few selected pictures from the several hundred that I took. I got back three days ago, and I haven't had much time on the computer (except for work) since then. I drove down with Bradley Wednesday after work. It was windy as hell, and at one point on UT-24 I thought it was going to blow the trailer over. There was sand blowing across the road in some spots and drifts of sand were starting to form on the asphalt. By the time I got to camp, it was just too windy and cold to set up camp so I got the trailer as level as I could and set up the jackstands underneath it to keep it from rocking in the wind. Bradley and I ate an early dinner and then turned in for a restless night of sleep, with the gusty wind keeping me awake. I hate wind.

By Thursday morning the weather had gotten much calmer. I set up camp and just lazed around all day with Bradley. By evening, Traci and Michael showed up, with Sam and Mark and family close behind. It was nice having a campfire that night.

On Friday, we tried driving down Iron Wash to some sand dunes that are supposed to be there. You can see the sand dunes in Google Earth in imagery taken last year, but not in the USGS aerial photos from 10 years ago. 4WD was necessary to drive in the soft sand in the bottom of the wash, and the going was a little slow. It was fun, though! We only got a mile down the wash before running into a fence with no way around or through it. We got back on UT-24 and drove a bit farther north and tried a different road, but that one dead-ended at some fun sandstone hills that we drove on for a while. Here's a video from Iron Wash and surrounding area. After that, we just gave up on the dunes and headed back to camp. There were other geocachers there when we got back, and we stuck around the rest of the day while others started trickling in. All told, I think we had about 30 people camped there that night. There was a geocache called Fat Man's Misery about 300' from where my trailer was parked, so a bunch of us climbed up to it that evening. It was so fun I think I climbed up there four or more times throughout the weekend. Here's a video I put together from a few of the trips up to the cache.

On the following day a group of cachers hiked down Crack Canyon, but the hike wasn't quite kid-friendly so we hiked Wild Horse Canyon instead. We also found a few caches in the area, did the potluck dinner in the evening, and stayed around the campfire drinking well into the morning.

Most people went home on Sunday, including Traci and Michael. The weather started turning bad again that evening, and most everybody who was still at camp holed up in their trailers early. By early Monday morning, it started snowing/raining. Taking down camp wasn't too fun in the mud and rain, but I think it was still worth staying an extra night, just to have another day away from home and the rest of the world.

Since returning, I've either been at work, or unloading the camp trailer and truck, or cleaning out my garage. I bought a new Craftsman tiller today so I can till the garden and the front yard. I've borrowed my mom's tillers in the past for the garden, but I can't get either of them to start now--they're each well over 10 years old. I was originally going to rent a tiller, but at $120 per day from the only rental place in the county, it cost less than three days' rental to buy a really nice one. Bleh, so now my wallet's a bit lighter, and I've got something to keep me busy this weekend.

This past weekend's camping trip was a good warmup to what's coming this weekend. Luckily I don't have to make any repairs to the camp trailer. I'm hoping to leave for Temple Mountain tomorrow after work. I'm taking just Bradley with me, though Traci and Michael will join us on Thursday. They'll have to go home on Sunday, and Bradley and I will probably stay until Monday as long as there are other people around to keep us company.

We've got plans to hike Wild Horse Canyon and visit Wild Horse Window (or Skylight Arch as Tom calls it). We're also going to drive down Iron Wash (providing that it's not too sandy in the bottom) to some sand dunes near the San Rafael River that I saw from the opposite side of the river last year. Besides that, I think we'll just tag along with all the other geocachers on Saturday and Sunday.

The owners of the dog we found on Saturday finally caught up to us yesterday. They live in Castle Dale and had been camped a few miles from where we found the dog. I'm kind of bummed to see her go--I wouldn't have minded keeping her--but she was so well-behaved that I knew somebody had to be missing her.

As of two days ago, I wasn't sure I wanted to go camping this weekend. But I finally made up my mind and spent the last two evenings loading the truck and camp trailer. It's supposed to be a bit cold, windy, and maybe rainy, but it's the first camping trip of the year and I'm looking forward to it anyway.

We had a lot of little adventures yesterday. It started out a lot like last weekend, with my family heading down into the San Rafael Swell with my sister and her family following us. Before we got to Cleveland, Mark pulled their Bronco over because there was a noise and vibration coming from the rear-end. The lug nuts had all come loose, and two of the bolts actually broke clean off. Mark tightened the remaining three lug nuts, and they turned around and headed back for Price while I followed. About a mile after that, I saw another lug nut break off and bounce down the road, and they pulled over again. I ended up driving Mark back to Price to get their van, then we returned and he picked up the rest of his family and we continued on our drive down into the Swell, though almost two hours later than we'd planned.

It was pretty uneventful for most of the day after that. Our first stop was a geocache near some pictographs and a really cool fossilized dinosaur skeleton near Buckhorn Wash. After finding several more geocaches south of the San Rafael bridge, we drove back north and stopped at Hambrick Bottom to eat lunch (well, more like dinner), find a cache and some more pictographs, and have an Easter egg hunt for the kids. While climbing back up the the vehicles after finding the cache, Michael found a baby rattlesnake that was coiled up on the rocks--he came within an inch of it, but it didn't strike at him.

We let the kids play at Hamburger Rocks for a while after that. It was actually nice to wind down there for a bit while the kids played, because up until that point we'd either been driving or hiking the entire time. After Hamburger Rocks, we had one last cache to find before we headed home. On our way there, we saw a dog wandering around on the side of the road. We were about 10 miles from the nearest pavement, but there were a lot of people in the Swell for Easter, so it could have came from anywhere. Nobody else was around though, and we stopped to check it out. The dog ran right up to the truck and Traci opened the door, and the dog was pretty friendly--she wanted in. We debated what to do for several minutes, but after a few vehicles drove by doing 50+ MPH on the gravel road, we decided to take her with us before she got ran over. She was pretty thirsty and drank a lot of water at first, and we fed her some bread wrapped around a piece of lunch meat, which she scarfed down. During the drive and hike to the next cache, we realized that she is a very well-behaved dog and tolerated the kids nicely. During the drive home, she alternated between sitting on Traci's lap and curling up in the back seat between Michael and Bradley.

Since then, things have been very different at our house. We don't know what to call her, so we just say, "Hey dog" or "Hey puppy!" She's a Brittany Spaniel, and she's not really a puppy, but she's not too old either. I plan on calling the animal shelters for both Carbon and Emery counties, and putting an ad in the newspaper tomorrow morning to try and find her owner. We're still not sure what we'll do if we can't find her owner. I wouldn't mind having a dog, but just having her for a day makes me realize how much work and expense will be involved.

Our plans for this past Sunday turned out to be way too ambitious. Our trip into the Swell lasted more than 12 hours, and we only did about half of what we'd planned. My family was in our truck, and my sister's family came along in their Bronco. I had to stop a few times to turn the hubs in and shift into 4-low, but Mark's Bronco plowed through everything in 2WD. We didn't find any dinosaur footprints, but I may go back some other time without any kids to try and cover more ground.

There was a lot of interesting stuff in the area. We saw some wild burros, some old mining equipment, and I even found an old mining claim--it must have been about 50 years old--inside a glass jar, buried under a pile of rocks. My favorite part of the day was a short hike to a geocache on Sand Bench, which consists of sandstone from the Curtis Formation. This type of sandstone is my favorite (and the kids' favorite too) of the entire San Rafael Swell because the rock formations are just so fun to play on.

We spent all day Sunday south of the San Rafael River, but we're planning on finding all the new geocaches north of the river (mostly in the Buckhorn Wash area) this Saturday. Unfortunately it's Easter weekend and the place will be a zoo. I've been down there before around Easter and there were camp trailers parked all over the sides of the road, and ATVs and other vehicles literally causing traffic jams on the dirt roads. Luckily the places we're going are mostly off the main roads, but we'll still have to travel on the main roads part of the time.