This weekend's camping trip reminded me of another trip two years ago, where it rained quite a bit but didn't put much of a damper on our fun. The weather was nice on Friday, and I hadn't even checked the weather forecast before leaving home, so I simply expected more of the same. We did some hiking around our camp on Buckhorn Flat, but didn't do much else that evening.

On Saturday we found a nearby geocache, then returned to camp and hiked up Cedar Mountain. There was a relatively large cave about a quarter-mile up the mountain that was fun to go inside, but it probably wasn't the wisest thing to do. ;) We saw several other small caves carved out of the dirt just below thick ledges of sandstone, and all of them seemed potentially unstable. After returning to camp, it started raining. At first it was a light sprinkle, then some heavy rain moved in from the south, and it kept coming in waves. During one break in the storm, Sam and Mark heard running water somewhere on the mountain just above our camp. Mark had gone to investigate, and I followed him shortly afterwards. We found the leading edge of some water just beginning to trickle down the mountain, and eventually it reached our camp, but it was flowing just to the west of us and didn't actually go through camp.

As the rain kept coming down, we decided to keep a roaring campfire going, so us guys set out in my truck to gather a bunch of dead juniper branches. Even with a big fire, the rain eventually got the better of us and we turned in for the night early. At around 1:00 am, Mark woke Traci and me up to tell us about the water that was flowing right through camp. It was flowing pretty good, right around both sides of the fire pit which still had hot coals in it. I started getting nervous then, even though the drainage area of the small wash we were in wasn't very big and probably couldn't produce massive flash floods. There wasn't much we could do about it in the dark, so we all just went back to bed and tried getting some sleep. After another 30 minutes, the rain stopped for good, and I was able to sleep until morning.

The water had stopped flowing through camp by the time the sun came up, and things dried out surprisingly fast. We were able to drive a few miles down the road, with my family in our truck and Sam and Mark's family in their minivan, to find a geocache and check out some petroglyphs. We spent the rest of the day just hanging out around camp and getting ready to head home.

I took a lot of pictures, but I've hit my disk space quota on this web server, so I can't upload them until Solo remedies that. Until then, I've put a few rock art pictures up on my Flickr account.

Update:

Still no luck on getting the disk quota changed, but here's a video full of short clips from the weekend:

It's been a buzzy few days, and I don't think it's going to let up soon. The Utah Association of Geocachers held their annual fall meeting in Price, and I spent Friday evening placing ten temporary caches around town for a game that took place on Saturday. We spent all day Saturday at Pioneer Park with a bunch of our friends who we only see a few times a year, and it was a blast.

On Sunday I took the family for a drive down in the San Rafael Swell. We went to Olsen Reservoir, where the weekend before I'd seen a lot of waterfowl that you normally don't see around these parts. The "reservoir" is really just a mud flat with a trickle of water running through the middle of it, but last weekend there were some cranes (or herons, I don't really know the difference) and a lot of ducks there. I was hoping that Traci and the kids would get to see some this weekend, but there were no birds there. The kids had fun playing in the mud, and Torrey spent the entire time chasing dragonflies.

After Olsen Reservoir, we headed farther south to Buckhorn Reservoir. We had planned on hiking more than a mile round-trip to the water hole where I saw all the toads a couple of weeks ago, but some bad weather was rolling in so we hit Buckhorn instead. We didn't stay very long--just enough for the boys to throw some rocks into the water and for Traci and I to walk around and stretch our legs a bit.

Then, we headed to the south side of Cedar Mountain to a place I'd been wanting to go for a few weeks. I saw this picture on the web, and I wanted to go there to place a geocache ever since. Once we got there, Traci didn't like the looks of the cliffs and ledges that we'd have to hike up, so I hiked up with Torrey while she stayed at the truck with the kiddos. I could have spent all day hiking around on the rocks up there--I think the Curtis Formation is one of my favorites because of the interesting shapes that the rock erodes into (including Hamburger Rocks). However, I haven't felt right about leaving Traci alone in the middle of nowhere since that incident last year, so I hurried up placing the cache, then we high-tailed it out of there.

Yesterday evening, a couple of new geocaches in Price got listed on geocaching.com, except they weren't normal caches. They were puzzles that you had to solve in order to figure out the actual coordinates. One of them took me longer than it should have, but I finally figured it out today and found the cache on my lunch break. The other one was pretty damn tough, but with a slight hint from the guy who placed it, I was able to figure out the cipher and get the coordinates.

For the next couple of days, I'll be getting ready to go camping this coming up weekend. I took Friday off work so we can leave town as soon as Michael gets out of school. It hardly seems worth going for just two days because the weather is just perfect for camping, but I've got 16 vacation days left for the remainder of the year, and I plan to use some of them for an extra-long camping trip in October sometime. Until then, I'll settle for whatever I can get, and two days will have to do.

A few years back I wrote about Mike Udink, a relative in Oregon who has "UDINK 1" on his license plate. Today I got a phone call from a reporter with the Daily Courier who was writing an article about Mike--his license plates (he has three with his last name on them) are all being revoked by the Oregon DMV. I thought my situation with Utah's DMV was one of those only in Utah moments, but apparently that's not the case. :( I want to wish good luck to Mike--hopefully he can appeal the decision, and just maybe reasonable minds will prevail.

This past weekend was both eventful and laid-back, which is pretty unusual for me. On Saturday I hiked on Cedar Mountain, but other than seeing thousands of little toads and tadpoles in puddles left over from a rainstorm a few days earlier, it was an uneventful hike. I was surprised to see toads out in the desert, especially since it's dry 95% of the time there. I'm not sure how they survive during the dry season.

We took a drive on Monday with Sam and Mark. I wanted to go back to a geocache we'd been to about a year earlier to look for fossils and check out a dinosaur quarry that we learned about after we'd gone last time. The quarry wasn't very interesting--it looked like they'd finished all their work, and all that was left was a hillside disturbed by heavy equipment. After checking out the quarry, we did some 4-wheeling while trying to drive closer to the Price River. The roads out there are rough, but fun.