My mind has been wandering a lot today, and for some reason I keep thinking about the first few times I ventured into the San Rafael Swell.

My first recollection of going to the Swell is an old one--I think I was five or six years old at the time, and I went with my father and some of his friends. At the time I didn't know where I was, only that it was somewhere far from home that I'd never been. I only remember small portions of the trip, but the memories are vivid. We listened to the Police and Queen during the drive. I don't recall whose vehicle I was in, or what kind it was, but I do recall that the road was rough and we kicked up a huge cloud of dust behind us. It was also very hot, but for some reason the adults had a campfire going. There was one other kid there, and he and I spent most of our time in a shallow cave/alcove nearby. It was much cooler in there, and the ceiling was blackened with soot from campfires, which we drew on with sticks. It wasn't until a couple of years ago--almost 25 years later--that I recognized the place in Buckhorn Wash where I'd been on that trip.

The second time I traveled into the Swell was with some friends, and I was 16 years old. I believe my friends were going with their Scout group, of which I was not a member, but I sometimes tagged along with them anyway. My friend's dad was driving a full-sized van, and I was following him in my parents' mint-green 1972 Ford F-250 2WD pickup. The road was washboard covered in fine, thick dust, and I recall (being a dumb teenager) getting into the gas really hard and fishtailing in the soft dirt. I had Nirvana's Nevermind playing in the tape deck for the entire drive. Our destination was a camping spot near the San Rafael River, and to this day I'm not certain where it was, but it had to be either Buckhorn Wash or Fuller Bottom. I'm leaning toward the latter because I think I would remember the high cliffs of Buckhorn Wash. It was fall, and the trees were losing their leaves. We played alongside the river, and at one point tried climbing horizontally along a cliff that rose up directly from the river's edge. We weren't worried about falling because we would have just landed in the water, which, looking back on it, probably wouldn't have been so good.

I don't really remember going to the Swell again until a trip Traci and I took in the fall of 2002. I had perhaps been to Cedar Mountain a couple of times before then, but this was the first time that I recall striking out into the area as an adult just to do some exploring. We were in our '88 Subaru, and we had Michael with us, who was a year old. I did not yet have a GPS, so I wasn't completely sure where I was heading, but at least I had some idea. It was a memorable drive during bouts of heavy rain--we were lucky not to have gotten stuck (or worse).

About a year after that Traci and I once again headed down into the Swell, with both kids this time, in our '92 Mazda Navajo. Bradley was only four months old, and Michael was two years old. We accessed the gravel road just north of Castle Dale and didn't return to the pavement until we reached I-70 about 60 miles later. We visited the Wedge Overlook for the first time, and then drove through Buckhorn Wash. South of Buckhorn was all new to me at the time, as was the drive along I-70 to Green River. Spotted Wolf Canyon and the San Rafael Reef were among the most amazing scenery I had ever seen.

In the last three years I've been to the San Rafael Swell more times than I can count. Hell, I would live there if I could. On a couple of occasions, I've half-jokingly mentioned to Traci that we should move to Castle Dale (to cut down on my weekend "commute"), but we both know that we couldn't stand living in a smaller town than Price. Maybe in about 30 years, if the Swell hasn't turned into a tourist mecca like the Moab area has, I'll be ready to retire there.

After all that worry last week about my furnace being broken, I managed to fix it myself without much fuss. I decided to take the flame sensor out and clean it. I was hoping it would be black with thick soot when I pulled it out ('cause that would easily explain the problems), but it just had a light coating of light gray soot. Since it wasn't all that dirty, I didn't expect cleaning it to solve the problem, but it's been more than a week and the burners stay lit when they're supposed to now. I'm glad I procrastinated on calling a repairman.

It's been a fairly fun three-day weekend. I took my family out with Sam & Mark's family to sit around a campfire and roast marshmallows on Saturday. It took us awhile to find a spot where we could do our thing, and Mark and I had to shovel a lot of snow to make room for all of our chairs to fit around the fire. We all ate soup, drank hot chocolate, roasted marshmallows, and played in the snow.

I went for a drive today to Cedar Mountain and did some hiking. There's not as much snow down there as there is in Price, so the hike wasn't too bad. I was able to find a nice south-facing ridge that was mostly clear of snow to hike along. I was able to hike about 1.5 miles, but admittedly it wasn't terribly fun. The area itself was pretty interesting, with huge blocks of Buckhorn conglomerate strewn about, but it was difficult picking a path between them without getting in the deeper snow. I'll have to add it to the many places I'd like to hike when the weather warms up and dries out.

I recently bought each of my kids a new hydration pack, and I'm hoping it gets them a little more excited about hiking this year. Normally they just carry water bottles, but Bradley often dumps his out on the ground and plays in the mud that it makes. I would like to do some more family hiking when it warms up outside. I've got my eye on Furniture Draw for an early spring hike. It would be a relatively easy two-mile hike in one direction if we spotted another vehicle at the bottom of the canyon where it meets up with Buckhorn Wash. Traci and I would also like to do Moonshine Wash again, but this time with the kids in tow. The last time we went through there, some people (including Samantha and Mark) brought some of their kids and they seemed to have an easy time. Granted, our kids are quite a bit younger, but it's also easier to lift them up or lower them over the difficult parts. I just hope that the boys get half as enthused about it as I am.

As for the problems with the furnace, I've decided to wait until Monday to call a repair person. The problem is intermittent and has only occurred three times in the past several days, so I'm not sure what good it would do to rush somebody over here to fix something that likely won't manifest itself. There is a status light inside the furnace that is supposed to blink a certain number of times when a part is failing, and so far I haven't been standing at the furnace to witness how many times it blinks when the burners go out. I will probably spend a lot of time babysitting the damned thing until it acts up, and that should give me enough information to tell the repair person what's wrong. This is going to be a fun weekend.

Did I ever mention that I'm terrified of gas appliances? The first camper that we owned had a problem with the propane furnace in it. I tried lighting it one night while we were camping in Huntington Canyon, and even though the pilot light was lit, the burner wouldn't come on when I turned the thermostat up. Eventually, I heard a loud *whoosh* as the gas coming out of the burner ignited, and it apparently shot a huge flame out the exhaust on the outside of the the camper.

Well, the natural gas furnace in our house has been acting up for a couple of days, and I'm honestly afraid that the place will blow up while we're sleeping. I'm sure my fear is unfounded, since there are numerous safety devices to prevent things like that from happening. The gas burners keep cycling off and on while the thermostat is calling for more heat, even though the blower stays on the entire time. I suspect that the thermocouple is on its way south, but I don't dare try to fix it myself. I'm going to call a furnace repair person in the morning--if I survive the night. Hopefully they answer their phones on Saturdays.

It's been more than a year since that little incident I had near Woodside, but somebody recently commented on that blog entry and it reminded me of a couple of things I had been meaning to post about.

The police never did find the guy who slashed my tires. I went home that evening and never heard from them again, so I just assumed that he had gotten away (which was pretty much already the case when I left).

A few months ago (in October 2007) I talked to Emery County Sheriff's deputy Ray Jeffs, who was one of the responding officers during the incident. I was in Buckhorn Wash doing some geocaching with some friends, and he stopped to talk to my wife and friends while I was about 20 yards away in the truck getting the kids some lunch. Somehow the subject of Woodside came up in their conversation, and he started telling them about this incident that happened near there the previous year--he hadn't recognized me or my truck at that point, but as soon as the subject came up, my wife mentioned that we knew all about the incident near Woodside.

I strolled over there and Deputy Jeffs told me that he had patrolled that area for several days after the incident--driving the road along the Price River, and also the Little Park area above the Book Cliffs. He also knocked on the door at Jason Pogue's "residence" (a motorhome) at Woodside, but nobody answered the door. Apparently the sheriff's office suspected Jason Pogue, but they had no evidence to prove it, so they couldn't do much except try to question him about it.

I heard from a friend about another incident near Woodside in which somebody was parked along the river bottom somewhere and had a camera stolen out of his vehicle while he was away from it. The police were called into that situation as well, but didn't catch anybody that time either.

Oh yeah, one more thing--a couple of days after the Woodside incident, I was looking again at the pictures I took and realized that I had actually taken a couple of pictures of the Crazy Man. I had been taking pictures of Michael and Bradley as they hiked down the trail, and incidentally the truck was in several of those pictures. In two of them, you can make out a dark figure next to the truck. The images below were cropped at 100%, then enlarged nearly 2X, so yeah, they're blurry.

The first image (left) shows the truck by itself, with a pile of rocks and a thick fencepost in the left side of the image. The second image shows a dark but indistinct figure hunched down near the passenger side of the truck. The third image, however, clearly shows the guy standing upright next to the driver's door (click here to view the full-sized image [3.3MB]). It was just a few seconds after taking that picture that I noticed him standing there, and that's when the shit hit the fan.

I suppose the lesson in all of this is not to leave your vehicle unattended anywhere near Woodside, Utah.

I think I've got strep throat. I was going to go into the office in Orem on Thursday to work and have lunch with my team, but now I think I'll just work from home and spare them the possibility of passing this on to them. So far I'm avoiding the doctor--I changed medical insurance this year and have a fairly large deductible to meet before co-insurance kicks in--but I'm confident that I'll be forced to go within the next few days as this gets worse.

My entire family has recently been or is currently sick. Both kids got colds during the holidays, and though Bradley's subsided quickly, Michael's turned into bronchial pneumonia. He gave us a scare in the middle of the night last week with a fever of almost 105°. He took antibiotics for several days and is still taking breathing treatments, but he's well enough to go back to school. He missed the first three days of school this year, and while he was gone he was awarded a certificate for perfect attendance during the first quarter of school. :D

With so much snow on the ground and the weather being so cold this time of year, I've been doing a lot of "virtual" exploring of the San Rafael Swell, and making plans for a few hikes for when the weather warms up. I came across some pictures that show the route up the southeastern side of Sid's Mountain, and it looks easier than I expected. The parking area is fairly close (within one mile) to where the route tops out on the plateau, and the steepest part looks a little less rugged than I was expecting based on the Google Earth imagery. I had already been planning on hiking the route this year, but now I think I will try it the first chance I get, possibly as early as the end of next month.

I also recently stumbled across pictures of some people taking a western route up onto Sid's Mountain that was previously unknown to me. Mike and I hiked through Saddle Horse Canyon in October 2004, trying to find a route onto the plateau from the west, but we were unsuccessful--we ran into a lot of vertical cliffs with no possible way over them. From looking at these pictures and comparing them to Google Earth, I was able to determine where they reached the top of the plateau. It turns out that Mike and I were only one-third of a mile from there before we gave up and headed back down-canyon! I actually dug up my old GPS tracklog from that hike and imported it into Google Earth, and it looks as though if we had walked another tenth of a mile, we would have been able to see the route up onto the top. It's one of those things that I can only laugh about now, but if I had found this out at the end of that hike, I would have screamed.