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.