Our ride along Ford Creek and up to Ford Ridge yesterday was well worth taking the day off work. In fact, I would really like to go back there another time or two to check out all the trails that we didn't get to ride. We parked on the side of US-6 near the Ford Creek waterfall, then rode along the creek for the first two miles. After that, the trail crossed the creek and we began a long, steep ascent to the top of the ridge on the east side of the canyon. From there, the trail stays on top of the ridge all the way to Ford Ridge.

About six years ago I tried finding a USGS benchmark on the second-highest peak on Ford Ridge, but it was buried under hundreds of rocks and I didn't have the patience to dig through them all. When we reached Ford Ridge yesterday that peak was the first place we went, and the benchmark had been uncovered and was plainly visible when we got to the top. I placed a geocache on the south end of the summit, where the views down into the valleys were awesome.

After leaving the peak and continuing south on the trail, we came to an intersection and followed another trail that went southeast along Ford Ridge. It was past lunchtime already, so we began looking for a shaded and level spot to eat lunch. We passed up a few mediocre spots at first, but soon we came to an area that was more heavily wooded and looked more promising. However, there was some bear crap in the middle of the trail near a place where I wanted to stop to eat, so we turned around and went back to a more wide-open place to eat our lunch. After eating, we rode farther southeast to the end of Ford Ridge. The trail actually went farther beyond that, but it was getting late and we knew that we still had a long ride back to the truck.

On our way back, we stopped at a place that I'd seen on the way up and had made a mental note to check it out. There were some birch trees that looked really out of place on an otherwise bare ridge, and it turned out that there was a natural spring there. The water was visibly gushing up out of the ground in a few places, and it ran through a wide marshy area down the hill into what used to be a cow pond. The downhill wall of the cow pond had been breached, so the water just flowed right through the bottom of it, then dropped in a rivulet down the steep mountainside below. I don't think I've ever seen naturally-occurring birch trees in Utah, so I'm fairly certain that somebody planted them there. It was a nice peaceful spot, so I placed another geocache there since it was right next to the trail and a nice place to take a break from riding.

There are about five more trails in the area that I would like to ride, but next time we go there I'll park farther up Price Canyon and take the main road into Ford Ridge. That road leads to several radio towers on the highest peak of the ridge, and it'll be much faster for us to get to the area trails. Ford Creek is definitely worth riding at least once, but it's not ideal as a primary means of accessing the other trails.

After what was a hectic and long Friday evening, I was hoping for a relaxing weekend. I didn't get to relax as much as I'd hoped, but I did have a bit of fun. On Saturday we drove the truck up Alrad Canyon to find a geocache that somebody had placed last week. I'd been up that canyon once before in my Subaru, and when I couldn't drive it any farther, I pulled my mountain bike off the bike rack and rode/pushed (mostly just pushed) it to the top of the Book Cliffs. When I was there this weekend I didn't expect to get much farther in the truck than I did in the Subaru, but the road has been somewhat improved in the last five years--apparently it has "benefited" from all the gas exploration in that area. We drove to within 0.22 miles of the cache, then Mark and I hiked the rest of the way while the ladies and the little ones whimped out and stayed behind. There was a trickle of water flowing over the cliffs and boulders near the cache, and it made the long drive and steep hike worth it.

Sam and Mark's kids and my kids have been wanting to have a sleep-over lately, so we ended up having everyone over and we camped out in the back yard Saturday night. The next morning we ate a breakfast of pancakes and sausage, then everyone went home and I spent some time tidying up some unfinished work in the front and back yards.

That afternoon, Mark and I again set off to find another geocache, this time just above the Ford Creek waterfall in Price Canyon. I had a vague notion that there was an ATV trail that led to the top of the falls because I'd seen trucks with empty flatbed trailers parked there, but I'd never given much thought to where the trail went. It turns out that it follows Ford Creek all the way to Ford Ridge, and from the short portion of the trail that I saw yesterday, it looks like a great one. So great, in fact, that I took Friday off work and we're planning on riding up the trail and spending the day in the higher elevations around Ford Ridge. I hope there's still some snow up there. It seems like summer just arrived, but I'm already looking forward to October.

Earlier today, Traci and I were certain that we would finish preparing the front yard and laying down sod today. Technically we were right, but just barely. We removed about eight wheelbarrows full of dirt, then added fertilizer and 12 cubic feet of soil conditioner and raked it all in. We leveled the ground the best we could, and by the time we were done we had been working for two hours. We took an hour-long break to pick up the sod and grab some dinner at Subway. By the time we were done eating dinner, it was 7:00 pm, and I was pretty sure we'd be finished laying the sod before dark. Traci started in on the north side of the yard while I started putting new sprinkler heads on the south side. After I replaced a few sprinkler heads, I decided I ought to turn on the water and test the system before I got too far. When I turned on the valve, the pressure was extremely low, but I assumed it was because the pipes had gotten some dirt in them from not being used for four years. That assumption turned out to be wrong, which I realized when I turned the water off. Some water should have remained in the pipes, but the water level went down so quickly that I could hear air hissing as it was sucked into the sprinkler heads. I knew immediately that that was bad.

After fumbling around for a few minutes trying to think of how to proceed, I finally just started digging holes trying to find the problem. I knew there had to be a big leak underground, but I couldn't imagine where it would be. After digging nine holes, I found a pipe that shouldn't have been there. I dug a trench to follow the pipe, but it disappeared under the sidewalk. I started digging on the other side of the sidewalk to find the pipe there, and with the first shovelful I ran into mud. The pipe apparently used to run into the box that the water meter is in, and was used for draining the sprinkler system before winter. The sewer line construction must have torn that pipe out too, and at its end I found a sinkhole forming underground.

It took me quite some time to remove the pipe and plug the hole. Luckily a plumber used to live in my house a long time ago and left a lot of old pipe fittings in the garage. I managed to find a 1/2" plug--if I hadn't, we would have had to wait until tomorrow to fix the sprinkler system and lay down the sod.

That one little problem cost us about three hours, including having to level the soil again after filling in all the holes I'd dug. We worked into the night laying sod, watched the sun set and the full moon rise, and we finally got finished and turned on the sprinklers at exactly midnight. The only reason I'm still awake is that I need to turn the water off soon. I think my next project will be to install automatic sprinkler valves, but that can probably wait another year--or four.

I finished repairing the sprinkler system in the front yard, and surprisingly it went well. My yard is split in two by a sidewalk leading to the front door, and the sprinkler system is comprised of two separate systems, one for each side. It took almost an entire evening to fix the north side of the system. That side was completely torn out by a backhoe up to the shutoff valve near the foundation of the house, so I had to start from scratch. I was able to find pre-cut and threaded lengths of pipe that just happened to be the right length for that side. When I got done, two of the sprinkler heads extended about an inch too high, so I had to wait until the next day to buy shorter pipe nipples and replace them.

The south side only took me an hour and a half to repair. Its only problem was that a street elbow had been broken off where it was threaded into a tee, but the threads remained inside the tee. In order to remove the tee I had to dig up 10' of pipe to find the nearest union. Then I removed the union, replaced the tee and installed a new street elbow, and installed a new union to replace the old rusted one. I lucked out that none of the existing pipes were too rusted to reuse. Having to replace them would have been much more difficult.

I think there's too much dirt in the yard to lay sod, so this evening Traci and I are going to remove about an inch of the existing clay soil, then rake in some soil conditioner and fertilizer and lay the sod. The yard is tiny--only 540 square feet--so the sod will be cheap and the job shouldn't take too long. The cost is definitely worth avoiding the hassle of planting grass from seed.

It's been more than four years since I had a lawn in my front yard, but that should be remedied within the next week. I had the sewer line replaced in 2004, which destroyed the yard and the sprinkler system. Since then all I've done is try to cut the weeds a couple of times a year. I'm not a big fan of hard physical labor (as evidenced by the four freakin' years it's taken me to get to this point), but today I spent about five hours tilling, digging, and leveling the dirt in the yard. The hardest part is yet to come. Last year I bought all the pipes and fittings that I need to fix the sprinkler system, but plumbing and I just don't get along and I've been dreading this part for a long time. After I get the sprinklers fixed and tested (hopefully tomorrow), I'll be raking in some fertilizer and mulch and laying down sod. I'm sure my neighbors, especially old man Arno from across the street, will be happy to see it done.

I was hoping to get this job finished before Friday, but with Bradley's birthday party on Thursday, I don't think I'll have time to get it all done. I had hoped to go for a drive up in the mountains on Saturday, but I probably won't have time to plan it out and get everything ready. It's just too hot to spend a day in the desert unless you plan on being inside the car/truck the entire time, so the mountains have sounded quite appealing to me the past couple of weeks. I want to drive up to Ferron Reservoir, then over the crest of the Wasatch Plateau and down into the Twelvemile area. I read in the DWR's fishing report that Ferron Reservoir is open, but Skyline Drive over the top of the mountains is another 1,100' higher in elevation, topping out at around 10,600', and there may still be snow drifts blocking the road. Utah's oldest unfound geocache is about 11 miles beyond Ferron Reservoir, and though it's probably accessible right now from the west, it would be much more fun and worthwhile to access it from the east side of the mountains. If I don't make it there this weekend (which is looking very unlikely), I'll shoot for next weekend.

After our last attempt at riding the Curse Canyon trail, Traci and I have wanted to go back to try it again. We had hoped to do it without the kids because there are a lot of off-camber sections along the trail, and we didn't want either of them falling off an ATV or, worse yet, to roll over. I hate imposing on relatives to babysit though, so we just decided to take the kids with us, but luckily they actually enjoyed walking for the worst parts of the trail.

We parked the truck at the ball fields on the north side of town, and as soon as I got both ATVs unloaded I realized that I'd left the GPS at home. I wish I'd have gone back for it, but we were already running a bit late and I didn't want to take the time. The first part of the trail seemed easier than the last time we tried it. It was obvious that the trail had a lot of use during the rainy weather we've had over the past couple of months, and I think all that traffic on the soft ground helped smooth out some of the bad spots. As soon as we got past our turnaround point from last time, Traci ran into a little trouble. There was a short hill that required a sharp right then left turn near the top to avoid a boulder in the trail, and she started tipping over to the right before she could make the left turn. She caught it in time, and I applied my weight to the left side of her ATV so she could make it the rest of the way up the hill. She had another scare going down a very steep hill, where she almost tipped over forward. Luckily she didn't panic, and she let off the brake just barely enough to gain some forward momentum and avoid the rollover. After that, I was just scared. I wasn't having too many problems, but the trail was a little beyond Traci's ability. We pressed on very cautiously, but eventually came to a steep hill that even I didn't think I could make it up. Instead of turning around, we rode in the bottom of a wash for a short distance before coming to yet another impassible spot. We had nowhere else to go but back to the truck after that, so we turned around and took our time going over all the obstacles that we'd already passed.

It was still a fun time, although a little short--we were riding for perhaps just over two hours. I'm glad that I now know what I missed the last time around, but I also know that I never need to go back down that trail again. Here are a bunch of video clips that I put together from today's trail ride:

I shouldn't be surprised by this, but I did get a chuckle out of it. I went to a portrait studio today to get some passport-quality pictures taken for my CFP renewal, and the woman working there was chit-chatting and asked me whether the pictures were for an actual passport or for a concealed firearm permit. She looked disappointed when I told her it was for the latter, and said she always expects to hear about the wonderful places people are planning on traveling to, but apparently the overwhelming majority of passport-picture customers go there for the same purpose as me. :D

I took the family out for another outing yesterday after work, and it turned out being a fun little adventure. Last week when I was poring over satellite photos of the Kenilworth area I saw a long shadow stretching across the ground, presumably from a tall pillar of rock sticking up from the ground. It was in a short canyon situated directly between Kenilworth and Helper. Judging by the length of the shadow it had to be a fairly tall and thin feature, so I marked it in Google Earth to remind myself to check it out someday.

Someday came sooner than I expected, and we set out yesterday in the truck driving toward Kenilworth. I had originally planned on driving the car and parking at the nearest gas well to our destination, but after some more thought I decided to drive the truck, which would get us 0.8 miles closer. The road beyond the gas well was merely rocky for the first 0.4 miles, but for the remaining 0.4 miles it was rocky, steep, and washed out and required 4-low to get us to where I wanted to park.

The hike was only moderately difficult, following the bottom of a wash and gaining 240 feet of elevation over the course of a half-mile. There were a few spots where huge boulders clogged the bottom of the wash, some areas where we had to bushwhack, and closer to the rock pinnacle we had to scramble up some steep and loose hillsides. The terrain is so steep near the head of the canyon that the pinnacle wasn't visible until we were within a couple hundred feet of it. The entire area looked to be untouched by humans, which is unusual for most canyons near Kenilworth and Helper. I hiked up to the base of the pinnacle while Traci and the kids stayed down low waiting for me. I took a few pictures up there, then hiked back down and placed a geocache in the hollow trunk of a dead junper tree.

The hike back to the truck was just as fun as the hike up the canyon, except a storm was rolling in and the wind was gusting pretty hard. After getting home we ate dinner pretty late (after 8:00 p.m.) and got to bed later than usual, but being a little tired today is worth the fun I had yesterday.

Today has already been more fun-filled than my entire weekend was. Traci was out of town scrapbooking with some of her family all weekend, so it was just me and the boys. I finished planting the rest of my vegetable garden on Friday, but Saturday and Sunday we didn't do much at all. We only left home once to do a little shopping, but the rest of the time we spent in the house or in the yard. I did invite my sister and her family over for some dutch oven dessert on Saturday evening, but the cold wind made it less fun than I had hoped. It was nice to have some company for part of an otherwise boring weekend though.

Traci and I took the kids to Spring Canyon today to look at some petroglyphs and we had a pretty good time. We parked at the mouth of Sowbelly Gulch and hiked around the area for about an hour and a half. There's a sealed-off coal mine shaft on the east side of Sowbelly Gulch, and a short coal-covered grade leading from the shaft to an old wooden bridge that looks like it used to hang out over the road. The road there follows an old railroad grade, so there was probably a tipple at the end of the bridge where they used to dump the coal into train cars. I found the petroglyphs that Jason told me about, but the lighting was poor and I think it caused me to miss the one petroglyph that I really wanted to see. This picture, taken by a fellow geocacher, shows the petroglyph that I had hoped to see. I was told that it was right next to the other petroglyphs that I did see, so apparently the lighting conditions (some direct sunlight and some dark shaded areas) made some of the rock art difficult to see. I'll have to go back early another day so that the sun is hitting the cliffs at a better angle.

Long story short, the "airplane" I thought I saw in the aerial photo turned out to be a big boulder. Mark and Chris and I parked below the mountain and scanned the mountainside but couldn't make anything out, even with binoculars. However, it was obvious from there that the terrain was extremely rugged and it was entirely possible that there were areas we couldn't see from the bottom, so we decided to start hiking up to where I thought the plane crash would be. It was slow going, but as long as we kept a slow pace it wasn't too difficult. As my GPS showed that we were getting closer and closer to the coordinates, the anticipation kept building. Along the way I saw several footprints that indicated other hikers had been up there, which I took to be a good sign--after all, why else would somebody hike up that mountainside? When we were about 70 feet away, we rounded a corner along the cliff face that we'd been following and Mark and I spotted a large boulder that was lighter in color than the rest of the surrounding rocks, and we immediately suspected that we'd hiked all that way for nothing. We scrambled up a couple of ledges in the cliff face and the GPS zeroed out right on top of the boulder. A quick scan of the area revealed nothing but boulders, cliffs, and trees. I was bummed, but I knew there was a chance that this would happen.

We spent some time there just enjoying the view and resting. I contemplated placing a geocache there, but I wouldn't wish that hike on anybody unless there was something rewarding at the end. I decided it would be nice to take a different route back just for a change of scenery, and that turned out to be a big mistake. The hike back to the car ended up being just as difficult as the hike up the mountain. We ended up above a line of cliffs that extended a quarter-mile around to the north side of the mountain, which, in that steep and rugged terrain, felt like two miles. We finally reached a place where the cliffs pinched out and we were able to slip and slide our way down the steep and loose mountainside until we reached the floor of the canyon below.

I don't think I'll be going on any more hikes looking for downed aircraft without more solid information. However, I was so close to summiting the top of that mountain--it would have been an easy 0.35 mile walk to the summit--that I may return just to experience the view from the top. I'm sure others have done the same on that mountain, but it would still be nice to be one of those very few.

When I was a kid living in Kenilworth, I heard a story from an unreliable source--a kid known for bragging--about an airplane crash that happened on the mountain northeast of town. I never knew whether to believe the story, but several weeks ago when I ran into an old friend near Kenilworth, he mentioned the plane crash. That was the first time I had even thought about it in probably 25 years, but strangely somebody else mentioned it to me just a few days after that. My curiosity got the best of me, and I started digging around trying to find out as much as I could about it. I asked my mom and my grandpa, and they confirmed that it did indeed happen, but all they knew was a rough location of where the plane crashed.

Short of finding somebody who had first-hand information about the exact location, my only other option was to scour the aerial photos on Carbon County's website. Their site runs ArcIMS and it's pretty slow and clunky, but the resolution of their aerial imagery is many times better than that in Google Earth. I spent several hours looking over an area roughly 0.6 miles long and 0.4 miles wide. I finally found something that could be an airplane, but nothing else even resembled something man-made. It's not much to go on, but it's the best I could do, so tomorrow Mark and I have plans to drive out there to see if we can spot the plane from the road. If so, or if we're unable to determine for sure whether it's there, we're going to hike up to it. The site is 0.3 miles from the road in Cordingly Canyon and 700 feet higher in elevation. There are several bands of cliffs above and below the site, so getting there may be tricky. The hike might end up being 3/4-mile one way, but that's still not too bad. We won't be leaving Price until after 5:00 p.m., and hopefully we can make it back down to the car before dark. I've got my fingers crossed that we find the plane and that all the time I spent looking for it wasn't wasted.

It always seems like the number of pictures that I take on any particular outing is directly proportional to how much fun I have. Traci and I both filled up the memory cards on our cameras during yesterday's ATV ride along the south fork of Gordon Creek, so I think it's safe to say that we had an excellent time! :) I had wanted to ride out to the Gordon Creek waterfall for quite some time, but over the last few weeks I'd either been too busy or the weather had been too wet. Last weekend somebody found the geocache that I placed out there, which was the first find in more than a year, and it made me want to go even worse.

I really didn't expect to have as much fun as we did yesterday. We parked the truck just off Consumers Road, then unloaded the ATVs and took the gravel road all the way to the railroad trestle, where the kids climbed around on the bridge supports and we hiked to the nearby petroglyphs. From there we backtracked a little bit and took the rough, steep road leading to the lower falls along the south fork of Gordon Creek. We had to drive through the north fork of Gordon Creek along the way, which I believe is the first time we've had to ford a creek on the ATVs. The water looked much deeper than it was, so when Traci crossed it first, we weren't sure what to expect. She made it across just fine--the water was only a few inches deep--so I proceeded to cross and followed her the rest of the way to the falls.

We spent a lot of time at the lower falls. At first we had the kids take off their shoes and socks and roll up their pant legs so they could play in the water, but there was enough algae on the sandstone in the bottom of the creek that several times they slipped and fell into the water. We had to dry their pants out before we started riding again, so we just had them strip down to only their shirts, which they seemed to think was fun. It's a good thing we were the only people out there.

After the upper falls, which are accessible by full-sized 4x4 vehicles, we rode farther west on a trail that is barely wide enough for ATVs in some places. A friend of mine had sent me some pictures of the area east of the falls, where there is an old cabin and a sandstone cistern along the creek. I'd been to the falls several times and never knew about the stuff farther east, so we set out to find it. I knew where the cabin was because it's visible in Google Earth, but the cistern I only knew vaguely where it was--somewhere along a two-mile stretch of trail. We actually found the cistern with little trouble because it was easily visible from the trail. It's constructed much like an igloo, with a curved top that is unsupported in the center. I don't know how old it is, but I would imagine that it's 100 years old or so, which would make it quite an engineering feat for the homesteaders who originally tried settling this area. The inside was surprisingly clean, with just a few plant roots penetrating the walls and no dirt or silt in the bottom. We only spent a few minutes there looking at it, but it was an interesting stop.

Farther east along the trail, we turned onto a side trail that I could see in Google Earth, but that wasn't visible in the USGS black and white aerial photography from the late 1990s. That alone piqued my curiosity, so I just had to check it out and see what the attraction was. As an aside, I've found a lot of interesting things by following dead-end roads that I first saw in Google Earth--most such roads around here were created for reasons that are only obvious when you travel to the end of them, and it's usually worth the trip. Anyway, it turns out that there is another waterfall at the end of this short spur road, smaller than the lower falls but larger than the middle falls which we had passed up on our ride earlier. We ate lunch there under the shade of a big tree, and we hiked around and played in the water some more. It was a great spot for a picnic, and I don't doubt that we'll be going back someday this summer.

The cabin wasn't much farther down the trail from the upper falls, and we spent 15 or 20 minutes there checking out the cabin and surrounding area. I could imagine living there, so far from civilization and without any modern conveniences, and it couldn't have been an easy way of life.

I could see that the ATV trail continued beyond the cabin, but a sign at the beginning of the trail said not to proceed past the cabin, so we returned the way we came. Since I hadn't been paying close attention to my GPS on the way in and missed the middle falls, we stopped there on the way back. I had hiked in to the middle falls several years ago, but I couldn't remember much about the area. We found that it's not as fun a place to hang out as the lower and upper falls--you have to hike a short distance from the ATV trail, and the falls are much smaller--so we just spent a couple of minutes there before riding back to the truck.

Here's a quick video showing parts of the ATV trail and the lower and upper waterfalls:

We had only planned on spending two or three hours out there, but we ended up being gone from home for seven hours. I think the next time it's hot outside and we've got nothing else going on, we'll go back to the lower falls to play in the water again. This time I'll bring some shorts and sandals so I can play in the water right alongside the kids.