Worst pet peeve

I really hate it when I find graffiti and vandalism in the wilderness. It's really narcissistic and shows disrespect when you scratch your name and date in a wall. What if every hiker pecked their name into the rock? Really, who will recognize your name and truly care if you were there? Take a picture of the rock for crying out loud. Markings like that take away from the natural beauty of the rocks and their features. The sad part is, most graffiti is labeled as a "historic resource" after about fifty years. The "50 year rule" generally applies to all graffiti, trash, and anything else that is not native to the land. Ridiculous.

In this picture, Clyde, Joe, and Albert scrawled their names right over the native american pictographs. Dumb.

The Needles, Canyonlands. Mountains of untouched crypto. You don't find too much of this in Arches.

This is what I love: beautifully pristine wilderness with no sign that any other human being was there before you. I took this picture while backpacking with Ivy. Only a narrow trail led our way through the desert.

Wildfire

There was a wildfire in the wetlands on Monday. It came really close to the west side of town, where I live at the World Wide warehouse and the Hazlett's house. It was about 5pm when I noticed ash falling into the warehouse yard and was about to jump on top of the roof to see if I could see any flames. Ken Bishoff from the county Search & Rescue walked into the yard and told us that they're encouraging evacuation. A few of the guides and I walked down the Hazlett's house and prepared to help spray trees down if it got any closer. There were 50mph gusts spreading the flames, and it got really close to a few houses before the winds died down and the firefighters got it under control.

A view from the Hazlett's yard. Click to see a report on KSL.

Horseshoe Canyon

Last weekend my dad and I took off to the San Rafael Swell. We started in Horseshoe Canyon, a deep canyon filled with incredible pictographs, known as the Great Gallery. The trail meandered through a sandy and rocky wash in the shadows of the towering walls and the cottonwood trees. There were small pools in the wash where thousands of little tadpoles and water skippers swam. The red pictographs rose high on the cliffs, obviously painted in a time when the canyon floor was higher. Some figures were close together with triangular bodies, and some had limbs wielding weapons.

Part of the Great Gallery panel

Little friend on the trail

On the way back we stopped at Chaffin Ranch Geyser. Who knew there was a geyser in the middle of the desert?! It was an old drill hole that spouts carbon dioxide and water filled with minerals twenty feet in the air. We were there when it blew, and it went on for about fifteen minutes. The ground all around the cold-water geyser is covered with hardened layers of minerals that turn everything a brownish-orange color. An old wagon wheel and wood beams laid close by, slowly petrifying. It was incredible.

Thanks, dad!

If I told you

where this place is, I'd have to kill you. I'll give you a hint though, it's in Arches. It was cool to hike to something not well-known in such a high-traffic national park. I love discovering the wild and weird; the esoteric places of Moab.