In Before Dark

At this time of year, the days are short.  If you aren't headed for the truck by 5p, you're going to be walking in the dark.  When it took us almost three hours of scrambling around in the back-country to find this spot (above) by 3:30p, I wasn't sure we could make it home in the daylight.  Luckily, VSO, who was feeling unwell, had started back an hour before, so it was only EDO that I had to worry about.  I needn't have.  She can hustle when she wants to.  We made it to the truck in 90 minutes.  Not only that, we stopped to open the shutter a few times (below) when the setting sun caught our eye.

Remake

I really wanted to remake this 75-year-old picture today.  But I had a little trouble finding it.  The valley is full of pavement and faux-lux "cabins" now.  One can hardly pull over without having some motorized Californian pushing you into the ditch.  I just could not find the corrals.  When I did, I knew I had it.

Black Friday

I rarely visit the Pine Valley Ranger District.  It has become too urban—loud, busy, and trashy.  But, I had some time this week and a couple of things I wanted to see.  I was on Little Pinto Creek at sunset today, and I was mostly by myself—just one other vehicle passed me on the way out.  I guess the loud people were in the shops, or at home buying things on the internet.  The biggest holiday in America.

Retirees

A number of years ago, we may have done some sport climbing, or gotten out the ropes for a little mild mountaineering.  But, when it stopped being fun, we retired.  What we do now is mostly fourth-class scrambling, with the occassional fifth-class move thrown in.  Unfortunately the waterfall we wanted to get past today required a little more commitment, so we were forced to retrieve the aging hardware in the hopes that it would protect us on a 40-foot wall.

I'm not a good lead climber, and we were going to give the sharp end to VSO, but she was a little uncertain about setting up an anchor at the top.  In the event, I went first.  It was inelegant, to say the least, but I eventually battered my way to the chains and got ready to belay the girls.  EDO came first, and we asked her merely to unclip; VSO followed and did the cleaning.  With all three of us up, we proceeded through a beautiful, narrow canyon.  After a quarter mile of hiking, we encountered a second waterfall that would have required an additional belay.  Given the hour, and our general inexperience, we called it a day.

We went back to the first fall and rappelled to the valley floor.  We hiked to the road in the growing dark, and I was relieved not to be on a second climb with darkness closing in.  On a side note:  I generally post pictures of EDO or of the beautiful canyons of southern Utah, but today I was compelled to feature VSO.  The sun was obscured and the canyon was dim, but she provided her own glow.  She was beautiful.  A super model.  Literally.  The camera was drawn to her.

Subterranean

Speaking of pictures.  I made many pictures last week, too.  Not on the ridge, but in the canyon.  These were two of my favorites.

Funny Pictures

It is funny how pictures work.  They are, after all, merely a record of a millisecond of light reaching the CCD (formerly the paper) through an aperture.  But, sometimes they tell a false story.  Like this pair:  EDO running across the stage:  An apparently fake backdrop of a southern Utah landscape with a goofy teenager crossing to the curtain at left.  But, of course, there is nothing actually funny or fake or false about it.  The two of us were simply out hiking the ridge.  Or were we?

Mistake Corrected

Last summer I found an aspen carving that had me stumped.  If my reader was paying attention, it seemed that I had discovered evidence of (potentially) an American visitor to the Markagunt in 1819.  This would have predated William Ashley, and many of the men he made famous, such as Jed Smith, who could not have been near the plateau prior to 1820 or so.  I was thinking a lot about the problem this week, and decided that I needed better data:  Tree age data for one.  So I went out there today to collect it.  I immediately discovered that I had simply made a mistake.  The date—1819—which seemed so clear, and so uniform, is actually composed of six digits, not four.  Here they are:  181903.  The 18 is the day of the month.  The year is 1903.  I see it now, and it seems obvious.  Unfortunately, while 1819 was too early for Ashley or Smith, 1903 was much too late:  They were both gone by 1840.