I was hiking south of the Gap yesterday. From across the flat, I eyed these two domes (above). Or cones? Cinder cones. Or might it have been a single cinder cone many millennia ago? At any rate, I thought, "I need to climb the domes." So, today I did. With EDO. The climbing was easy and it took less than an hour to bag them both. Perhaps the most remarkable thing was the wind. It was about 26 degrees and there was a very strong north wind. It nearly blew our faces off.
A couple of years ago, someone, maybe it was EDO, pointed to a small, broken band of rocks near the Little Salt Lake (LSL) and told me that there was a panel of petroglyphs there . . . not as good as the Parowan Gap, but a few carvings. I noted it, but didn't think it was worth much of my time. Until today. This afternoon, I decided to scramble up there to look at what I assumed would be a single (low quality) panel. But, I was wrong, there were several very nice panels, and up to nine small sites with beautiful glyphs (a lunar bicycle, below?). The hillside was covered with them. Because the LSL was in view, I decided to call them the LSL glyphs.
Today, I soloed the Manzanita Trail. The thing that was most difficult was finding the trail. I'm not sure that I was in the right place for most of the afternoon. The trail was built perpendicular to the slope, but the wind-blown snow doesn't understand that. As a result, most of it looked the same: A smooth snowpack. At the end of the trail, someone has installed a plastic picnic table. I found the table, so I must have been close. At any rate, one good thing about skiing is that you can always find your way back.
EDO calls this "Treadmill Hill." When you're breaking trail on the way up it is one step forward for every two steps back. Of course, on the return trip (pictured above, pictured below), one enjoys a beautiful glide. I guess that is the joy of skiing and biking, as opposed to treadmilling, or even walking: When you get to the end of the loop, you can coast home. Jiggety-jig.
Over the past two and a half years, Green Chev Two (GC2) has made more than fifty crossings without a breakdown. So, after 515 miles of the latest trip, there was no shame in the alternator failure that left me completely without power. And stranded (above). I was 35 miles from civilization and there was no cell service. It took 60 minutes of hiking-biking-walking to get to a small summit about 30 miles from Milford, Utah where I was able to reach VSO on the phone. She agreed to an 85-mile rescue operation that we expected to take less than an hour and a half.
I guess that 7 February is almost exactly the middle of winter. From the winter solstice to the vernal equinox should be about 91 days, so maybe we reached the mid-point on Friday (the 5th)? At any rate, it was pushing 60F in the Great Basin today. It felt like spring: Clear, warm, still, and fragrant. Is winter over? (BTW, in case my reader has not noticed, I love winter and hate summer, so this observation does not make me happy.)
In order to finish the facia repair at 420 Grand, I decided that I should reduce the size of one of the intersecting shrubs. I don't know exactly what it is. Because it has awl-shaped leaves, it must be a juniper, but I doubt that it is native: Probably a landscape planting by a former owner that has done well in its sheltered location. It hasn't necessarily bothered me very much, but I can't reach the facia behind it.
I thought that I could use the chainsaw to convert the sprawling shrub to a box. In other words, I could flatten the front, pushing it back towards the house, and cut off the top, bringing it down to a manageable five feet tall. As I worked, I began to realize that my preferred dimensions would remove all the leaves, preserving only the lower trunk. Is it ugly? No, not ugly. A bonsai.
At the Homestead, the long dry spell has continued. We had one decent (wetting) snowfall in mid- to late-January, but that was the only one. At 420 Grand, things have been better. The big snow storm last week was packed with moisture—heavy wet snow. Then we had rain on the snow. Today, when the hot, spring-like sun came out, the big melt accelerated. I wondered whether it would cause flooding. So, after work, I went to the levee—was it about to break? Um. No. The Susan River is flowing, but not flooding.
