Time Stops for No One

On this trip, we spent only a couple of days at K's Rock because we wanted to explore some other places too. But, we truly enjoyed the time we had there.

The Runner did some low level climbing on K's Rock. My photo makes him look far off the ground but he was actually only a few feet off the ground. That's why I call it "low level" climbing!

During that quiet afternoon, I went around our campsite closely looking at the blooming flowers. There weren't as many as most years but I'm betting that there will be a late bloom. It rained a lot while we were in Utah.

There were many Primrose blooms...

We also saw many of a pretty flower that's considered to be a weed - a Globe Mallow. We saw these lining the roads throughout the Utah desert.

Near our campsite, I visited a Cottonwood tree with beautiful green leaves...

I walked K past that Cottonwood tree on her last visit to the desert. I knew that she would die soon, and I viewed the entire world through that lens. She and I stopped to look at this tree, and, at that time, I thought to myself that the tree would outlive K. It made me realize all over again that the world would keep spinning on its axis even after K was gone. Since then, I visit the tree on every trip to K's Rock, and I'm so happy to see it flourishing.

It reminds me of my mother's death so long ago - the first major loss in my life. After she had passed, I went to the hospital with my Dad and brother to pick up her personal belongings. Among them was her watch. Without consciously thinking about it, I'd expected that her watch, a constant fixture on her wrist, would have stopped when she died. I anxiously pulled it out of the bag, and I saw its second hand inexorably ticking forward, just like when my mother had been alive. It was a tangible reminder that time stops for no one.

And now, we visit K's Rock with our "new" girl, Shyla. Just like when K was alive, the sunsets are glorious in that spot. Shyla and I enjoyed the sunset on our last evening there.

She was beautiful and the world was beautiful. Little did we know that those clouds hanging on the horizon signaled the end of the calm and sunny weather during our trip. It rarely rains in the desert but it threatened rain every day after that one.

The next day, after leaving K's Rock, we tried to visit a more popular destination, thinking that because it was the "off-season" and the weather forecast was iffy, we'd be able to find peace and quiet. We were completely wrong. Throngs of people seemed to fill the entire landscape.

We made a quick decision to flee the crowds by driving further west, and we barely made it to a much more remote slickrock campsite as night fell. After a long day in the van, I was on the verge of a migraine. I sat quietly in camp as the Runner took the two dogs for a short hike up the slickrock just after sunset.

Our slickrock campsite did turn out to be a very peaceful spot, as we experienced our first desert storms of the trip before driving even further west. More about that in a future post...