A bear in the desert

Winter is here, at least for the moment. The desert trip from last weekend seems like a distant memory.

"They" say that we'll have 10-20" of white stuff on the ground by tomorrow evening.

I'll ignore the snow for a moment and, instead, I'll remember the warm sun on my bare arms and legs as I relaxed in the desert.

The area where we visited has a maze of beautiful singletrack trails that wend among cliffs and canyons. It was gratifying to see how much K has improved since we visited this desert oasis last May. On that visit, her paw was still weak from the toe amputation, and her activity was severely limited. Not this time. She ran each day, and even played wildly with a young pup named Bubba who we met.

K got a serious case of the zoomies as she, R, and Bubba chased each other in the desert grass at sunset. Even after that wild flurry of play, K's paw didn't get sore. Yahoo!

Some of my bike rides were too long for a dog to come along. On one, I started before anyone else had been on the trails. The trails consisted of firm sand, perfect for tracking. I immediately dropped my bike and started cataloging the animals, including lizards, kangaroo rats, coyotes, snakes, a bobcat, and a BEAR!

When I spotted the bear tracks, I immediately swerved to avoid messing them up with my tire tracks, and stopped to check that they were truly bear tracks. Bears don't usually hang out in the desert. And, this particular slice of desert was penned in by the Colorado River on one side and Interstate 70 on the other side. It seemed like a very unlikely place for a bear to be ambling on the trails.

You can see three bear tracks in the photo below. One is near the very bottom of the photo, one is in the middle, and another is near the top.

The bear tracks were fairly large.The Gu container in the photo below was 4.25" long, and the hind foot track was about twice that. That makes me think that it was a fairly big bear. He was heading toward the Colorado River. Swimming the river would have landed him in suitable bear territory. I wonder if that's what he did? It looked like a tough swim to me.

At first, I thought that he might be eating acorns from the scrub oak that grew in the washes of the desert. The oak had gorgeous red leaves but the acorns were gone.

After a quarter mile or so, the bear headed straight up a rock cliff so I stopped tracking him and headed out toward the river. I followed a beautifully constructed trail that paralleled the contours of the cliffs above the river.

You can see the green and yellow trees lining the river in the distance in the photo below. The trail followed a much less direct route than the river, winding along curvy cliffs.

As I rode, my eyes constantly sought the beauty of the river and the autumn colors along side it. Can you visualize a bear swimming across that wide but calm river? I'm told that a bear probably can do it but I find it hard to visualize.

The beauty of our world never stops astounding me.

A visit to the desert

We headed out to the desert for the weekend, to enjoy a couple of last days relaxing in the sun before winter arrives in the form of a snowstorm tomorrow. We arrived at a favorite campsite in the evening, as the sun was setting over the Colorado River.

As the sun peacefully sunk below the horizon, the world turned orange and red.

After dark, one star rose before all the others and sparkled with furious intensity. I opened the shutter on my camera for a few minutes, and the star turned into a streak above the opposite wall of the canyon.

In the photo above, you can also see lights down in the canyon, regulating the flow of train traffic along the tracks that parallel the river. A train came, and I captured its beam as it rumbled by. The million stars are all streaks due to my long shutter time.

The spot where we camped is one that we've visited many times, and it's always almost completely empty. Alas, this weekend was different. In the middle of the night, a boy scout troop arrived. Because all of the designated campsites were filled, they decided to erect their tents on the desert floor surrounding our campsite. It is an understatement to say that the rest of the night and the following morning were not peaceful. I even had the honor of a flashlight beamed on me while I peed behind a tree in the middle of the night. We kept wondering what values the scoutmasters thought that they were teaching those kids. Camp in illegal places. Trample all over the fragile desert floor. Make lots of noise.

Not surprisingly, we moved to a different campsite the next morning, and, although we had a less spectacular view of the river, we enjoyed peace and quiet again. The river looked different at sunrise than at sunset.

I, of course, enjoyed long mountain bike rides on both days, teetering on the edge of cliffs.

Sometimes, I was teetering over the awe-inspiring Colorado River as I pedaled my bike on the edge.

Little did I know that I would continue to teeter, metaphorically, when I arrived home. Life isn't always easy. Sometimes I feel like the gnarled old Utah Juniper near our campsite who has somehow survived centuries despite the harsh and parched heat of the desert.

Unlike that Juniper, I have my pack around me. I feel very lucky in that regard!

I'll tell you more about my gleeful desert bike rides tomorrow. Believe it or not, the stories include a bear who must have accidentally wandered into the desert. I'm starting to think that bears accompany me everywhere!

From the desert to the mountains

Back to the desert for one last day... We spent our last day/night at the San Rafael Swell in a sea of sandstone.

A fierce wind was blowing as the four of us explored the sandstone world that surrounded our campsite before heading off to western Colorado.

We divided our trip home from Utah into two parts by stopping at an "old standby" campsite just over the border into Colorado and overlooking the Colorado River.

While we slept, a rain storm swept across the desert, enveloping us. Because we needed to drive home that day, we couldn't wait around for good weather. K had been limping earlier in the vacation so she and I had barely mountain biked together in a week. I think that the rocky world of the San Rafael Swell didn't agree with her surgically altered paw.

That morning, we headed out into the rainy world for a very short ride together. It felt wonderful to have my chocolate girl next to me again. She did a dance, complete with play bows and spins, to sing out her happiness about being on the trails with me again.

I wanted to go very slowly to keep her paw safe so I stopped to photograph dripping primrose flowers...

...and gorgeous dwarf lupine flowers. They glowed purple next to the trail, elegantly beautiful in an understated way.

We rode for a short time, and K's paw seemed painless. I dropped her off with the boys to hang out while I hammered out for a longer ride.

I rode uphill to a singletrack trail that winds along a cliff above the Colorado River.

I didn't see another person on the trails but the flowers repeatedly stopped me in my tracks. Look at these crimson paintbrush flowers perched on the cliff's edge. Two years ago, I saw a prairie falcon nesting just below where those flowers sit. I didn't see a nest this time.

The Sego Lilies, drenched in rain, made me want to stop and worship them.

After each stop to enjoy the flowers, I'd promise myself that I wasn't going to stop again for the rest of the ride. I swore that I'd just zoom by the blooming shrubs and delicate flowers.

But, then, another patch of flowers would draw me like a bee to nectar.

The palette of colors astounded me, especially against the stormy skies and with no other people around. This odd looking but beautiful flower has the unappealing name of "Pallid Milkweed".

Prairie wild onion...

Finally, I heard the rumble of thunder in the distance and realized that I was riding on a very exposed cliff where I was the tallest thing around (that's a rare occurrence for a short woman). It wouldn't be a good place to ride out an electrical storm. So then, I did truly hammer toward camp. No more flower stops.

Almost there... It was easy riding from here to camp so I zoomed downhill without a care.

During my short stop at the van before we drove home, I noticed a beetle on the sideview mirror. Maybe she was checking her makeup? We helped her off the van so she wouldn't take an unexpected trip to the mountains and we headed for home.... where the rain was snow and the flowers were barely blooming yet.

But, since arriving home and enduring seemingly endless snow and rain, our world is waking up. I love springtime!

On a more somber note, today marks two years since our yellow lab, S, lost his battle with cancer. We miss him but we've reached peace with his memory. We mostly smile rather than cry when we remember him. He was an amazing character who brought lots of love and laughs to our pack.

Rattlesnake Canyon or Gilligan's Island?

I tried to prepare this post yesterday but I felt like I couldn't think straight. For some reason, I didn't make the connection between my mental fuzziness and the noxious odor of the glue that had just been used to install our new tile floor in the basement. By dinnertime, I was feeling truly awful and finally figured out why. We opened all the windows despite the freezing temperature and aired out the house. Now I can think again. After reading the disjointed story that I wrote yesterday, I'm glad that I didn't post it!

Here it is but hopefully I've made it clearer than it was...

It keeps snowing here, as I'm sifting through my photos from our desert trip. Early one recent morning, a pair of coyotes visited our snow-laden clearing. The wildlife are having a tough time with our seemingly endless May snow. R found a baby rabbit floundering in deep snow. He picked it up with his soft Labrador mouth and released it unharmed. I'm glad that it was R and not one of these hungry coyotes who found the baby rabbit.

At the end of my previous post, we had arrived at Rattlesnake Canyon hoping to hike/bike to see ten fabulous arches about 2.5 miles away from our campsite. However, we were in a deluge of rain. We hoped that the next morning would dawn sunny and warm. Alas, our hopes were dashed as we heard the rat-a-tat-tat of freezing rain on the van's roof the next morning.

We slowly ate breakfast while gazing out the windows hoping for a break in the weather. Indeed, the rain stopped around mid-morning. R and the Runner started a run and disappeared in the direction of the the fabled arches. K and I started in the same direction with me on my mountain bike. Believe it or not, I made it only 20 yards. In that short distance, the mud coated my tires so thickly that they would not turn within my bike frame. I stopped and tried to roll my bike back to the van but the bike wouldn't roll due to the dastardly mud. I tried carrying my bike but the mud must have weighed 100 lbs. My elegant solution was to drag my bike on its side, leaving a deep furrow in the mud road. I spent the next hour cleaning the mud off my bike, making it functional (although certainly not "clean"). I failed to take a photo of my mud-caked bike because my mood was horrendous at that time.

After cleaning my bike, K and I wandered around near the van. We could only walk a quarter mile from it without my shoes become 2 ton clown shoes with huge wads of mud stuck to them. I kept wondering how R and the Runner were faring in their quest to see the arches. I had a bleak vision of them stuck in the mud somewhere down in the canyon. I was also starting to ponder the notion that the roads were truly impassable and that we might be stranded in that place for a long time. Visions of "Gilligan's Island" were dancing through my head.

Despite being landlocked by a sea of mud, K and I enjoyed wandering in a brief sunny moment.

We saw vivaciously colored flowers. These "Four O'clock" flowers were blooming in the morning. These flowers open in the late afternoon and stay open all night, in contrast to most flowers. The reason is that Hawk Moths are their primary pollinators, and they're nocturnal.

Bluebirds flitted nearby with the skies darkening behind them.

I thought that the weather pattern had changed until we descended to the best lookout point for gazing over the plains and into the canyon. Oh my.

Almost immediately, another round of thunder, lightning, and a pelting rain engulfed our world. I could barely walk the 100 yards up the muddy hill to the safe haven of the van because my feet slipped back down the hill by at least 6" for each step. At one point, I left the trail, and started using my arms to pull me up the hill by grabbing boulders as I crawled. I was starting to understand what "impassable when wet" meant. I was also regretting the time I'd spent cleaning the inside of the van before our trip. It was rapidly becoming a mud-fest.

The two R's were still down in the canyon. I was starting to worry about them. K and I hung out in the van waiting for them.

They finally returned, having evaded the lightning and slipped all over the slick mud trail. The Runner sported the muddiest shoes that I've ever seen. Before the lightning forced them to turn back, they'd made it to the first of the ten arches rumored to be in the canyon.

Soon, we had another period of calm weather. My back was starting to scream in pain from being sedentary in the van too much. So, I pedaled my bike in the opposite direction from the arches. I discovered that I could ride 0.33 miles in that direction without hitting impassable mud.

I'm sure that the next part of the story will teach you that I am truly nuts. I proceeded to ride back and forth on the 0.33 miles of passable road for more than an hour. The Runner sat outside the van and shouted out my "splits" as if I was doing a high intensity workout. My best split was 3:26 for a 0.66 mile "lap" on the rough dirt road. In the end, what could have been a dismal ride was hilarious with me sprinting back and forth like a maniac, and my coach shouting encouragement. Even enticing birds watched me sprinting back and forth like this spotted towhee.

By dinnertime, it hadn't rained for a few hours. We hiked out the road in the "escape" direction to test the mud. The ground felt almost solid under our feet so we decided to seize the moment to try to flee.

Based on the weather forecast, we knew that we had no choice but to seize even the tiniest of dry weather windows to try to drive out of there. Otherwise, we might spend our entire trip in a 0.33 mile radius. It was a beautiful little area but we had planned to travel much further!

The start of our escape drive was on perfectly flat and easy roads through sagebrush plains. Yet, at times, we fishtailed as if we were negotiating black ice on a steep road. After slip-sliding for miles on flat roads, we made it to a junction where we knew that we had a very tough, but short, descent over steep and muddy roads. Darkness had fallen so we decided to sleep by the side of the road and wait for daylight to try to negotiate the final part of our escape. In the morning, I looked back at our tracks from the night before. You can see how deeply we were sinking into the jelly-like mud on the easy road.

You can also see that the storms stilled chased us. So, we immediately hightailed it down the boulder-pocked precarious hill. Within less than a mile, we were in trouble, mired in the mud. Thanks to the Runner's driving skills and the bull-moose power of our diesel 4wd van, we backed out of the mud.

After discussion, we decided to barge through a private road with huge signs screaming "no trespassing" guarding its entrance. Our map showed that it was an easy route back to civilization. We created an elaborate story of a "female" medical drama requiring us to rush to the hospital in case anyone tried to stop us. Thankfully, we didn't see a soul while committing our misdemeanor.

We made it out, with the Runner having seen only one arch and me seeing none. But, I've never been so happy to see a paved road and the cliffs that it overlooked, especially with the angry storms still circling us!

We'll go back to Rattlesnake Canyon someday. The photos of the arches there have convinced us that it would a perfect spot to enjoy nature's beauty in total solitude. However, we will choose a window of time when there is ZERO percent chance of rain.