Cornering Consciousness

One of the many great things technology has done for mankind is diminish the frequency of the turn of phrase, there's only one way to find out , the very words uttered (or so we imagine), when Lorrel "Sixty" McInnely put his bulldozer in gear towing a compressor across two felled lodgepole pines that spanned the gap of Box-Death Hollow fifteen hundred feet below. I can also imagine that "Sixty" got his name when it was discovered that one of his testes weighed thirty pounds.  But, I'll come back to the rest of the story in a minute. We've gone all Summer without a true breaking out into the backcountry save for a day trip late July, so on the last weekend of the season we set out to drive and camp along the road that goes to Hell's Backbone on the Grand Staircase National Monument. We packed up Friday evening and left Hurricane early Saturday morning, getting into Zion Canyon when the sun was up above the east rim.  If you've neve...

This trip was scrubbed two weeks ago when it was originally scheduled due to the unplanned surgery reattaching my left biceps tendon. So it's with great relief to get to a point where we could make this little overland trek in a minimum of pain. As with any adventure that takes us east out of St. George, this Grand Staircase trek took us through Zion Canyon. The idea was to drive to Escalante, Utah, where the trailhead to the Smoky Mountain Road can be found down a side street not far from the BLM offices on the south side of town. We're always glad to get back on the road or back on the water, to move, explore, share, talk, eat, sleep and drink in the proximity of each other. Mindy was able to get off work earlier than expected giving us a head start and putting us in Escalante a couple of hours ahead of time. The plan was to camp at Escalante Outfitters, a barely-an-acre parcel set up for tents, not RTTs. So we camped in the parking lot, fully warned that a weddin...