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Christmas in Arches 2017

Christmas Day | Monday, December 25, 2017

On Christmas morning Diane and I got up early, had some breakfast, loaded up the Jeep and then headed into Arches National Park for our annual Christmas tradition of hiking to Landscape Arch to make sure it’s still standing for another year. If you are interested, you can see our previous trips here: [2016] [2015] [2014]. During our drive through the park to the Devil’s Garden Trailhead we caught a pretty nice sunrise from a few overlooks along the way.

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Christmas Moab Weekend

Moab Area Rock Art XXXII | Saturday & Sunday, December 23-24, 2017

Since we were planning on spending our Christmas in Arches National Park like we do every year, we headed over to Moab on Saturday morning so we could spend the entire holiday weekend in the area. Earlier in the week when I was finalizing our rough plans for the trip I was expecting that there would still be none to minimal snow on the ground for our trip because even though there was a winter storm predicted toward the end of the week, I really didn’t think it would affect the area too much. Boy, was I wrong! Well, actually I was right about the Grand Junction area since we didn’t get any snow that stuck around, however, the storm seemed to be centered right over the area surrounding Moab and dumped about 6-10 inches there! We tried to continue on with our original plans at first, but we ended up having to cancel or change some of the hikes since they would have been too dangerous with all the snow and ice on the ground, even with our microspikes. In the end I acted as a tour guide for Diane as we revisited many easily accessible rock art sites that I hadn’t been to in a while.

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A Quick Nine Mile Canyon Visit

Monday, November 20, 2017

A few years ago while we were exploring Nine Mile Canyon with our friend Dennis, Diane had spotted some nice petroglyphs high above the road that none of us had seen before. We didn’t have time that day to climb up to them for a closer look, so I marked them on my GPS and we planned to return another day. On our way back home from Salt Lake City this weekend we spent a few hours in Nine Mile Canyon to break up the drive and decided to finally climb up to those petroglyphs we had seen from below. We also visited a few other locations in the canyon before continuing our drive back home and we found some other nice petroglyph panels, too. Here are a couple of photos from our quick visit to Nine Mile Canyon.

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West Rim of No Thoroughfare Canyon

Friday, November 3, 2017

This evening I wanted to squeeze in one more hike after work before the Daylight Savings Time change occurs this weekend and it will start getting dark too early for after-work hikes. I decided to head up to the Colorado National Monument so I could explore the West Rim of No Thoroughfare Canyon. Since I had hiked part of the East Rim last weekend, I wanted to see if a trail that is shown on the National Geographic Trails Illustrated Map of the area actually exists on the West Rim. I’ve looked into this trail before and never seen any mention of it on other maps, so I was curious to finally get on the ground in the area and see what I could find.

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The Abajo Mountains

Southern Utah Wanderings | Fall Colors 2017
Monday, October 2, 2017

After spending the weekend in the northern section of Bears Ears National Monument and Canyonlands National Park, we moved a little further south into the Abajo Mountains (Blue Mountains) so we could get a little peak-bagging in on our trip. Since I’ve hiked the highest peaks in the La Sal Mountains and Henry Mountains, I thought it would be nice to complete the trifecta by reaching the summit of Abajo Peak (11,360), the highest point in the Abajo Mountains. This one is a little easier than the others though, since there is a good road all the way up to the top because of all the towers and antennas up there. Shortly after sunrise we broke down our camp located at the base of the Abajo Mountains and drove up the road to the summit. There were some nice views along the way.

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