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The Book Cliffs: Coal Gulch to Ross Ridge

After Work Adventures | Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Today after work I hopped into my Jeep so I could spend a couple hours in the Book Cliffs on a little After Work Adventure before heading home for the rest of the evening. After leaving work I drove over to Fruita and then followed 16 Road north to the foot of the Book Cliffs where I headed up the road through Coal Gulch and onto Garfield Mesa and Ross Ridge. While I was up there I hiked over to the highpoints of each of them. It’s been over 15 years since the last time I was in this area and I was looking forward to returning for this short visit since I don’t really remember all too much about it. These are just a couple photos from my afternoon in this part of the Book Cliffs.

Blue Mountain Shadows: Beef Basin to Cedar Mesa

Southern Utah Wanderings | Friday – Friday, October 1-8, 2021

This year for our annual week-long trek into Southern Utah, Jared and I started out in the Beef Basin area and then we explored our way over to Cedar Mesa. It has been a while since either of us had spent much time around Beef Basin and I was also really hoping that we would be able to spend some quality time around the Dark Canyon Plateau and Elk Ridge areas along the way. The trip started out great and we found plenty of new rock art and ruin sites, but unfortunately the weather did not cooperate with us on the second half of this trip and we had to change our plans multiple times because of storms and slick muddy roads. At one point we even stopped to help winch a truck back onto the road that was sliding off. One of the unexpected benefits of the poor weather was that it chased us closer to the Abajo Mountains than we were originally planning to go, and they were in peak falls colors at the time! At the end of the week we found out that President Biden was restoring the original boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument, which was fitting since we were sitting in camp within the newly restored boundary. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of this trip, so please enjoy plenty of photos from our journey below.

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La Sal Mountains: Horse Mountain & Grand View

La Sal Mountains Peak Bagging | Friday & Saturday, July 9-10, 2021

This weekend I was finally going to my first concert in over a year on Saturday evening so I needed to stay close to home, but I still hoped to squeeze in a hike to the summit of a peak or two on Saturday morning. Since the Pack Creek Fire near Moab was finally contained and the La Sal Mountains were opening back up, I thought this would be a good time for me to head that direction for a quick overnight trip. When I left from work on Friday afternoon it was a blistering 106 degrees out and I would later find out that Grand Junction had set the all-time high temperature record of 107 degrees while I was driving into Utah. The thermometer on my Jeep registered 112 degrees as I passed by the Fisher Towers– it’s certainly been a hot week on the Colorado Plateau! After driving through Castle Valley to the La Sal Mountains Loop Road I followed the narrow and bumpy road up into Miners Basin and spent the rest of the evening around the small lake near the trailhead. It was still a bit warm up in Miners Basin when I arrived, but it cooled off nicely as the sun went down for the night.

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The Paradise Slot & Grosvenor Arch

Southern Utah Wanderings | Tuesday & Wednesday, October 6-7, 2020

After leaving Lick Wash in the midafternoon on Tuesday, we drove back to Tropic to grab some dinner and then headed out through Cannonville and down the Cottonwood Road into the Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument so we could check out a remote and little-known slot canyon known as the Paradise Slot on Wednesday morning. This short slot canyon is kind of out of the way, so we figured we probably wouldn’t run into any other people out in this area, and it turns out that we would be right about that! We stopped to visit Grosvenor Arch along the way since we were driving right by it. I think the last time I was here was in 2009, so this was a good opportunity for me to get a better photo in the late afternoon.

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The Highest Point in Grand County: Mount Waas

La Sal Mountains Peak Bagging | Pilot Mountain, Green Mountain & Mineral Mountain
Friday – Saturday, July 5-6, 2019

After spending the last month on the river it was finally time for me to start getting back into the mountains again! Like last year around this same time, I decided that this would be a good weekend to continue my peak-bagging pursuit in the La Sal Mountains near Moab. Since I’d already climbed the San Juan County High Point a couple years ago, I thought it was about time that I finally got to the summit of the Grand County High Point. Originally, Diane was supposed to come with me on this trip and we were going to spend the full weekend in the area, but at the last minute she decided to take a shift at work on Saturday, so I ended up going by myself. I’m not going to lie, I was very worried about this hike. Since I’ve been on the river every weekend for the last month I felt that I was quite a bit out of shape since I haven’t been hiking much lately. It feels like I haven’t put on my hiking boots in forever; not to mention that I haven’t been up in the high country since late September of last year! I was really concerned that I wasn’t going to make it to the summit this time, but still, I knew that I needed to try…