"What Happens Here, Stays Here"

LAS VEGAS Baby!!!

Why were we going to visit this mecca-metropolis on our tour of our country's great outdoor spaces?  Did we need a break from it all to gamble away some stress and hard-earned money that could be spent on many a Ramen packet?  Well, it turns out, just outside of Vegas is another mecca...for rock climbing.  Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area!  Since this is Karl talking about rock climbing, I'll try my best to keep it short.

Back Story:  With 2 months of warning, Stacy's REI co-workers informed us that they had planned a week at RR, and maybe if we were in the area, we'd like to join?  OK.  We all stayed at the awesome-est 'climbers hostel', with hosts Jorge and Jess.  They are friends that offered everyone place on the floor, puppy-loving, delicious food, and great company.

Cast

Starl:

Krenbic:

'Animal' Rach:

Braid Katie:

'Husband' Andrew:

'Cold Press' Jared:

'That Guy' Nick:

Host Jess:

Host Jorge:

 <PICTURE NOT FOUND?>

Guide Adam:

Dobby:

and The Other One:

Day one was spent warming up on some 5.7's-5.9's in a canyon with 30 mph gusts, rain and even some snow.

And then onto a protected canyon with good 5.8's and 5.9's

Day two was spent (by us) driving to LA to fix this damn computer...

Day three was spent on Trad / Multi-pitch (with the others being guided by Adam and Jess).

Day four was spent finishing up on some 5.10's and 5.11's and eating sticks.

Thanks for the great climbs and great times!!! 

-K

And a P.S. Shout out to Cousin Amy and (second) Cousin Shaye for being in the area and meeting up for a hike!!

Finishing Utah: From A to (Katie) Z

Guest Author:

Katie Z. joins Stacy and Karl to explore the wonders in winter!

Fair warning – I don’t have the same skill set as Stacy, so I can’t let my pictures tell my story for me. But I want you to know how amazing and diverse and mind-blowing all this stuff is, so buckle up for the ride. This is gonna be a nerdy journey! 

One goes through life with certain expectations of things being where they are supposed to be, and behaving the way they are supposed to behave (it’s how it’s always been). So when your East Coast self arrives by airplane at night, in the lights of Vegas, and drives through a darkness punctuated only by the pinpricks of a growing number of stars to a campground in the desert, the next morning’s sunrise is pretty darn magical. It was a small little campsite on the Arizona side of Lake Mead, mainly RVs with some tenting spots on the upper elevation, but the stars were beautiful at night with the bare outlines of the hills breaking up the horizon and nestling us into a cozily between them. The air is so clear that the hills come alive with light well before the sun shines above the edges of the folded and serrated peaks worn sharp in places by wind and the rare rains, but looking like soft sand piles in other places with the golden light warming them against the blue sky. You’ve seen it in photos and movies, but being there and seeing it with your own eyes, and feeling the dryness on your skin and in your nose... It’s so different. Different plants, different terrain, different feel in the air, different smells, different bird sounds… even the sound of the dry gravel beneath your feet. Like Dorothy waking up in Oz. 

Some tea and quick breakfast, pack up the tent and off we go!

This level of surprise and awe stayed with me for most of the trip. We went into a WalMart on day one to get our groceries for the week. Nothing too different here, one WalMart is like any other. The standardized experience of a national, windowless big box store. So we were half way through the parking lot (a parking lot just like any other) when I happened to look up, and shout! “Mountain! There’s a Mountain!” A beautiful, snowcapped peak! Straight ahead! Duck, duck, duck, goose! Same, same, normal, normal, normal - Woah, magic! Even when you shouldn’t be surprised, like leaving a Visitor’s Center in a National Park, it somehow sneaks up on you – Mountain! Big and close and impressive. If you don’t like gorgeous views, this would be a terrible place for you to visit. 

The other thing you don’t realize when you’re from the East is that these mountains are everywhere! They have mountains out here like we have houses there. You drive for 2 minutes and there’s more of them. You drive another two hours and they just keep coming! Good lord! The first three days I was out with Stacy and Karl I just couldn’t wrap my head around how wonderful that was – they just kept coming!!! And they’re all different. Some are red and abrupt, some have slow inclines and rocky surfaces, some are single tall snowcaps, some are a big pile of pointed crags all massed together, some have flat-tops and crumbling edges. And they just rise up - stately, massive, silent. Defining the paths, behaviors and lives of the animals, plants and people around them. So, just a little bit awesome.

It’s also neat to see how much it all changes in such a short distance. Within 5-hours drive you go from solid desert conditions to the snow-covered terrain of Dixie National Forest and Fish Lake Forest, with enough water to support conifers and aspens. That’s the same amount of time it takes to drive across Pennsylvania. Thanks elevation gains! We wandered around between 1,200 feet to almost 9,000 feet on this week-long journey. And it made for some pretty fun times. I especially enjoyed practicing self-arrests with the ice ax while killing time for our ranger-led snowshoe walk at Bryce! 

In one week we visited Capitol Reef, Zion and Bryce National Parks (plus the quick stop at Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam on the first evening). And I gotta say, going in the winter was magnificent! If you’ve only seen it in the summer, go back! If you read Stacy’s last post you saw it can be tricky working with the weather, and I bought my ticket ready to bail and head somewhere else if the weather didn’t cooperate. But it’s so worth the gamble! Obviously, I’d love to go back (and often), but if I died without seeing these places in the summer, I would feel okay about it. That’s how cool they were in winter. Plus, we still saw tons of critters (one bald eagle chased a magpie right over the road about 20 feet in front of Elle causing much screaming, pointing, and a much-required u-turn for photo stalking). *Check the bottom of this post for our full list of critters.* And the weather was amazing. The whole area got several weeks of snow and then the storms passed away leaving us with days that were sunny, in the 40s, with bluebird skies and just enough snow to play in. Bonus – the morning of my flight to Utah I slipped on ice during a marathon training run and had a very swollen tendon in my foot/ankle. Fortunately, we had plenty of driving time for recovery and very convenient roadside snow buffet for perfect on-demand make-your-own ice packs so I was ready to party when it was hiking time. How convenient – thanks roadside snow!

Although all the parks were stunning, Capitol Reef was by far my favorite!

For those of you in the Pittsburgh area, it’s like comparing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water vs Kentuck Knob. You love both but one is impressive and was designed for short visits, and the other is meant for living in every day. Capitol Reef is Kentuck Knob. We aren’t the first and we won’t be the last people to enjoy living under the grandeur of those red cliffs! 

I guess our campsite was okay... 

Karl kept having to remind me that the things I kept calling brooks and streams (like this one just behind our tent site) are generally called rivers out here. I thought everything was bigger out west, but apparently only in season? This river had neat ice formations, with ripples and curves caused by the fast-moving water as it froze. It was very popular with the local mule deer population.

Water pockets like these (below) hold water and serve as important habitat for insects, tadpoles, and more in the harsh desert landscape. Can you spy the Katie in The Tanks? Here’s that big scenery I was looking for!

With reasonably predicable weather patterns and decent access to water, 11 Mormon families staked their claim here in the 1800s, creating the town of Fruita – so named for the orchards they planted and which are still maintained by the Park Service. We saw them pruning a few trees during our visit, but when they are in fruit park visitors are allowed to pick some. The town set up shop right under the massive walls. This was a common thing to see in this part of Utah - you’d be driving down the highway and see a horse’s pen right under a wall, or a house, etc. Maybe not the safest choice, but by far the most picturesque! 

The Fruita Schoolhouse, complete with wood-burning stove and dunce caps in the corner.

It’s no picnic though – this area didn’t get electricity till after WWII because it was so hard to get in among the canyon walls. But long before the Mormons settled in, Native Americans lived in the shadows of these walls. A semi-nomadic people that anthropologists refer to as the Freemont culture, they farmed and hunted in this area from 600 – 1300 C.E. and left petroglyphs we can still see so clearly in 2017 C.E. (Petroglyphs = carved images; pictographs = painted images.) The oldest thing I own came from my Great Grandma and is maybe about 100 years old?... How old is your house? How old was your car when you start referring to it as old? Remember when your coworker casually mentions the year they graduated as “so long ago” and your jaw dropped because that was like, yesterday? Or, how your two-year old cell phone is completely out of date? These are 1,000+ years old. It’s rare for human-made things to last this long, and it’s pretty special.

While wandering around you also notice there’s all these big black rocks, sometimes whole fields of them, that don’t seem to match anything else. Those are volcanic rocks. Yup, Utah has volcanos!!! What, you didn’t know? (Okay, they have been dormant for a couple million years, but still, I bet you had no idea! Kind of makes you wonder where else is hiding in plain site…)

Being in these places gives you a different sense of scale than you grow up with in the East – in both time and size. The walls towering over our sunlit campsite are composed of dirt that was blowing around in the time of the dinosaurs. No joke. We were walking in dinosaur land (well, there weren’t actual dinosaurs in this specific part of Utah – southern Utah was too busy going back and forth between being an inland sea, a coastline and a series of freshwater lakes). But the three layers of rock visible in Capitol Reef reflect the Triassic and Jurassic Periods – the prime dinosaur time! 

What you see in this picture is what’s called the geological record - the earth kept a photo album of the big moments in its life (here’s prom, and its first car…). The difference in the rocks show us when a big change happened, so we name the periods of time occurring between those changes (e.g. the Triassic Period). 

Click here for the Geology Side Spur.

In the middle of the trip, we took a brief spin through Zion National Park. Zion is beautiful in winter. Zion is beautiful anytime. I will let Stacy put in some pretty Zion pictures, but I’ll use this silly one. Sometimes it’s hard to really grasp the scale of something as big as these mountains. I like the way the fallen “tiny” chunk of mountain makes the car next to it look like an insect. Not the first car… the other one. If you just said, “What other one?” then you get my point. That little chip that fell off the mountain is 4-story-building HUGE!    

These are big rock features. Zion highlights for me were: the waterfall with ice breaking off in the sunshine, hearing the crushing charge of ice down another water fall (damn that was loud and terrifying!), running around in our icetrekkers (like yaktrax) and laughing at the slick ice (you won’t stop us!). And I loved the weeping wall. (It’s hard to look at a big solid rock – one that’s solid enough to arch above you like a very short cave – and wrap your head around the idea that water is seeping through miniscule pores in this mountain above you. Humans can visualize a drop of water, a little trickle of water, but a few molecules of water wiggling through solid rock and weeping out in big old drops (quantities we can see and understand again)? That’s like Star Trek transporter levels of cool. And it’s just happening all the time.) And the birdies! We saw a towhee, an orange-crowned warbler, and a mountain chickadee! (Oh yeah, and giant canyon walls carved by a river. Just a couple million years of the powerful effects of the thing that makes all life possible… No biggie.)

One last crazy rock thing before we move to squishier subjects… Ranger Joe at Bryce Canyon National Park explained that much of the cementing agent for the rocks in this part of Utah is calcium carbonate. And the specific source of the calcium carbonate in Utah is waaaaaay over yonder in the High Sierras. Hold on to your hats folks, it gets even more amazing. Because once upon a time the sierras were not big mountains in the sky, they were underwater. Not only were they underwater, but the High Sierra area supported a huge coral colony. That coral all went extinct and the coral we have now is totally different and completely unrelated – it evolved entirely separately millions of years later! And the Sierra Mountains rose, and as the coral skeletons eroded away the water carrying those teensy-weensy coral particles eventually made its way into Southern Utah and all those dead particles of coral skeleton formed the cementing agent for much of the rock formations there. (Mind exploded at this point, but it was cold so it wasn’t too hard to clean up the ooze. The problem is the mini-brainquakes that happen every time I retell this story!) It’s hard to stand in the middle of Bryce Canyon, in snowshoes, at 8,000+ feet of elevation, after driving through mountains and forest, and think about all the warm seas and deserts and billions of dead corals under our feet. I hope I get to be part of something this cool when I die.

The air and water is so clear in these parks they get dark sky ratings of 2. And on the best days, you can look from the North Rim Trail in Bryce and see the North of the Grand Canyon (about 100 miles).

This is the longest blog-novel ever – especially if you took the geology spur. I’m going to claim it’s in sympathy with the long, slow pace of everything out west. It was a magical time warp in many ways. Item number one – time moves slower when you’re on vacation. You know what I’m talking about! And this blog post is proof – how could we fit so much amazing and awesome into one week?! Not even Neil DeGrasse Tyson could explain it. And number 2 is obviously all the geologic evidence we got to witness and wander through. But it’s not just the land itself that is patient and slow, it’s the living organisms too. Stacy mentioned in her last post that we got to see bristlecone pines in Bryce. The oldest living bristlecone in Bryce is around 1,700 years old. And there are dead ones in the park as old as 3,000 and still standing. Coming from the east coast, where everything is wet and decaying and we’ve got mushrooms and bacteria and slugs and all kinds of other decomposers around, it’s hard to wrap your brain around this sort of thing. When we find a 200-year old tree we say “oooo” and are filled with wonder. Even in what we consider old growth forest in our neck of the woods, the trees are probably not past 400 years old – not much older than the US Constitution. And sure our smallish mountains are truly ancient (“My mountains are so old, they started shrinking before yours were even born!”), but with all the terrain constantly reinventing itself and covering the rock with green and brown stuff, heaving with the urgency of life, it’s hard to notice all that ancient bedding beneath. Out west, the only thing making any soil is little patches of cryptosoil – a living crust on the earth made of cyanobacteria (AKA blue-green algae – in the desert? Who knew?!), but also includes lichens, mosses, green algae, microfungi and bacteria. This is what starts the work and eventually makes it so that a tiny scrubby tree can take root in the rocky wildness of the place. And as Stacy mentioned – don’t touch it! Because it will take years to grow back after you step on it. 

Here’s the slowest fight to the death ever recorded… lichen in slow motion battle for territory. My money’s on the orange (if our money still has any value when this fight is finally over).

As we drove through the snow-covered Fish Lake National Forest, Karl pointed out that Aspens are one of the largest living things on Earth, because they clone themselves and are connected underground. And it turns out they’re also one of the oldest. Fish Lake National Forest contains the oldest colony of quaking aspens in the world – with a root system estimated at 80,000 years old! Sooo… sorry oldest hemlock tree in PA that’s like 800-900 years old, teamwork won this contest. Packrats don’t live all that long, but they keep using the same nest for generations. The oldest nest in continuous use in Bryce Canyon is (drumroll please…) 30,000 years old! (Oldest evidence of humans in North America is 13,000 – 14,700 years ago. Sooo… we’re all immigrants and the packrats have first dibs?) But it’s a trade-off – harsher environment with variable access to water, big winds, high elevation and sun exposure, not much soil or nutrients… it’s a specialized ecosystem in Utah, for sure. And the things that live there have cultivated patience in response to the harsh conditions. This blog post has been harsh and dry, and hard to cross – do you feel older and slower and more patient now too?

But even though it’s harsh there, and even though we visited in winter, boy did we see some amazing critters and plants. (Some were on farms, but why not count them? They were living in this ecosystem and we saw them!) Here’s a quick run-down:

Lake Mead (Night/Morning #1):

American coot (duck)

White-Crowned Sparrows

Red tailed hawk

Northern mocking bird

Night-calling bird at lake mead – no idea, but it called in the night. That’s all I got!

Big fish in lake mead (24" and pretty deep and wide) – unsure of species

Capitol Reef (Days 1-3):

Lots of mule deer!

Grey Fox 

Rabbit (they have 4 out there, not sure which one we saw)

Horses

Cows

Ravens

Turkeys (seriously huge, their footprints were almost as big as my hand)

A dormant Carpenter Bee (was nesting in the free park firewood log, found when we split the log, I assume it later because a tasty and nourishing meal for a turkey)

Between Zion & Bryce (Day 4):

4 Bald Eagles

2 Golden Eagles (a mated pair)

Magpie

Llama

Black-faced sheep 

Bison (all the other farm animals are obvious, but want to clarify, this is farm bison)

Flock of ducks in pond (under an eagle in nearby tree, ducks were dark in color but didn’t get a good look)

At Zion (Day 4):

Mountain Chickadee 

Orange Crowned Warbler 

Spotted Towhee

Mule Deer 

Prickly Pear

Aspens

At Bryce (Day 5-6):

Hairy Woodpecker

Stellar's Jay

Mountain Chickadee

Black Capped Chickadee

Pygmy Nuthatch

Utah Juniper

Ponderosa Pine

Bristle Cone Pine

Limber Bristle Cone Pine

Manzanita

Mountain Mahogany (this tree has feathers!!!)

Mahonia (looked like a scraggly short woody vine with red holly-like leaves

Gambel Oak

That’s Southern Utah.

I think you should go! GO GO GO GO GO GO GO!!!!!

Actually, I think you should go anywhere and everywhere with Karl and Stacy. They will show you amazing things, be great company, and generally enjoy every moment in life – even the hard and frustrating parts. They are the most magical thing I found in Utah. Thanks Karl and Stacy – I couldn’t ask for better travel companions to share this adventure with! And I love you very much!

-Katie

Utah: friends of the parks and parks with friends

Admittedly, I have been putting off this blog post for quite a while, with persistent reminders from Karl that it is my turn to write something. Avoiding the task was not due to of lack of time or need for inspirational content (we've had plenty of both), rather the opposite.  I have too many things to say, wrapped up with many emotions over that extended period of time that I am fumbling with how to refrain from a full out rant or boring play by play recap.

To "rip off the band aid" so to say, I will dive right into the muckier stuff to get it over with. Beginning with politics (load groan).  First, let me begin with the over all statement that I truly believe both Karl and I were exactly where we were supposed to be this past year. Meaning that we kept our sanity during the circus of the election and we disappeared into the woods in order to limit our "real world" contact when everyone else was waging political science wars on social media, which I would probably be very active in if I wasn't so content in my current escapism. But our blissful bubble was burst when certain political maneuvers began encroaching into our adventure-land world and threatening what we have been so vividly immersing ourselves in: our National Parks, public lands, scenic/cultural/historic places, overall well being of our environment, and interactions with some of the most awesome humans I have ever met; Park Rangers.  For a bit, there was a dark cloud over our heads, a feeling of hopeless depression with the "what the hell is going on?"/"what the hell could I even do about it".  Questions swamping our minds that used to be preoccupied with thoughts of "how many miles can I hike today" or "where might we end up sleeping tonight"? Finding our own ways of being "politically active" while on the road has helped us climb out of our stupor.  Like the wise words of the Dalai Lama, shared on a bulletin board at Denali National Park:

Ranting on this unpleasant topic will end soon, as I realized that I would rather my photos do the talking for me.  So, no matter if you are red or blue, left or right, elephant or donkey... if you have EVER enjoyed, liked, smiled at, shared, loved, glanced at, or even just been curious about any of the photos I have taken or blog posts we have shared on this trip of the awesome country we live in, then understand that these places you are getting to see and experience through us are worth protecting. Protect our parks, protect our public land, protect America's best idea ever! Oh and the Rangers that are the sentinels for many of these locations should not be silenced but praised.  End rant.

Want to talk about being cold (also known as visiting Utah in January)?  A recurring theme of our road trip is that there are only so many good weather windows that you can squeeze numerous parks into, sooner or later you have to deal with the less ideal conditions and Utah's parks got that short straw.  As Karl mentioned in the end of the last post, Utah just got dumped with snow and the temperatures were staying low and the white stuff was there to stay.  Thankfully, due to a trip a few years ago to the same region, we knew what these parks were like in the summer heat and took the winter weather as an exciting change of pace (or challenge). This is me trying to act optimistic, keep in mind Karl is the one that likes snow, not me!

The major benefit of visiting these popular places in frigid temperatures is the hope that you will have the pristine views to yourself as most other people are not as determined (or crazy?) as we are to brave the nippy air.  With that said we are diving directly into Moab, the jumping off point for everything interesting near Arches and Canyonlands National Parks as well as a bunch of state parks, so anything being "uncrowded" is a relative term.  With our forecast knowledge being limited only to knowing it would be necessary to bundle up, our first stop was to the Visitor Center in Arches National Park to talk with Rangers about conditions, suggestions, and thanking them for being bad asses.  Once a Ranger determine that you are of a certain caliber of visitor, a wealth of knowledge and hidden gems of insight (like favorite spots, remote finds, and back country permits) are provided. With the advice given, our next few days were spent jumping from Arches to BLM or State hikes around Moab to Canyonlands back to Arches and so on. Depending on small factors like how windy it was, what the lighting looked like, or if the slick rock would be wet, we customized the days excursions.  

- Scenic drives though Arches to reacquaint ourselves to the park, with short jaunts on nature trails to see some of the more accessible famous features.

- Multiple entertaining trails to explore outside of the National Park on BLM Lands to check out natural springs, train tracks, and more arches. 

(Karl couldn't just look at the arches from below... his antics makes for cool photos though!)

- Back to Arches to repeat the Devil's Garden Trail we enjoyed nearly 7 years ago to revisit some of our favorite sights and recreate a few choice photos. 

Our recreation attempt ended shortly after this photo was taken. The freezing temperatures, the biting wind, the white out conditions with the snow fall was NOT the reason we turned around.  We actually pushed on until while in the midst of all of that and scrambling on the icy slick rock through a small slot canyon, we hear in the very close gray distance crunching, cracking, crashing BOOMs slightly muffled by the thick snow falling in the air... a rock/ice fall. My heart was probably pounding just as loud as the echoing items falling from the sky, and that was enough of an adrenaline rush for me. 

As we hastened back along our footprints in the snow, we confirmed that the famed Landscape Arch was still hanging in there. Looking even more precariously thin with the blanket of snow on top. 

-Visit Canyonlands.  By the way, this park is divided into three districts: Island in the Sky, The Needles, and The Maze (split by the Green and Colorado Rivers, and their confluence, kinda like how Pittsburgh's rivers converge and separate parts of the city). Beginning with the first and appropriately named, Island in the Sky (which would be central like dahntahn back in PGH) we spent the morning hiking around Grand View Point, 

watching storm clouds crawl along the landscape below while trailing wisps of precipitation.

We were going to take a "rest day" and just drive through Island in the Sky and take short walks to overlooks and features. Well, 9 miles later we realized we aren't very good at sitting still on rest days.

-And that night we drove back into Arches to hike to Delicate Arch to watch the sunset from the famed spot. 

Yes, it was freezing but you don't need to feel your extremities (as long as you aren't shivering too much) to take a pretty picture. 

I was savoring the fact that so few people were up at Delicate Arch that I would not have to photoshop posing individuals out of my pictures. 

Karl's entertainment was people watching the few determined but unprepared individualist who were trying to get up to the arch in high heeled boots or converse sneakers and no flashlights other than their cell photo screens. Oh well.

After the sun dipped below the horizon, we had the place almost all to ourselves.  It was a whole different world. I say "almost" because we did have to share the trail with some deer.

The next day we took a small detour and drove to visit a place that almost had a mythical status for me, we were off to Castle Valley, Utah to gaze upon Castleton Tower. 

Why is this random 400-foot wingate sandstone tower standing on a 1,000-foot moenkopi-chinle cone in Utah so special to me?

It was all because of the "hot-wheels" version of this tower at the Pittsburgh REI that I became a climber. REI in more ways than one, has changed the course of my life.  Because of my employment there I found a new trail to follow. In this instance, if it wasn't for my managers at REI thinking for some reason that I would be a good belayer, they trained me to help work the Pinnacle at REI. I fell in love with a mock rock in the middle of South Side.  While encouraging people to new heights, I would tell them about the Pinnacle I loved working at and how it was modeled after a real place. Many times, I was asked "Have you been there?" and the longing in my voice as I answered "not yet" was always there. Now, I can claim I was there!

We made it to the real Pinnacle!

Sadly, we did not climb the real thing. Honestly, the drive on the insanely muddy roads/hiking to the base of the cone on said road when we didn't want to take Ele any farther, 

then hiking up the huge cone on snow and ice get to the base of the Tower was a workout enough. 

Add in the fact that is was around 20 degrees, windy as all hell, and the easiest option would have been four pitches of off-width 5.9+... we skipped the actual roping up. 

But, that just gives us a reason to come back one day.

- Back to the parks, the next day exploring another region of Canyonlands: The Needles.  Following foot trails to panoramic views, crazy formations, and historic relics we had plenty to do. 

With it being the off season, other than a single ranger patrolling in his truck we had the park to ourselves.  This even included the campsites near Elephant Hill picnic area, we were alone. And our campsite had its own cave!

It was awesome. 

That night, we found out why we were by ourselves.  By morning our water bottles were solid, our large 7 gallon water tank was now a very large ice cube (and these items were inside the car with us), every inch of Ele's surface was covered in a think sparkling frost, and the windshield wiper fluid was frozen. According to Karl, to have that freeze the temperatures had to be in the negatives. Oops.

From freezing to the Fiery Furnace we go. Despite the name, it wasn't that much warmer but at least it was above 30 degrees and sunny.  The Fiery Furnace is a natural labyrinth of narrow sandstone canyons, fins, and passages in Arches and if you venture in alone (without a Ranger led hike) you need a permit and to agree that you will most likely get lost.  

When obtaining a permit, you have to watch a video, talk to a ranger, answer questions about your capability to complete a hike like this on your own, and sign your life away.  This hike also had more restrictions and warnings than any other I have ever done. From the standard safety expected bullet points one expects to see (like have your own 10 essentials, wear sturdy boots, pack out all waste, etc), to no children under a certain age allowed, to things like do not talk above a slight whisper (because everything will echo) or if you encounter another group or person hiking, take a different route as them so as to allow the experience of having the place to yourself.  The most stressed restriction for hiking anywhere around Moab concerns the "crypto", a living crust that is actually called "biological soil crust" and it covers much of the surrounding sand, creating a crust like foundation composed of algae, lichens, and bacteria for desert plants to take hold onto.  This crust takes years to grow and develop and one misplaced footstep can disrupt this living ground cover and impact the effected area for years, screwing up the whole ecosystem.  It is understandable why they want to protect it.  But they surely make you know NOT to walk on any crypto and only place your boot on slick rock or established wash bottoms. 

We've seen the crust throughout the area, but when thrown into a natural maze where this stuff is everywhere... it becomes a lot harder to avoid. I have never had to truly think about the placement of my every footstep so much in my life. This area is not an easy trek to begin with (hence why they require the permits) but it was suddenly made so much harder due to my paranoia over over the crypto! Every place I went I feared I might be killing an ecosystem that has been struggling to grow for years. Is that rock safe? Is that sand growing any crust? Can I jump from here to there and miss the crypto? Is that an actual wash bottom or did some other jerk leave a social trail through the crust? If I have to walk along the ridge of this fin, will I fall into the crevice below? Oh the self doubt! Oh the guilt of possibly crushing the crust.  

Add in the fact that scrambling and climbing is an essential part of attempting to get anywhere within the Fiery Furnace and another one of the warnings was before climbing up somewhere, make sure you will be able to climb back down. As anyone who has tried climbing or scrambling knows, down climbing is a lot harder than going up. 

Karl was, of course, in his mountain goat/monkey/Spiderman mode glory. To him it was a challenging playground that he could problem solve, route find, climb, and scramble around in.  

Then there was me. Guilt stricken over the potential of stepping on a living carpet and awkward at the best of time. Oh, who am I kidding, anyone that has seen me active knows that the word "graceful" is never used to describe me unless it is dripping with sarcasm. Just say, this hike brought back deeply buried doubts of me trusting my muscles to do what I actually intended them to do. (Thanks for the deep seated lack of confidence of any muscle you damn missing eyelid muscles!) 

Oh well, I survived and often just found solid rock to plant my butt on while Karl scaled to a higher vantage point (once again, it makes for good photos).

Two more National Parks down with extras thrown in, and we were only getting started with Utah. The rest of the state would be explored with a fresh perspective. Literally, as we had a friend flying out from Pittsburgh to join us... enter Katie Z!  Plus Karl and I only have each other and were looking forward to annoying someone else for a while.  But, there is nothing more refreshing and contagious than the excitement of experiencing the parks from a new outlook.  Seriously, the grin on her face and the awe in her eyes with each new view was priceless. 

That also means that you get to read a post from Katie Z's take on her adventures with Starl Krenbic in the next blog. Stay tuned!

<3 S