White Rim and Child Endangerment

After a little house work on Saturday myself and the boys drove out Potash to the White Rim Trail. I had not been out there for awhile and forgot how long it takes to get anywhere. We came back out the Shafer Trail.

A diving board over Musselman Canyon.

The boys sitting out on Musselman Arch. I walked them out there and told them to not move at all. Of course Rowan kept trying to stand up and go further out.

When you are on top of the arch it really does not look very exposed, but from the side view it was unnerving to see all the boys sitting out there. The arch is formed out of a piece of the White Rim hat held together as the softer rock below was eroded away, so instead of actually being arched it is a perfectly flat piece of sandstone suspended above the canyon.

Snow and Water

Saturday Todd and I skiied up into Red Snow Cirque in the Central La Sals and got severely sunburnt and got some great spring skiing in. We got about 10 inches of new snow this week in the high country so instead of corn conditions we actually found great powder conditions.

Sunday we floated Westwater at 7,000 cfs. It was a great level. My back two passengers (Sam and Jess) got bucked off in Sock it To Me without the rest of the group even knowing. So as we were celebrating our clean run of the rapid Sam and Jess were struggling to get out from under the boat and get back in. Once we realized we were missing two crew members we pulled them out of the cold river and apologized for not noticing they were gone. Good trip, no photos.

Todd waiting for me and eating lunch in Red Snow Cirque

Perfect spring conditions on the glacial morraine. Tuk in the background

Tracks off the north ridge of Tuk

Todd skiing the north ridge back into Red Snow Cirque

Todd skiing into the white ocean of Red Snow Cirque

Comb Ridge

Last weekend we headed down to Comb ridge to watch the cottonwoods leaf out, listen to coyotes and look for more ruins of the Ancient Ones.

This is a ruin that I have been looking for for a few years and finally found it. It is amazingly well preserved and nearly impossible to get into. One of the things that intrigues me almost more than the structures themselves is there setting and the places these people chose to build their dwellings. This ruin is perched right on top a a 200 plus foot vertical cliff with a small set of steps chipped into the rocks to access them. The snow covered Abajos are in the background.

Me and the boys at the Eagle Nest

Monarch Cave

The Procession Panel. This panel has 179 anthropmorphs (human figures) walking in a long line.

Chaco and Aztec

We headed south to Northern New Mexico for Spring Break to escape the annual internal combustion invasion in Moab and hoping that if we went far enough south we would outrun the strong spring storm that was heading into Utah.

We did escape the parade of people looking at each others engines (i.e. Jeep Safari) but did not escape the storm. We were planning on camping near Bluff on the San Juan but when we got to Bluff it was a sand storm of biblical proportions so we drove on to Farmington,N.M. and got a room (and ate pretty good Thai food, who knew there was Thai in Farmington?). We woke up to a white out the next morning and headed to Aztec Ruins in Aztec N.M, hoping that the storm would let up and let us get to Chaco Canyon the next day.

I was glad we made it to Aztec as it is the largest of the Chaco Greathouse outliers and was an impressive site. The Great Kiva at Aztec was rebuilt in the 1920s to what they thought was its original style. It is a pretty amazing place.

The next day it was still snowing but we decided to still head to Chaco. We drove south out of Farmington and turned onto a dirt road at Nageezi, N.M. Part of the Chaco experience is driving out to the site and wondering why the Ancestral Puebloans ever decided to construct their largest communities in what seems to be the most inhospitable part of the entire Colorado Plateau (which is already an pretty inhospitable place.)

If you have any interest in the prehistoric cultures of the Southwest Chaco is Mecca, you have to go at least once to get a sense of the scale of the place and how it influenced so much of the region. The most elaborate burials excavated in the Southwest were found here, along with an immense amount of pottery, jewelery, macaws, copper bells and even chocolate.

Part of the Murdock Clan deep inside Pueblo Bonito, this area was probably 4 stories high, 800 years ago. It is considered the largest prehistoric structure in North America.

Mesa top view of the Kin Kletso Great House

Cold day in downtown Chaco

Pueblo Bonito

Hallways in the Aztec Great House

New Wilderness and Spring Powder

I had the chance to go to our annual Wilderness Managers Conference in Cedar City last week and also visited one of Utahs newest designated wilderness areas (designated in the 2009 Omnibus Bill) the Cottonwood Forest Wilderness.

Canyon in the recently designated Cottonwood Forest Wilderness

I also got back out to South Mountain for what may be the last of the spring powder? Great day in the snow and sun. Corn season is next and it should be a good spring in the La Sals with 170% of snowpack as of today.

Mozart and Mill D North

We traveled north again this weekend for some skiing and culture. Creed and myself toured into Mill D North on Saturday morning and found great conditions on the north faces and a couple of new avalanches.

Saturday night we tried a new restaurant in SLC, the Himalayan Kitchen, (very good) and then we went to the symphony (Mozart and Bruckner). I know I am not the most sophisticated guy around but I actually really enjoy classical music and really like seeing it live. Every time we go to the symphony everybody always says "You are so nice to take Alina to the symphony" as if it was something I had to endure. I just want to make it clear that I actually enjoy it.

Creed touring the ridge between Mill D North and Beartrap Canyon above fresh avalanche debris

Alina and the Chihully statue at Abravenal Hall after the symphony

Haystack Peak

I got back out for a field day yesterday, after staring at a computer screen for way to long this week, responding to comments about a trail project we are working on in the Abajo Mountains.

We took the machines up to Warner Lake and cleared the roofs on the Forest Service cabin and shed and then went for a tour into upper Mill Creek to look at the snow pack. We saw a number of large avalanches from last weeks storm.

The snow surface actually had gotten quite wind and sun damaged this week so the skiing conditions were not great above tree line, but the snow was still good down in the trees.

Winter Aspens

North Face of Haystack

Skining up towards Haystack

South Mountain and the South Fork

We got out to South Mountain last week to ski what are long talus slopes in the summer but when they get covered with sufficient snow in the winter they become the best runs in the range. A surface hoar layer buried by the last storm stopped us from venturing all the way to the top of the mountain, but the part we skiied was perfect snow.

Perfect La Sal Powder

Sunny days and North Faces. Todd and the bottom part of the runs.

The blur of white and red in the middle of the photo is a local skiier that is twice my age. He beat me up and down the mountain twice that day. I hope I am doing that at his age.

We went back up north last weekend to celebrate Rowans and Grandma Murdocks Birthdays and we got one day of skiing in on Presidents Day. We had a nice little tour up the South Fork of the Provo on the backside of Cascade Mountain. I had never been there before. It is a bit longer approach than other Wasatch locations, but there is some wild terrain up in the high bowls . Photo is of Todd and Tuk breaking trail in the sticky spring like snow. It was Tuks first ski tour and he learned the hard way to not jump in front of someone on skis heading downhill.

Elk Ridge Winter

With the massive amount of snow that the southern mountains have received we decided to try and make it out to our cabins on Elk Ridge and clean the roofs off to avoid the roofs caving in. I thought we would be able to drive a ways up the South Cottonwood road but we had to start snowmobiling from Highway 95, which made for a very long day.

I broke the clutch on one snowmobile in the first mile and had to tow it back to the highway. We saw 8 good sized bull elk that were having a hard time getting around in the snow, hope they make it through the winter. We finally made it to the cabins and removed the snow and got back to Moab at about 9:30

Slickrock avalanche. We actually got enough snow down low that we saw good sized avalanches on the slickrock. I believe this one is on Ute lands and it actually took out a fair number of trees.

Removing snow from the Gooseberry Cabins

Winter at Sego Flats. Nobody had been up there yet this winter

Elk Ridge Winter

Skiing and Shovelling and Roofalanches

Last weeks series of storms centered right on the town of Monticello, where the other half of our office is located. Our weather station in the Abajo Mountains recorded close to 60" of snow and an incredible 6" of water, it a was a storm of biblical proportions.

We went down on Wednesday hoping to see if any of the big slide paths had slid, but it was still snowing with little visibility. We dug some pits did some tests and skiied the old Blue Mountain Ski resort.

After coming off the mountain we went down and started digging our Forest Service buildings out so they did not collapse like several buildings did on main street.

Todd and Miles in the abandoned lift shack at the top of the old resort, which makes a nice little warming hut now.

Buried Forest Service truck

The horse barn. I hope the snow on top does not come off and kill one of the horses

Photo from the San Juan Record looking out somebodies door after the storm

Gold Basin

With no snow for the last 15 days, the avalanche danger has receded somewhat in the La Sals so we headed into terrain that is usually reserved for the spring. We made it into the large cirques of Gold Basin and found unexpected good turning conditions. The temperatures were much warmer than down in the Moab valley.

Skiing Tele Gold

Talking Mountain Cirque at the very end of Gold Basin

Todd (in the lower left) making turns in Red Snow Cirque

Nate in Red Snow Cirque

Skinning up into Red Snow Cirque

Little Cottonwood

We had to make the trip back up north this weekend so Alina could take a test for her teacher recertification. It was a quick weekend trip and we will probably not be back up that way for awhile. I met up with Creed and Nate Saturday morning and we skiied into some country I had not been to for a long time. Started at Alta went up to Catherines Pass, climbed the ridgeline to Tuscarora Peak, summited Mount Wolverine, traversed Wolverine Cirque and skiied down Patsy Marley Peak back to the cars. We actually found some decent snow off Catherines Pass and made a few runs, but everything up high was windblown and crusted. It is a little depressing to see how little snow there is in the Wasatch right now. There are stilll a lot logs and rocks lurking under the thin snowpack and unfortunatley my skis found a few of them.

Nate and I bootpacking up Mount Wolverine

Creed skiing off Catherines Pass

Breath deep the gathering gloom. The view down Little Cottonwood into the toxic soup of the Salt Lake Valley.

Old Tilly

I took the boys out to ride on Tilly while we were up in Utah County. This is the same horse that my good friend Regan used to ride when we were in Jr. High and High School. We put a lot of miles on that horse ans she is still getting around. My dad rode her into Dark Canyon this fall.