Labor Day

Xavier Rudd
Dark Summit
Climate suit

Respect and Encourage

My Map

BD Factor

Ski Pass

Deep Creek Mountains

What a place! The mountains here have more vertical rise from the valley floor to the top of the peaks than that of the Teton Range. Theres quite bit of water here, no lakes, but about five creeks running off the east slope. It is a Wilderness Study Area (WSA), but has a few roads that slightly penetrate the the WSA. The longest are at Tom's Creek and Middle Canyon. These penetrate the WSA the furthest. Once you get off the valley floor these two routes are suitable only for ATVs. They are very narrow and although it doesn't say so anywhere, it looks like it is local practice to use ATVs only... Although I think they are technically open to all motor vehicles. We also drove into Indian Farm Canyon in the Subaru until about where the track crosses the creek, then came back out and camped on a small spur that headed off to the north towards Tom's Creek. Both Indian Farm and Tom's had a good amount of water flowing out of them. Besides these few ATV routes there is no trail system in the mountains. It is very rocky and fairly vegetated with very high vertical rise. These factors make much it the range very difficult to penetrate. Also note that most people who are climbing Ibapah Peak go into Granite Canyon and up that way. I have not been there, but I think there's water most of the way and that its a nice scenic route.

When we discovered how steep, vegetated, rocky and rugged the range was we knew that utilizing one of the two ATV trails would be our best chance to get further into he range. We awoke from our camp between Indian Farm Creek and Toms Creek and drove over to the mouth of Middle Canyon. We were able to get right to the edge of the WSA in the Subaru and this gave us a pretty big boost off the canyon floor. The ATV trail continues from where we parked and there is a fairly dramatic change from road to ATV trail at this point, although I think technically the road beyond is open to all vehicles. We started walking up the ATV route at Middle Canyon from this point this point. About a half mile up the road we ran into two dudes in camo driving ranger ATV who were fillin up water at the spring. They said that would be last water we would have until we got up to the basin. I was pretty surprised to see them. Our dog Lizzie did find a little water part way up Middle Canyon. It was a little pool in some Aspens about 15 feet south of the trail. The water was not visible from the trail.

We ran into another guy coming down on a ATV with a huge Elk rack lashed to the front. The rack was still attached to the skull which had a few old tufts of hair remaining. He said he had found it the night before in The Basin and gone back to get it that morning. In my opinion it hadn't been poached because it looked to old. Pretty nice hike up the the rim of the The Basin. A little hot but some shade and nice views. From the rim of The Basin we took a left and followed the ridge to the south over towards Tom's Canyon. This had some great views. It did have some ups and downs and one of the hemigogs we had to skirt on the north side was a little tuff. The ridge was too rocky and clify, the south was hot, clify and dense with Mountain Mahogany so we picked north. It was tuff but it was the only option. We made it over to the pass where the Tom's creek trail come up into the Basin. In retrospect, it may have been better to just drop down into The Basin.



Our route is shown below:












After about 5 hours we found ourselves on the ridge between the area known as The Basin and Tom's Creek (our location is shown as the small red dot on the map below) and we needed to find water. We were on a ridge and wanted to go higher but all the water was of coarse below us to either side. If we went into south into Tom's Creek we wouldn't lose much vertical but we were not sure if there was water there. To the north The Basin had water but it was quite a drop to get into. We had some decisions to make. What happened next was a little trick of terrain and a map reading subtlety that really taught me a lesson.

We decided to drop into Tom's Creek. (area shown as red square in the map below) The only map we had was the 1:100K (same as shown below) and it displayed the stream as intermittent, but you could hear a kind of rustle of water coming from the whole drainage and I could actually see water way up high running off of some rocks so I was pretty confident that it had water. But when we got down into the drainage...nothing! completely dry! I was perplexed and in kind of a tough situation. The kind of situation that was only a little bit bad but if careful decisions were not made, could snowball into a much worse situation. We decided to walk downstream to where the spring was marked on the map and where the stream turned from intermittent to perennial on the map. The backup plan was that if there was still no water there, Jill and Lizzie would sit tight and I would make the 2 hour round trip to the Basin and back to get water. So you can see how things can start to snowball. As we walked down towards the spring we all of a sudden heard the rush of water in the creek! We couldn't believe it, but there it was, the creek bubbling along. And it wasn't from the spring, we were still above that. It wasn't untill I got back home a looked at more maps that I realized what had happened and why we had failed to find the stream higher up.















The 1:24 map below shows that what had happened is the stream was actually not in the bottom of the Tom's Creek Drainage in the area were we looked. It was actually running along the side of the drainage in some kind of side gully. If I had looked closely at the map above I could have seen that. ( in the red square) Or if I had carried the more detailed map.

Events are numbered and described on the map below.
1. Where we left the ridge.
2. The bottom of the drainage where you would expect the creek to be.
3. Actual location of creek
4. Where Tom's Creek is somehow diverted out of the main channel.
5. Where Tom's Creek rejoins the main channel.
6. The spring
7.Where we could see water running off clify rocks.




















Our Camp in Tom's Creek:


Ahhh... That desert grass. Fish Springs:


New secret windsurfing spot?

SouthWest

We have just returned from a wonderful relaxing trip to Albuquerque and Santa Fe to visit family and friends.

I totally over ate at Clara and Carlos's party. Lots of good food. I could hardy move. We had a contest to pick the license plate letters for Carlos new electric motorcycle and "LCTRIC" won. Thanks so much to both of them for their hospitality.

The next day in Santa Fe, the eight of us got caught out in a serious hail storm. We were on the street in town, the clouds were dark and you could tell a storm was coming.... But when dime size hailstones started impacting around us one at a time then quickly increased frequency to storm it was really a surprise. Tullah Tate were safe inside the Schwinn baby stroller (the king of baby strollers) which was really cool. We ran for cover. Jonah and I made it around a street corner to some shelter, but when we looked back the rest hadn't followed us. I went back to check on them and found all four huddled behind a single tree trunk getting pelleted by hail. It was pretty cool whether event. We had a great time making sushi that night.

The next day Jill and I went off to Bandelier National Monument. Being in the National Park was special treat for Jill and I because we haven't been able to go since we got Lizzie. It was great to climb around on the ladders and go in the caves. We climbed to one alcove that required 14o feet of ladder climbing. It looks like most of park is fairly primitive and it would be a good place for backpacking.

I got my ring fixed at the little shop where I bought it. That night got to play some bochi with Dad. Maybe he will be able to come to the ridge in Sept

Overall it was great trip. I liked how it was simple. that made it relaxing and made time to visit and have fun.

A few thoughts:

Jonah's house is super cool. I really like the idea of not just following the traditional building code. You can still meet or exceed safety and energy standards without doing it the same way that everyone else does.

Also like the idea of building an image portfolio that displays the image sin a large size.

It was awesome to see some of the images from Egypt and to see Jonah's journal entries. It makes me think that I am on track with the blog.

Tour of Utah

Went went down to stage three of the Tour of Utah last night. It was a 70 minute criterion downtown. It was super fun and totally reminded me of the good old days when I used to come with Jason to the bike races in North Carolina... and come to think of it, I guess what it really brought back was the good old days of going to the Coors Classic and Red Zinger in Colorado. I was pretty nostalgic about it. Cheering for the break aways and imaging what the excitement of being in a break away would be like. The hope and possibility of glory. The announcers the bike hats and scene definitely brought it all back. Brandon said that it kind of made him wish that he had gone pro.

We are leaving to go down to Albuquerque and Santa Fe in a few hours, so that should bring more adventures.

First Blog Post

If I don't start blogging now, I will just be another day older when I do. I wish I had kept a blog of my life so far... so I want to the have the facts, eye-witness accounts and small details of future adventures captured here from now on. Maybe they can just be brief notes for a real life story to come later. I'm pretty excited.

My wonderful wife Jill and I have a dog named Lizzie and we live in Salt Lake City Utah. I work for the US Forest Service making interactive maps. Probably the most important things in my life right now are:

• Keeping my family and myself happy, healthy and progressive.
• Training for ski season, improving and progressing my skiing.
• Doing a good job at work and meeting the challenges I face everyday.
• Personal improvement in art, sports, friends and family.