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This Month’s Adventure

I’ve gotten into is this eccentric habit over the last few years of trying to carry out an adventure of one or sort or another-usually once a month on the average. This does wonders at increasing the “fun” quotient and making all sorts of things in life interesting. The adventure for April of this year was a trip to Moab with a good friend of mine. Visiting desert environments in the spring is basically a mandatory adventure trip for Colorado mountain types like myself.

My buddy had never been to Moab, which I consider a crime against humanity on the scale of not liking ice cream. With the exception of Lactose intolerant individuals, always be suspicious of non-ice cream eaters by the way. We owe my friend never having visited Moab to the fact that he’d just moved out west last year from his former home in New Hampshire. Moab being a bit of a jaunt from North Easterner parts of America. In that case, we’ll forgive him. Not his fault that he’d never been to the area, don’t you think? As for me, I hadn’t been to Moab since 2009, and a return trip to the place is in order. What’s life if you don’t have the freedom to make return engagements to revisit a place?

Originally, we’d planned on doing this Moab thing in spring of last year. Even though CoVid-19 had loosened its grip on society slightly at that time, the disease still had a pretty tight stranglehold on a lot of things in 2021. This included trips all over the place, and visiting southeastern Utah was no exception to that particular rule.

Getting to the place from Silverton involved a return drive north through Disappointment Valley between Naturita, Colorado and the Colorado/Utah border. Right after we’d climbed out of the valley and drove across the border, the environment began to shift dramatically. Suddenly the spring-time mountains with all their melting snow and prominent mud puddles all over the place began to transform into red-rock formations. I’m reminded of an earlier trip to this neck of the woods and thinking to myself that it appeared as if rocks had been growing out of the ground. Almost seemed that surreal too.

Moab, and southeast Utah is loaded with all sorts of hiking options, and that afternoon our first wandering through the desert involved hiking up a draw affectionately referred to as the Grand Staff Canyon Trail. Owing to the fact that neither my buddy (64 years young), nor I (63), aren’t exactly spring chickens, we deliberately chose hiking trails that were slightly easier and only 2-3 miles in length. We avoided the poison ivy bushes along the trail and all in all, this was a good way to get our first initiation of Moab Hiking in.

One must remember that both my friend and I are former U.S. Peace Corps volunteers. Owing to that, both of us are also Penny-pinchers when it comes to shelling out wads of Dead-Presidents. That being the case, we ended up driving north to spend the next two nights at the palatial Holiday Inn Express motel on the outskirts of Green River. Similar in scope to my previous stays at the Ritz Carlton hotel right off Central Park in Manhattan. Both in terms of décor and ambiance. Since it was only for two nights, we managed to survive. Plus, the place has an indoor pool and free breakfast, so neither of us complained about the accommodations.

The big hike was actually the next day when we visited the Fisher Towerstrail. Another surreal hike bordering a slick rock ridge, and just as bizarre since the environment has been used as a back-drop for a few Hollywood productions.

The main tower (The Titan) has also become a back-drop for a group of rock climbers whom we viewed in action while returning to the trailhead. This looked exciting, and once again I’m reminded of previous rock climbing expeditions where I skirted my way to the summit of various peaks, then put on my Flying Squirrel Suit and flew down to the base. Ah, to be young and dumb…

As I needed to return the very next day so I could get back to work at my Town of Silverton parks job, our morning hike on the last day was short-n-sweet. Hidden Valley Trail on the outskirts of Moab, which climbed up to the top of Moab Rim above town. This was a good end this month’s adventure installment, and a nice way to bring the three days to an end.

I could go on and on about some of the other highlights of the trip including our scheduled visit to a UFO themed Beef Jerky purveyor near I-70 (Jack-Ass Joe’s). I won’t touch upon our visit to this place as they advertise themselves as having UFO type Beef Jerky, as opposed to your regular type Beef Jerky, which doesn’t have a nice green glow to it. Bit of a disappointment actually.

It’s somewhat ironic that this part of the Great Southwest was once considered a wasteland. The desert environment in and around Moab is anything but. Almost as if you’ve made a trip to Mars, without the 144.41-million-mile trek to get there.