The One Where We Howled at the Moon

Two weekends ago Justin and I went backpacking in Coyote Gulch with his friend Cory and Cory's fiance Liz.  It is seriously one of the most beautiful places on earth!!  Cory used to work in the Escalante National Monument collecting bees (how random!!) but never did this particular hike.  He and Justin have been talking about doing it since 2008 and Cory is moving soon so we finally went.  I was excited to try out my new backpack that Justin gave me for my birthday.

The trip started out like many of our camping trips.  Justin and I were running late so by the time we got to Cory's house it was mid-afternoon and I hadn't eaten lunch.  So we started out driving through a McDonalds.  About an hour down the highway we ran into some road construction, not surprising in the summer, and even less surprising, there was no one actually doing construction!!  Why do they leave those stinkin' cones up and cut a three lane road down to one for no reason other than to slow down travelers?!!  Good grief!  Apparently the lack of movement gave Justin time to ponder on things we may have accidentally left behind when he remembered we actually did leave two very important items at home- our sleeping pads!!  (Funny enough, we've done this once before on our trip to Yellowstone last summer) So we made another stop along the way at Wal-Mart to pick up some $5 foam pads.  These are the times you're grateful for Wal-Mart's cheap prices and omnipresence :)

With all of these sidetrips we were much later getting into Escalante than originally planned and the sun was setting.  And where we had planned to camp for the night was 40 miles down a dirt road.  Again, true to form,  we were about 15 miles down the washboards when Cory realized we were almost out of gas.  So we had to trek back to town, fill up, and hunt down a place to camp.  By now it was pitch dark and there sure aren't a lot of street lights in the monument.  We basically camped in the middle of a dirt road.  I love our adventures!!  Luckily, nobody else seemed interested in driving down this road so we didn't have to wake up and move.  Cory and Justin made their favorite, traditional camping meal for me and Liz: homemade chili and dutch oven cornbread with gingerbread peach cobbler for dessert- amazing!!  The ending to the day was much better than the beginning :)

Who would mind camping anywhere in a place this beautiful?

The next morning Cory was excited we had camped closer to town so we could eat breakfast at The Golden Loop Cafe- Worst Restaurant in America (and proud of it).  Unfortunately (or extremely fortunately from my point of view), the Golden Loop is now closed.  Also unfortunately the restaurant we ended up going to did not have a working lock on the bathroom door and yes, I was walked in on.  We delayed our trip again by missing the turnoff.  But that meant we got to see this-

What a view!!  And I believe if you look far enough

you can see Arizona in the background :)

We finally got back on the dirt road and made it to the trail head.

The first two miles or so of the hike are out in some open desert.  And full of cows.  Apparently ranchers can still use the land for grazing and there were enough pies out there to prove it.  You could look around for miles and only see rolling hills of sagebrush and then suddenly we were on the edge of the gulch.  Such a beautiful view!!  I'll let the pictures do the rest of the storytelling.



WOW!!!

We opted to enter Coyote Gulch from "Crack in the Wall" and had to lower our packs ~30 feet over the cliff face. 

  

This is where I unthinkingly told Cory to
take a picture of Liz "up the crack."
Stupid double meaning!

It got a little narrow toward the end.





I was obviously the supervisor in this endeavor :)

We had a short, but beautiful walk left until...

I love the canyon walls.  They look like cake dripping with chocolate frosting.  Yum!!



 

...we finally reached the river!  (Coyote is the brown on the left joining the green Escalante on the right)

The final descent into the canyon.

Walking the gulch.  It was really fun climbing over the rocks and the water felt sooo good to our hot, tired feet.  So many photo ops.



  

The leaves on the ground were all silver and some were even sun bleached to the point of being transparent.  I thought it was really cool.

This rock must have fallen not long before we visited.  Look how smooth and clean the break was.  You could see where it would have fit on the opposite cliff wall.

There were lizards everywhere!  Some pretty big ones too.
This little guy surprised me with his excellent camouflage
technique.  Almost smashed him!

Justin and I had just seen Thor so we called
this rock formation "The Hammer of Thor."

There were so many waterfalls walking up the Gulch.

Swiss Cheese Falls was my favorite.

 

 The aptly named Jughandle Arch.

More pretty views.

Jacob Hamblin Arch.

 

Liz found the only shade on the north bank.

 

This is the view from the top on our way out.  You can see
why it's an arch.  The river used to cut through
and then got diverted around it.

And just in case you don't really want to rough it, the nice Park Service people have flown in a bathroom for your convenience.



How random is this!!  No, they do not flush.

All of the guides tell you to actually enter Coyote Gulch by dropping in over a rock slope by Jacob Hamblin and exit via Crack in the Wall.  So glad we did it backwards- look at this slope we hiked out!!

None of us were comfortable doing this climb with our packs.

Funny that any description of this hike calls this part "walkable."  I'm not gonna lie, that was a scary climb.  Especially with packs.  We felt like pansies though when it took us 45 minutes to get 2/3 of the way up and this guy shows up and just walks up the face with a rope tied to his pack (that's the line going up the middle of the second picture).  Just walked up a sandstone cliff basically.  He's obviously done that a few times (he had a tour group waiting at the bottom) and was nice enough to let us use his rope (once he anchored it) to scale the last 20 feet.  We were getting tired so we were grateful not to have to drag our packs up any more rocks :)  After that though it was pretty smooth sailing.  Beautiful views back down into the gulch and much flatter ground.

We took a wrong turn on the trail somewhere and ended up hiking an extra 2 or 3 miles to get back to the car.  Thank goodness Cory had a GPS with him.  We did find a friend on the trail.

I've never been so grateful to see a Honda!  Maybe someday we'll go camping and not forget something or actually find a shorter trail.  But then the story would be really boring :)





The One with Odds and Ends

I've been thinking lately that I haven't posted in a while so my one follower (Thanks Wendy!!) may be experiencing extreme withdrawals from my rapier wit.  Probably not the case but I'll try to come up with something to write about if for no other reason than to entertain myself as I wait for my samples to etch.  That's right, I am currently in the lab and need something to fill the downtime as chambers pump down to vacuum.  I'll apologize ahead of time for the lack of pictures but they frown on me storing them on the nanofabrication lab computers ;)

Recently we've been blessed by multiple (and by multiple I mean two) visits by family.  I absolutely love that people have finally come to see us here in Utah (other than our wedding which, of course, we're very grateful everyone made it to :).   The day after I passed my proposal defense Lisa and Travis brought baby Anistyn up to Utah to meet the rest of her family.  She is such a good baby!  I think we may have heard her cry twice the whole week.  And she's definitely Lisa's daughter, she can sleep through anything and in any position :)  We all had Easter dinner together at Grandma Sabol's house.  I made chicken alfredo (thanks to Wendy's crockpot recipe) and we played games.  Unfortunately we had too many players for Travis to show us his new Rummikub skills but I'm sure he'll have another chance to take on Grandma.  Lisa and Travis stayed with his sister Tiffany down in Lehi but she was nice enough to give up a few evenings throughout the week and let them come visit me and Justin up north.  We met up at Texas Roadhouse one night (so excited to have a special reason to go, it's a little expensive for just a regular dinner) and we headed down to Lehi on Friday for pizza and video games.  Tiffany's kids have Dance Central for Kinect which Justin and I have actually (luckily) played before at our friends' house.  We showed off our skills on our first dance by each earning over 1,000,000 points!  We are awesome!!  Not really, I'm pretty sure it was on the easy setting.  Lisa and I did a "dance battle" and she beat me by 200,000 at least.  Apparently points are arbitrary and easily come by in that game.  It is addicting though and we definitely stayed up too late busting a move.  It was just too funny to watch our group of white people trying to dance.  It's probably a good thing I don't have any pictures from that activity...  And speaking of pictures, they certainly don't do justice to Lisa's sweet little girl (which unfortunately I can't prove because they're all on Lisa's camera!).  I was too busy holding Anistyn to take any myself :)  It was a really fun week- thanks for making the long trip to come see us!! 

Randomly, Steve was up here (well in Park City, close enough) for a work conference just two days after Lisa and Travis left.  We only got to see him twice but we made the most of it.  We had baked potatos and played Bang! on Tuesday.  I took the opportunity to introduce Steve to my friend's sister who just moved up here from New Mexico and is single.  Unfortunately I don't hear any wedding bells (sorry Mom) but Bang! is definitely more fun with more people and I enjoyed hanging out my brother again.  Even after 27 years of playing games with Steve I still have a hard time figuring out if he's the renegade or an outlaw!  We had an unintentional Italian night on Thursday.  I was really excited to take Steve to Settebello, an authentic Italian pizza place that Misha introduced me to.  Justin and I love this restaurant, but again it's a little pricey so we save it for special occasions.  Unfortunately Steve didn't feel the same way but it was still fun.  Thanks for trying it at least :)  Afterward we went to a gelato shop about a block from our house that I think he liked much better.  The best part (for us at least) is we all ate for less than Steve's per diem so it was free :)  Thanks Dude!  We also went to Dick's sporting goods to buy me a new softball glove (more on that later) and then back to our apartment to hang out and digest before Steve had to head back to his hotel.  Recently, another couple in our ward had traded us the first season of Prison Break on DVD for Lost.  I didn't think PB could be as addicting as Lost but Steve said it definitely was and stayed to watch the first two episodes with us.  He was right.  Justin and I are already on season 2.  It's a good thing the show has some action/suspense/a real plot to it because with the actor to actress ratio at about 100:1 I can see women being huge fans and men being extremely bored.  Very cool effects and an actually intriguing story.  Anyway, it was a good two weeks and having family come visit us helped overcome some of my homesickness.  Love you guys!

So about two months ago one of Misha's former coworkers called and invited me to play on her city softball league.  I've only ever played church ball so I was excited to play at a more competitive level and said yes even though I didn't know anyone on the team.  Unfortunately this has been one of the longest winters ever (not kidding folks, we're still setting snowfall records) so our first three games were cancelled due to snow and/or rain.  I finally got to play in my first game the week that Steve was here and broke the lacing on my glove during warmups.  This shouldn't be too surprising, I got the glove for my 14th birthday and have already fixed the lacing once before but I was really sad.  This time it was a lost cause and I finally had to borrow a glove for the second half of the game.  We got killed by the team who apparently wins every year so I wasn't too disappointed.  It was really fun to get out and play again.  And I even had my own cheering squad.  Our friends Brock and Carrie came to the park and joined Justin in watching me play.  They also brought their grill so I had a hot dog waiting for me when the game ended.  It was a very all-American evening at the ballpark.  Our next game was cancelled again and we played our second (but should have been our sixth) game two days ago.  We lost again!  I really feel like we're better than what our record shows so hopefully things pick up.  My OBP is currently 1.000 and I have a few RBIs on my stats as well even though I have yet to actually score.  I'm hoping it's not my fault we haven't won yet.  I blame the snow.

Another exciting event that happened recently was I got to go on my first science road trip.  My research project has been added to a multi-university collaboration that is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).  The collaboration is halfway through "Phase 2" (meaning the funding has been renewed once before, prior to our joining the project) and so we had a site visit.  NSF program officers came out to UC-Irvine to see presentations and determine if the research has progressed enough for the funding to be renewed again.  I got flown out to California for free and had my own room in a very nice hotel.  Unfortunately I didn't get to enjoy it much.  What a crazy trip!  First off, the week before we left I was informed I needed to make a poster to present my research.  Doesn't sound like a big deal but scientific posters like this are typically 3x4 ft and people spend a good month putting them together!  I scaled it down a little and made a 3x3 ft poster in 2 days!  Thank heavens for Justin's patience as I was staying at school till midnight and worked over the weekend.  And to make the trip even more stressful we missed our flight!  Luckily there was another one a few hours later but that was definitely not the best way to start.  The first day was full of presentations on all the different aspects of the research which was great since I didn't know much beyond my own small contribution.  Mid-morning they had scheduled a student poster session probably to get us up out of our chairs.  I was one of only two students not from UC-Irvine and when the poster session started we didn't have places to set our posters up!  This was basically the only reason I was there and I wasn't going to be able to present my data!  I was a little upset.  The director found a few spare easels and got us out-of-towners set up pretty quickly but by then I was thinking noone was going to come over to the corner I was stuck in to talk to me.  Surprisingly, they did.  I had more than half of the NSF officers come over to ask about my research and each one seemed to tell somebody else that they needed to come check out my poster.  I was on cloud 9!  They were all so interested I didn't even have time to eat my muffin!  It's very rewarding to have people so interested in what you're doing.  That night a few of the Irvine faculty took us out to dinner.  We went to a restaurant on a cliff overlooking Laguna Beach called Las Brisas.  Beautiful place, bad food.  I wonder if it would have tasted better if I'd had a margarita like everyone else :)  Apparently that's what the restaurant is known for, not its mexican food.  My advisor and I were the only two not to drink at dinner and we seemed to be the only two who didn't like the food.  Coincidence?  The second day of the visit was an opportunity for the NSF people to really dig in and see how the program was being run, what kind of outreach is being done by the center, etc.  Which meant no students allowed.  Thankfully I had brought a book so I hung out in the lobby of the chemistry building till the fog rolled out and the day warmed up.  Then I went on a walking tour of campus.  It was beautiful, not surprising for a CA campus.  Just outside the chem building were 2 huge planters full of rosemary ~18" tall!  Who knew it can grow that tall?!  It smelled amazing!  And about 100 ft away there was a park with bike paths and students playing frisbee.  Whoever designed campus must have been a Lord of the Rings fan also.  I saw "Middle Earth Housing," the "Ring Mall," and "Brandywine Commons."  Too funny!!  Overall it was a good trip and a good place to present my data for the first time.

This weekend is our first camping trip of the summer.  In just a few hours we'll be heading to Coyote Gulch and enjoying some beautiful scenery.  I promise to take pictures :)