Beginning of a Good Thing

One of my goals is to blog more often this summer as I attempt to fulfill the ambition of getting out and traveling more.  I want to climb timpanogos, go to arches again, hit up Zions, travel down to the coral pink sand dunes.. I also think it would be cool to go to the narrows, and to the area where Aaron Ralston got stuck and almost died. Seemed like a sweet place to hike. Guess I should check to make sure the place in the movie was actually where he was.. Haha. Duh.

Anyway, this weekend was a good beginning. My brother and I went camping up Spanish Fork Canyon.  We got off on a familiar foot as it was dark before we ever arrived at our ultimate and unforeseen destination.

No biggie though. We set up our tents in the dark after thoroughly investigating the otherwise deserted railroad area where we had chosen to make our encampment.  We found plenty of dry wood.. 

It was warm considering the lingering rainclouds that had followed us and persisted over the entire Utah Valley for the majority of this past week.

As we walked along the train tracks, my brother had the misfortune of stepping into a huge mess of filthy black tar that had somehow been deposited. It was positively nasty, totally ruined his shoe; 

it went clear up to his ankle..black, sticky, clinging, viscous tar, like the stuff people were tortured with by mobs in the nineteenth century.  

To his credit, it didn't ruin his night. He scraped off what he could and made due under the circumstances, though his shoe looked a sight. He didn't even really complain. I was impressed. I can't even stand dealing with getting maple syrup on my arm for five minutes, let alone black goop for hours on end away from civilization. Nasty.

We got our fire built, and I roasted the first marshmallows of the season (strawberry flavored, mind you).


That night we had about five trains pass by us in the night. It was pretty cool, I only wish I'd 'a' had my camera out to catch it on video to share it here. Noisy as all get-out, as it sounded like they were passing through our tent..

Before we it the sack the sky cleared off and we even saw stars.

I want to go again next weekend.