What he said

Cailan got out of school early on Wednesay, so he spent part of the afternoon hanging out at my office.  He ate yogurt for his afternoon snack, and then I said, "Come with me to the staff kitchen, so we can rinse out the yogurt container and recycle it."  He said, "Where is this room of which you speak?"

*****

Last night we went to a Shakespeare in the Park performance at the high school.  It had rained earlier in the day, so we brought our groundcloth to sit on.  Cailan was holding the stuff sack for the ground cloth, twirling it around by its strings, pretending it was some kind of Magical Object.  He said, "Observe the Invisible Hammer!"

*****

We went to Cailan's parent-teacher conference at school.  The teacher kindly claimed to have truly enjoyed having hm in her class.  She shared with us one of her favorite pieces of his handiwork. The kids in Cailan's class were supposed to write about what they had done on the playground at recess. He wrote "The passageway monster lives deep in the field and I listen for its thumps. I hear a lot of thumps. I always listen."
 

Big splash

We were driving home from Cailan's rehearsal for The Music Man when a shimmering flash caught both our eyes. From the backseat Cailan called out "The splash ground is going!" Since we were headed home with nothing in particular to do in the hour before bedtime, I asked him if he would like to go there. Of course he said yes, so I found a parking spot and we headed over to the fountains.

The splash ground in downtown Grand Junction is made up of fountains in four concentric circles. At the center is the one which shoots the tallest, broadest plume of water, with a ring of not-quite-as-tall plumes around it. The comes a circle of tiny jets that shoot straight up in a slender stream. At the outside are three thicker jets that cast arcs of water towards the center. The fountains don't all go off at once; they fire intermittently and I can't tell if they go randomly or in a very long pattern. The height of each jet varies too - sometimes there will be a plume 5 feet or more, other times just a burble that barely reaches above the ground.

Cailan kicked off his shoes and rushed towards the fountains. He was tentative at first, skipping around the outside and just brushing his fingertips against the sprays of water. He soon became bolder, darting between the water jets. Eventually he was drenched. His hair was hanging around his face in damp tendrils, his orange t-shirt clinging to his body. His sopping cut-off jeans slapped against his tiny deer-like legs. He brought his glasses to me, since their water-blurred lenses were no longer any use to him. He wore his socks the whole time, one white and one turquoise, a hole in the heel of the turquoise sock becoming more and more apparent as the evening wore on.

He played the fountains like percussion instruments, beating the plumes with the flats of his hands like bongos, plucking the arcs of water as if they were harp strings, tapping the burbles with his feet in time to some inner song of joy. Then the fountains became monsters, and he went after them with slashing hands, high kicks, whirling spins with outstretched arms, dizzy, shivering, and laughing.

A pause. A snapshot. A little boy framed by water droplets turned to spherical rainbows in the intense evening sunlight, bending over to touch his own reflection on the damp concrete.

Spring Break Day 2

There was a full moon when we were camped beside the Colorado river, but we didn't see it at night. It rose so late, and we were nestled so deep within the river canyon, that it didn't appear until well after we had snuggled down inside our tent. We woke early in the morning, thinking that the sun was already coming up - but it was actually the moon.

We got up not long after that and drove in to Moab for breakfast. It seems silly, perhaps, that we went out to eat so often on a camping trip, but Moab is a touristy town with lots of interesting restaurants and it can be fun to get out and enjoy them. Also, this early in the spring, the desert gets cold fast when the sun goes down, which means cooking dinner and breakfast outside can be uncomfortable. We ate at a small, strange restaurant called the Eklecticafe. Jewelry and photographs by local artists lined the walls and were even displayed, under glass, on the cafe tables. The coffee was disappointingly weak but the food was abundant and delicious.

We returned to our campsite, to play a little bit and to pack up our tent. The campground was located right across highway 128 from the end of the popular Porcupine Rim trail. There was a tunnel under the highway from the campground to the trail, and the acoustics in the tunnel were fabulous.

While we were loading the truck, Chris realized we'd forgotten a piece of equipment, one that we hadn't missed yet but would be crucial at our next, much more remote, campground: our camp stove. We hemmed and hawed about what to do. To our credit, neither of us got angry, which would have only spoiled the beautiful morning and wouldn't have gotten us out of the jam. After going through all the options (head home early, buy dinner and breakfast items that don't need to cook, get charcoal and try to cook over a fire ring) we decided to buy the least expensive camp stove we could find, reasoning that we could possibly recoup some of the expense by selling it on craigslist. So once the tent was stowed away, we went back into Moab to an outdoor sports store. It turned out to be a pretty nice store, stocked with all sorts of interesting things, so we spent some time browsing around before buying a one-burner Coleman propane stove. Then we headed up highway 191 to Deadhorse Point State Park.

Deadhorse Point is probably most famous as the location where the end of Thelma and Louise was filmed. It has long been a popular route for road cyclists, but in the last few years, the park has added a set of mountain bike trails, which we needed to investigate. The trail system is called Intrepid, and it has 3 concentric loops of 1 mile, 4 miles, and 8 miles. We rode the longest loop, called the Big Chief trail. This ride had some of the most spectacular scenery of any ride I've been on. The trail was fun, with only a few obstacles and challenges, so it would be another great spot to bring our family. Hint, hint.

This picture shows the same potash plant that you can see from the Amasa Back trail, from the other side. The overlook where that trail ends is surely visible in the picture, though I'm not sure exactly which cliff it is.

After a family trip around the Big Chief loop, me on the Blur and Chris and Cailan on the yellow tandem, Chris took a turn on his single bike while Cailan and I went to the visitor center and then ate lunch. We had to keep moving around while we ate our picnic, trying to find the perfect balance between being too hot in the direct sunlight but getting too chilly in deep shade. And then it was time for something completely new: I captained the yellow tandem on actual trail. It was short (the 1.1 mile loop) but it went well; we never capsized. There was one rocky slope I didn't make it all the way up, but that was mostly because I didn't have a sense for how long it would take the rear wheel to get to the top and I ran out of steam a bit too soon.

In the mid-afternoon, we got back in our truck and drove to our next destination: Goblin Valley State Park. I can't believe I have lived this long in Colorado, have travelled so much in Utah, and have never before been to this amazing place. I don't think I can accurately describe the landscape: the flat valley floor filled with hundreds of lumpy rock formations, the sandstone cliffs on the far side of the valley with towers and goblins slowly emerging from the rock, the childish glee of running here and there among the rocks, climbing, and hiding and jumping out to say boo. Fortunately, we have pictures:

We wandered through the valley for two hours, until the sinking sun and our grumbling bellies dictated that we needed to go set up our tent and cook some dinner. We were dismayed to find that our campsite, which we had reserved ahead of time and had no option to move as the campground was full, was located at the very windiest point of the entire campground. It was a challenge to set up our tent with the wind constantly trying to tear it out of our hands, difficult to set up extra lines to stabilize the tent on a rock-hard dirt surface, and we all know from El Dorado Lake that cooking and eating in a howling wind is very tricky. I was so relieved, and so tired, when all the chorse were finally done and we could collapse into the tent at last - but then I lay awake for hours listening to the raging gusts and wondering if it would be the tent that collapsed instead.

Spring Break

For many years, we had a tradition of going to Moab for spring break, to enjoy the warmer weather, sunshine, and drier trails than were available in the Denver area.  It was great: we'd get the first sunburns of the season, the first saddle sores, the first wobbly legs from pushing hard on a long bike ride.  This year, we got the chance to revive that tradition and introduce it to Cailan.

We left our house on Saturday morning, not so early that we couldn't have a nice French toast breakfast but not too late either.  We wanted to arrive in Moab with plenty of time to find a campsite, a task that we were worried could be difficult, since it was the weekend of the annual Moab Skinny Tire Festival.  Fortunately our location gives us a headstart on all those Denverites, and by 11:00 we had found a campsite by the Colorado River and were setting up our tent.  We gave Cailan and Utah strict admonitions about going too close to the river's edge - one of them listened. After a picnic lunch, we set out for the trails.

We went to a fairly new area called the Moab Brand Trails, a trail system with several loops of varying degrees of difficulty. In a very uncharacteristic move, I didn't buckle on my bike shoes and slap my helmet on my head; instead, I found myself tying on my running sneakers. I am getting ready for my first half-marathon in April, and I really needed to do a long run this weekend to stay on top of my training schedule. Chris and Cailan geared up for a ride on the big yellow tandom, and we all headed out in the same direction, heading along the EZ Trail toward the Bar M loop. Chris and Cailan soon pulled ahead of me, though they paused a couple times to give me a drink from a Camelbak and to snap a picture.

I saw them again after another mile or so. They had stopped near the junction of EZ and Bar M to look for a geocache. I grabbed another sip of water and kept moving. It was a gorgeous day: sunny and somewhere in the mid-60s, a very comfortable temperature for running. The scenery was spectacular. From the Bar M trail I could see many of the rock formations in Arches National Park, as well as the La Sal mountains. The EZ trail was narrow and windy, a soft dirt surface studded occasionally with rocks. The Bar M trail was wide and hard-packed with many sections of slickrock. Both were fun to run on, and the trail system is well marked, with signs at every trail junction and trail maps at many of the intersections.

After I'd gone about four miles, I started to wonder why I hadn't seen Chris and Cailan again. They had been planning to ride the Bar M loop also, and even though Cailan doesn't pedal very hard, they can easily outpace my running speed. But they had several geocaches to hunt for, not to mention any lizards, rocks, flowers, or sticks that caught Cailan's attention, so I wasn't too surprised. At 5.5 miles, I could have taken a cut-off trail back towards the parking area, then caught the Lazy trail to get back to the truck, but I decided to stick to the Bar M, so the boys wouldn't get worried if they didn't catch me. In retrospect, I wish I had taken that left turn, because after 6 miles, the Bar M trail stopped being quite so fun. The trail surface alternated between soft loose dirt and deep sand, and the trail went up and down a series of gullies - each up started to feel longer and steeper than the last one. Eventually the trail curved around to the left, turned into a gravel road with a long gradual climb, and was parallel to the highway; it was not nearly so scenic and at a point in the run where I really could have used some distraction to keep me going.

At 8.25 miles I was back at the parking lot, and Chris and Cailan weren't there. I called Chris and, after a couple of missed calls due to bad reception, learned that he was on the Bar M trail, at the top of one of those gullies, with a pinch flat. He'd unpacked his spare tube, only to discover that it also had been the victim of a pinch flat. He opened his patch kit, and found one lonely patch left - not enough to fix the two holes left by a pinch flat. I couldn't do anything to rescue him - I didn't have any keys to the truck. I couldn't even ride my bike to them, because my bike was locked on the roof rack, and Chris had the only keys. Fortunately, on a spring weekend in Moab, you don't usually have to wait long to meet someone else on the trail, and soon he had met a couple bikers with a well-stocked patch kit.

Cailan kept himself busy during the tire change by taking pictures with Chris's camera. I think when they finally got back to the truck, he had taken over 100 pictures, including a couple dozen shots of Utah (including a few that were in focus), countless pictures of dirt, a nice series of Chris in action with the bike pump, and some self portraits.

We all had water and snacks, then we pulled my bike down from the roof, I changed shoes and plopped my helmet on, and the four of us took a spin on the EZ Lazy loop. This was about 3.5 miles of easy but fun trail, a few bumps to go over and some nice swoopy downhill singletrack. At least, I think it would have been easy if I hadn't just finished an eight-mile trail run. My legs felt a bit like jelly. Back at the parking lot again, Chris unloaded his single bike and went to look for a little more challenging trail. Cailan and I hung out near the truck, casting spells with our magic wands (which closely resemble drumsticks) and collecting magic rocks. I'm not sure what exactly was magic about the rocks, but we sure did find a lot of them. The sun started to disappear early as it sunk behind some rock towers in the west, casting our play area into shadow and sending me to the truck to dig up long pants and a sweatshirt. When Chris returned, we loaded up and drove into town to buy a patch kit and a spare tube and enjoy dinner at Eddie McStiff's..

Then we went to our campsite along the river and started to get ready for bed. Of course, we had time to cast a few more spells in the dark, before retiring to our tent.

depths battle

I went to the depths battle.

I saw when the creatures got together, and the zombie squid had its tentacles wrapped around the common bottlenosed whale's fins.

The zombie squid's eyes were scary.  They followed me wherever I went.

I watched it disappear into the depths and then come back.

I saw the whale above the shark's fins.

The zombie squid's beak is so cool. 

I saw the zombie squid run into the whale. It would really hurt if it ran into me.

The shark's teeth are so big. They are strong and knock things apart.

I saw one mysterious mile. The shark looked like it was above the water.

The zombie squid lives very deep.

The place with the darkest depths is a tunnel-like maze. Most of it is unknown. The only thing that is known about it is that it is very big and only has light at the very end.

This a very neat photo that I got. The pygmy saltwater crocodile is one of the coolest animals known.

All good things must come to an end...

January 2nd was the last day of my Christmas vacation. We decided to squeeze a little more fun out of the holiday with a day trip to Moab, and we were delighted when our biking buddies Max, Maria, and Nico were able to come along. We went to an old favorite trail, Klondike Bluffs.

It's not a hard ride and it has some interesting features that make it a great ride. You start off on a dirt road, but before you get too far you get sucked in by a horrible sand trap. You're riding along and the bike gets slower and slower, the front wheel starts to swim around, and inevitably you're off the bike, trudging ankle deep in fine soft sand. Then there's another sand trap, but after that the surface is good.

The road winds along among squatty humps of red rock and then you get to the big rock slab. The entire slab is sloped, making for a gentle but constant climb; traction on the rock is outstanding. It's a big white rock, wrinkled with seams and pocked with craters, so that you might think for a moment that you're riding on the surface of the moon. In fact, Chris and I have ridden this trail at night under a full moon, with the white rock taking on a silvery glow while everything else disappeared in shadow.

Another cool feature about this rock - and the best part of the ride, if you ask Cailan - is the set of dinosaur footprints. There are many very distinct three-toed prints, maybe about 15 inches long to the end of the middle toe. Cailan had some ideas about which Jurassic carnivore might have made the prints, but I don't know what dinosaur was actually responsible.

After climbing maybe 2 miles on the rock slab, you're out on another dirt road, and spend another mile or so alternating rock and dirt. When the road ends, there's a bit of singletrack that climbs pretty steeply along the north-facing side of a hill. On this trip, much of it was covered with snow. We all did some pushing through the snow, but there were also parts we could ride.

Then the trail ends at a bike ride, which looks a little out of place this far out in the middle of the desert. The bike trail ends because this is the border of Arches National Park: no bikes allowed. But a quarter-mile hike over more of the white slabby rock brings you to an overlook with an amazing view. You sit on the white rock, which just in front of you drops away to form the walls of a sort of cul-de-sac canyon. On the far side of the drop of is more white rock and behind that the orangey red rock formations of Arches and behind that the snowy tops of the La Sal mountains. Ravens and swallows soar and swoop in the canyon as you eat a snack and soak up the sunshine and the brilliant sky.

The return trip is mostly downhill. On the way down the white rock becomes snow, and your bike can carve beautiful turns this way and that as you descend. And even though the temperature was just above 40 degrees, a certain member of our party couldn't resist the temptation of a pothole filled with melted snow:

After the ride we drove into Moab and gorged ourselves at Pasta Jay's, one of the only restaurants that stays open all day during the winter slow season. Then we had to hurry home so Chris and I could get to a dance rehearsal. The sun painted us a glorious goodbye in the rearview mirror as it settled below the red rocks.