Utah Trip, Menagerie, and Helicopters!

Okay, here is the Utah Update email:

So, it's been a pretty busy couple of weeks, but Mel and I have been up to all sorts of fun stuff. If you are ever looking for a place to visit, I strongly recommend Utah, especially the area around Zion NP... That place has once again, blown my mind!

So, on a somewhat spontanious idea, Mel and I threw a pile of gear into her car and took off for a road trip to Utah over memorial day weekend, which was actually 6 days for me with holiday and vacation stuff we added to it. We drove through the night, and 17.5 hours later, we were in Zion. Since it was already noon and we had to ride a shuttle up into the canyon, we did the angels landing hike, which was pretty spectacular... It involved traversing this knife edge ridge crest that had chains bolted into the side of it to hold on too (nice to have in some places, as I would suppose we were about 1000 feet up or so). Anyway, if you ever go there, put this on the to do list, cause the views are amazing, and it's just a pretty unique hike.

Since there was no hope of us getting a campsite in the park we had to stay in this little floodplain a little outside of the park, which actually worked out pretty great for us (that would begin our series of "sketchy" camping spots).

The next morining we rented some gear, and did our first "technical" canyon trip, which was for me at least, the highlight of our trip. Nothing like rappeling into a 3 foot wide slot in the ground into a pool of 45 degree water! Anyway, that was amazing, although I only got a few photos before I thought it would be a good idea to jump into a pool of muddy water with my camera attached to me... Oops.

Anyway, after we finished with that, we had to leave Zion to hit some of our other objectives... We tried to get a permit for the North Coyote Buttes area of Paria canyon (aka "the wave" - Grand Staircase National Monument) but there were 40 people going for 10 spots so we ended up hiking through a section of buckskin gulch, which was also quite awesome... More slot canyon with really cold water, except this time no wetsuits or ropes (the water was so cold that mel was dry-heaving and laughing at the same time... pretty fun).



Anyway, once we finished that, we decided that there was still a lot of Utah we needed to see, so we jumped back in the car for Natural Bridges Nat. Mon., Monument Valley (yeah, stupid lake powell got in the way, so we had to drive through part of Arizona, and probably should have visited Chris B), Valley of the Gods, Goosenecks of the San Juan, Goblin Valley State Park and finally over to Arches National Park.

Lots of cool stuff in there that I won't hit the details of, although I wish we had a Jeep instead of a Corolla...

Goblin Valley was pretty cool, but it was too hot to really do anything there, so we walked around a bit and then took off. Arches was pretty amazing, and we managed to dodge the crowds and do some spectacular hiking in the devils garden and fiery furnace areas (which weren't as hot as their names suggested).

Anyway, our Utah trip was over then, so we drove halfway back to the city of rocks in idaho, where we camped and climbed our only pitch of the whole trip. Then another 11 hours of drive back to work. Ugh.

Last weekend we did a little bit of climbing in the Menagerie wilderness... I had been up there a few times, but it was my first on any of the other features besides Rooster, and I got the crap scared out of me a lichen and moss covered 5.8 route that had no protection for 40 feet. Truely an "adventure" climb, and for my first time was very much considering the implications of an 80+ foot fall! It worked out okay in the end, but I don't think I would go up there again without bee spray and a wire brush to clean the rock off first!

Finally, yesterday I had my helicopter hoist training with the 1042 airborne national gaurd division (blackhawks!), which was cool, but unfortunately only a fraction of how cool it could have been. We got to practice the hoisting but didn't get to fly and do "hot" rescue training cause the weather was terrible and the pilot's couldn't get clearance to fly. Pretty crazy though... Those army guys are out of their minds! Here's a fun stat... When I got my introduction to the "life-flight" helicopter a couple of months ago, they told us that they needed to know the exact weight of the patient because someone over 220 pounds may require that the helicopter pilot fly around a bit to burn off some fuel weight before being able to lift off with the patient. The blackhawk guys could lift and carry ~5-10 thousand pounds!!! Anyway, hopefully for Chinook training later this summer the weather will be better and we can fly around.