Slow Progress

I didn't think we could get dustier than we already were...

After our night at Ken's Lake, we couldn't miss returning to the waterfall where we had sought some much needed solace from the heat last summer. Luckily this time around (about a month earlier) the outside temperature was much more comfortable. The water was just as cold, but we stuck our heads in anyway. Very refreshing! From there we headed into Moab to do some much needed laundry and to get connected so J could do some work. We stopped in at Eklectic Cafe and sat out on the patio with a little lunch whilst taking full advantage of the free wifi downloading topo maps and J working. Once we had satisfied our stomachs we moved to a nearby city park to continue the work day- this meant reading time for me, yeah!

For those of you who wonder why pictures are not posted immediately, here is how it works (or doesn't work...) I/we can write and post text from any of our devices but pictures can only be added using the laptop. If we have sought out wifi it is generally because there is work of the paid variety to be done - on said laptop. So, apologies if it takes us awhile to load pictures, we do have hundreds of them which you will definitely get to see one day!

Eventually we left Moab once the battery on the laptop gave up (we really need a solar panel!) and wheeled our way into the hills. We came across a really nice campground not too far into the leg however I foolishly thought we should carry on and get some miles behind us- which we did but with a few sacrifices. First it got dark, then it got late. Finding semi-obscured campsites in a desert in the dead of night is not easy, especially when the road you are on is partly slick rock and there are no ingress or egress tracks to follow. Before darkness fell completely we traveled through some stunning canyons (if you're ever near Moab with a high clearance vehicle, be sure to check out the Onion Creek area).

In the end we wound up heading for Fruita over the border in Colorado- which was 60 miles away from the trail, in the wrong direction. Never fear, our madness had [some] reason. We found a campground with showers and we were close by Grand Junction, the Jeep was due for an oil change (which it kept reminding us of) and we wanted to get the front end checked as we'd been pounding on it for hundreds of bumpy miles and had some wobbles/sounds. We had tried to get all this done in Moab but as it had just been a holiday weekend all the mechanics were "swamped". We got the oil changed at the Grand Junction Jeep dealer but they didn't have time to check the suspension stuff so we found a local family run off road shop (Barney Brothers Off-road) and the guys there were super nice and said they could check it out in a couple of hours.

As it happened the birthplace of our sleeping bags [Wiggy's] was right across the street. We poked our heads in and were given a crash course in sleeping bag manufacturing and a tour by the owner himself! A very interesting chap.

Once the Jeep was sorted we hit the highway to get back to Thompson where we had left the trail. Back into the dusty desert. It was a rather beige area, after the stunning red rocks and canyons we'd seen the day before, this part of the route seemed somewhat arduous. We made it into Green River and found a state park oasis in the middle of town, set up camp early and more work was done.

It got warm pretty quickly the next morning. We got up and J took on the task of posting pictures; not an easy task! Still we managed to leave before lunch after some free hot showers. We knew we were headed for the hills today so the initial dusty drive through desert terrain did not seem so endless like the day before. The trail took us through the first half of Nine Mile Canyon - a place where there are apparently many sites with petroglyphs/pictographs etc. I thought these would be neat to see. Little did we know that the entire road was being worked on, so instead we were covered in more dust and mud and spent many minutes waiting for dump trucks and excavators to notice us and let us by! Eventually we got to our turnoff and we could keep moving.

It cooled as we climbed and we found a cheap empty campground way out there and there was even some cell service. So, wood was collected, a campfire was started, more work was attempted, an early dinner was eaten and now we lie in bed, our first night this summer in bear country.