Southern Utah hiking is great fun!

This past week my wife and I had a chance to get down to southern Utah for a bit of relaxation. She has been disabled enough that we haven't been able to go out on the road overnight for around a year and a half. Over that time, she has been gradually improving and we decided to give it a try. I wrote about the rest of our trip in another entry, so I'll just tell you about the hiking I was able to do.
From our lodging in Hurricane, I could see a trail on a nearby mountain. We were staying at an Airbnb place, which was nice and described in more detail in my other post. We were only going to be there for two nights and that trail was nearby so I thought I'd give it a go. I asked Paul Maag, one of the owners of the rental, about the trail. He said something like, "Oh yeah, that trail goes all the way up to the top of Molly's Nipple. This is a good time of year to go as the snakes won't be out. I wouldn't go up there once it gets past ninety degrees. They come out then." I had looked for a place to park the night before near where the trail began, and so that morning as it was getting light, I parked there. The sunrise was awesome!

My arrival at the trailhead, perfect sunrise timing!

In between the parking area and where I could kind of see the trail, there is a wash that comes out of a slot canyon that needs to be crossed. I crossed the wash looking for where the trail began and it looked like it went up some really steep stuff right at first. I began looking for another way up, because the way I saw at first looked like a good way to slip and get hurt. After ten of fifteen minutes of scouting around further up the canyon, I decided that I wasn't going to make it up that slope on that day and instead decided to follow a trail up into the slot canyon. The thing was, it was looking like rain and I didn't want to be in there if it really started coming down. The little pockets of water I was seeing from a previous storm, and the dark clouds above made me nervous. I only got up in there about two hundred yards before turning around. Ann likes me to bring home some cool looking rocks on my outings to put in the yard and so part of that little side trip was hunting for something cool to take home. I found a couple of rocks and headed back down the canyon, then back to the van.
Once back at the van, and in the better light, I spotted a gate, about fifty yards further to the west of where I had crossed the wash. I bet that's where the trailhead is, I thought. Once through the gate, I knew that was where I needed to go to climb that peak. I headed up the trail.
It was still early. I had a deadline though because we needed to leave at about 11:00 in order to make it back home for a viewing for my aunt who had died. I decided that I would hike uphill until 9:00, then turn around. It was a steep climb and a lot of the trail was made out of that chalky, white dirt that turns very slick when wet, while other parts of it had a lot of loose rock on it. I knew that if it started raining hard, it was going to be an extreme challenge getting down in one piece. I modified my original plan of turning around at 9:00 to include unless it starts raining.

The first item on my agenda was to make it to this outcropping of rock.

I made good time. The lower elevation than I was used to in the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains made it seem much easier to hike without getting out of breath, and the stairclimbers I'd been doing hadn't hurt my ability to climb in the least. Within about 45 minutes though, I began feeling drops of rain. About two hundred yards above me there was a rocky outcropping and I made that my goal before turning around.
The views from there were amazing, and I could look down into the slot canyon and see what looked to be actual pools of water.

To the southwest, a Beautiful array of farmland.

The view to the northwest included Pine Valley Mountain

The slot. Down in the bottom about mid-pic was what appeared to be pools.

I stopped for a moment, took some pics, and headed back down. It wasn't yet 9:00, but it was time go go back because of the oncoming storm.
As I descended, I was thankful that my experience as a hiker had warned me to be careful. The steepness and looseness of the trail was treacherous enough, and I was glad that it was only lightly raining at that point and not enough to turn the trail into extremely slick mud.

Just to prove I was up there.

When I made it back down I drove away, stopping to look back and take some more pics of where I'd been. I could tell that in another half hour, I'd have made it to the top of Molly's Nipple.

I made it to the second "hump" in this photo. Molly's Nipple still isn't visible from here.

From another angle: I had made it to the top of the prominant cliffs before turning around.

From a distance, the trail and the peak.

Like many more trails that I hadn't completed, there would be a time to come back, should I desire. I'm thinking I will. Those unfinished trails always call me back sometime.

Back to traveling!

Ann and I just got back from a three day adventure into southern Utah. Actually it truly was an experiment of sorts. Since Ann had gotten severely ill back in January of 2017, we had not been on any kind of overnight outing. Actually it had been more than a year and a half, since it was at least as far back as summer 2016 the last time we went on a trip together. We had planned one in October last fall, but she ended up nixing that one as she didn't feel capable of handling it. This time it was different.
I had researched the listings at Airbnb until I found one that had recliners, like she was used to at home. I finally found this one: clickety-click. We left on Tuesday morning.
The trip down went well. I helped Ann get in and out of restrooms at gas stations and McDonald's and we made good time going down. I had been in contact with the owners of the place we would be staying, Zion's Angel's Nest, linked above, and they had been very good at communicating. We found it easily by their directions and soon met Iann and Paul at the door to where we'd be staying for the next two nights. They showed us around and let us know what was available in the suite, made some recommendations for food and activities, and then left us to our own devices.

Nice and comfy accomodations.

Outside the entrance we used.

A lot of great slogans on the walls that I agree with entirely.

They had a map of the world and pushpins to show from where you came.

Ann found out pretty quickly that the reclining furniture wasn't what she was used to and she couldn't manage the reclining of it with her limited strength. It was very comfortable, but she just couldn't make it recline, nor could she fully unrecline it when I reclined it for her. She has been disabled since about 2010 and has become used to certain surroundings, so for her to adjust wasn't as easy as for the average person to adjust. She hadn't slept on a bed for many months either, but she decided to try that and again, it was a failure. Not because the bed was uncomfortable in any way, but because she had broken her arm in late winter of last year and not known it was broken, then it had healed crookedly, and now, when she was on the  bed, she didn't know how to manage it. The combination of failure to manage either the bed or the recliner caused her to get quite agitated. That brought us to dinner time and she wanted some cheap tacos. I didn't so I thought I could get me something else and I went to Alfredo's Mexican and got a shrimp burrito. Across the street was Taco Bell, so after I picked up my burrito at Alfredo's I headed across the street for Ann's cheap tacos. The parking lot had about twenty cars in it, so I decided to try the drive up, which had about ten cars in it, but since my experience has been that fast food places put a premium on waiting on drive-up people, it would be much quicker than going in. I couldn't have been more wrong. Forty-five minutes later, I picked up my tacos at the window. Had there been a route of escape out of that line, I would have been out of it long ago. However, on one side was the building and on the other was a curb with grass and trees. Even if I'd had my 4Runner I wouldn't have been able to get out of that drive-thru line. My burrito was long gone before I ever picked up Ann's food. With things going as they were, it looked like we might be going home after one night instead of two. When I got back to the rooms we were staying in, things got a little calmer. As time for bed approached, she finally tried lying on the couch and we both went to sleep.

The next few pics were taken right outside the house where we stayed.

In the morning I found out that she had slept rather well and was in a much better mood because of it. "So are we still going home today?" I asked.
"No, we can stay the second night." she said.
We ate breakfast, then decided to go for a ride.

Interesting rock formations near Sand Hollow.

We drove past Sand Hollow State Park, circled around and got on the road that heads over to Zion National Park. I was thinking we could go over by the ghost town of  Grafton, then catch a road I knew of that drove over the top of one of the mesas near there. We actually missed the turn-off to Grafton and nearly made it into Zion before I realized what had happened and we turned around, turned on the GPS and found the turn-off. We went on into Grafton as I thought they may have added some portable restrooms to the area in the years since we had been there, but no dice. Back on the road, I found an alcove where the passenger side of the van was at least partially hidden and Ann did her thing.
Heading back, we turned off on the road that went over the top of the mesa, but within just a hundred yards or so, found out that the van couldn't hack it. I ended up backing down 100 yards of dirt road. I'm glad it wasn't a mile. Sometimes the sign that says "High-clearance vehicles only" is actually true!
We headed back toward Hurricane and took the road that heads up to Kolob Reservoir. I really wanted to hie to Kolob, but Ann's endurance wasn't up to it, so when we got to the national park boundary, we turned around and headed back, but not before I went off on a foray onto the edges of a large canyon to try and find some interesting rocks. Ann always likes to take a large boulder or two home with us, and we often joke about tying on a car-sized behemoth to our roof. This time I didn't find anything large and interesting, but I found a few pieces of petrified wood, which I could take because it was outside the park boundaries on either National Forest or BLM land.

Beautiful farmland on our ride.

What looked like an ostrich farm on the road to Zion National Park

That night we had better food and faster service. Ann is counting calories and wanted a salad, and I wanted something great. I got mine at the Stagecoach Grille--shrimp linguine. Do you see a pattern here? Shrimp both days. They had some salads, but had no idea what the calories were in them, so I went to the Main Street Cafe for Ann's stuff. They had no idea on calories either, but I didn't want to go another place so I estimated based upon salads that I knew of, like Wendy's salad calories.
We slept well that night. I had intended to wake up in the middle of the night to see if any stars were out, because it had been partly cloudy for most of the time we were there, but I was sleeping too soundly and didn't wake up until 5:20 or so. I went outside then, but it was mostly cloudy and I only saw a few stars.
I read for a while, then fixed us both breakfast: scrambled eggs, toast, and fruit. I had a glass of goat milk with mine. After breakfast I hiked halfway up a nearby peak called, appropriately (or inappropriately depending upon how you view such things) "Molly's Nipple". Rain was coming though, and the trail was treacherous and steep even when it was dry, so I headed back. When I got back down and could see the peak from a distance, I saw that I was probably only a half hour from reaching the top. One thing I noticed during the hike is that hiking at lower elevation is much easier than climbing the peaks near Salt Lake.

Our final morning as I got ready for my hike.

When I got back, we packed up and left soon after that. I had a viewing I wanted to get back for as my aunt had died and I wasn't going to be able to make it to the funeral because of some other serious things that couldn't wait.

As we got in the van to leave, we took this selfie.

We stopped at Mel's Drive-In for lunch in Beaver. I think we waited half an hour there for our food. It wasn't a great trip for prompt food service.
From there we headed home through a rain storm much of the way. All in all the experiment was a success and Ann is already saying things like "maybe we can go out for date nights now", which would be a big plus in my book.

Hiking: Thoughts on footwear

I hated those hiking boots almost from the time I bought them. Years ago, I had been in the market for some hiking boots. Strapped for cash, I had looked for some good boots at a great price. I finally found what I thought were great boots advertised at the REI discount page of their website. These boots were from The Northface. I had previously owned some Northface gear, but not much of it, because the cost was higher than my spaghetti and meatball diet could afford. However, they made great sleeping bags and jackets and so I figured that their boots were probably great too. I ordered the boots.
As I opened the package, the first thing I noticed was that they were made out of ankle-high sturdy leather with little give. Unlike the running shoes that I had been hiking in for most of my adult like, these boots were not flexible.  I couldn't help wonder how it would be to hike in them and not be able to flex my foot all that much as I had been accustomed to with the running shoes. They seemed well-made though, and I put them on, walking around the house. They were pretty comfortable and all of that, but I couldn't put out of my mind how stiff they were. I've always had fairly picky feet, when it comes to footwear, and I was worried about these boots. Still, I had spent the money and maybe they required a breaking-in period, so I held onto them.
My day job was as a mail carrier and I thought that I could break them in just wearing them to work. The postal service does have requirements for footwear, but occasionally, people do a bit of fudging on that without being reprimanded, and that's what I did. At the end of the day, there was one spot on the outer part of the boot's collar that had really hurt the tendon that runs down the outside of the ankle. Still, I thought, maybe the boots needed more breaking in.
However, I put them aside and went back to the running shoes.
A few years went by and the boots just sat in the closet. At the time, I wasn't doing any kind of winter hiking--rarely venturing into inclement weather, and when I did, I had some old army boots that were broken in and that did the job adequately, if not wonderfully. I had been backpacking, but generally it was for overnighters and no multiple day excursions. Then I planned the Kings Peak four night backpacking trip.
With that length of hiking, and expecting any kind of weather, I wanted something a little more durable than my running shoes. I remembered the Northface boots I had tucked away in the closet. I'll take those, I thought to myself.
It started out fairly well, but that first day on the trail, due to unforeseen circumstances, such as heavy run-off keeping us from crossing the creek where we needed to, we ended up walking extra miles, just so that we could be ready for the hiking on the following days. The first day was 12 miles and by the end of the day, I was exhausted.
Already that place where the boot rubbed my tendon on the first day I ever wore them was beginning to hurt tremendously. I didn't know what to do. We were miles from any chance of wearing something else, and we still had the peak to climb. By day three, there was no way I could endure the pain any longer. I pulled off the boot and took my knife and cut out the portion of the boot that was rubbing. Relief at last! It would take days for that pain to totally subside, but at least the pressure was gone. For the rest of the trip I could focus on why we were there instead of the pain I was in.
When I got home at the end of the trip, I tossed the boots into either a box that we had been saving stuff in to go to the local thrift store, or I threw them away disgustedly. I honestly cannot remember.
There is a moral to this story. That is, that when purchasing boots, or any article of clothing on which you have to depend to protect you in wilderness situations, make sure you like them, and if you have any misgivings, return them immediately and get something you are comfortable with.
A second lesson is this: Don't be afraid to modify your clothing to save your body from pain.  If I hadn't been smart enough to cut my boot to relieve the pressure, I'm not sure how much longer I would've been able to walk. And don't skimp when it comes to footwear that you will depend on to get you out of rugged terrain.
Northface likely does make some good hiking boots, but in this case I think they were on the discount rack for a reason. It's all part of the adventure though. Keep on hiking!

Jewel Lake, Uintas