Monday, August 7, 2017

August 5, 2017 Water oops...


August 5, 2017

I fell asleep and then I heard my humans playing a game.  I came to them and they had all sorts of toys on the table.  I wanted to play too so I jumped on the table.  My paternal human picked me up and put me on the floor!  How rude!  I jumped on the chair next to my maternal human.  She wouldn’t let me play on the table either.  I even turned on my purr box real high.  So I chased one of my own toys.  Then I scratched the couch…  that ought to fix ‘em…  they yelled!

I woke up with a headache.  DRUGS – NOW!  Was it going to be the big one?  It was close, but the drugs kicked in.  I rested… Spouse slept in.  We finally got moving around 8:30 just as generator guy turned up the noise.  We took a hike to Singletree Falls.  The trailhead is in our campground.  It was not more than a mile roundtrip, but it was very steep and rocky.  We are at roughly 9,000 feet elevation, so it definitely got our hearts pounding!

It is a narrow trail that winds across the ponderosa, through stands of aspens and along a ridge with spectacular views of the rocky landscape.  Did I mention it was steep?  The waterfall cascaded onto the rocks then down the canyon.  Then we climbed back up.  It was steep…






Back to Hannah, we made a good breakfast and by the time she was ready to leave, it was already 11 am.  Continuing east on rte. 12, we wound our way through the piney mountains, coming down in elevation.  Then we saw them… the vermillion cliffs of Capitol Reef National Park.  We weren’t planning to go there.  We need to turn left…  The cliffs are screaming their presence!  They command us to turn right.  NOOOO!!!    They are demanding that we go to them.  But NO!  We are going the other way.  It was out of our control…  The truck turned right.  We were caught in their spell.   We could not escape their seduction.





After a mere 30 miles of driving, we pulled into the campground at Capitol Reef.  There are no hookups, and we were low on water, so Spouse saw a spigot nearby and hooked up.  As he is filling our tank, he thought he better make sure the water is potable.  Normally it is marked if it is not potable, but NOT THIS TIME!  The water was already in the tank and now the tank is contaminated!  ARGH!  Spouse put some bleach in the tank.  Then we disconnected and went cruising around, giving the bleach some time to disinfect.

Capitol Reef is not a big park.  There are lots of orchards, we picked some apples and pears.   There are some petroglyphs that we had seen before.  We cruised out of the park and it looked like a gray moonscape.  We saw a town on the map and thought we would check it out.  We put it in the GPS, she took us there… alas there was no town!  We took a road for a few miles that would have taken us 66 miles to Bullfrog marina at Lake Powell.  We have been there in our boat, it would have been a whole lot different coming by land, but we didn’t want to go that far.  We went back and dealt with our water crisis.



We towed Hannah over to the dump station.  We drained the bleachy tank.  We filled the tank and added bleach again.  We drove Hannah to slosh it around.  We drained her again.  We filled her… if you don’t hear from us, we are poisoned in Hannah somewhere in the wild west!

We definitely needed a cocktail hour.  A deer came and visited us.  Rudy kept his eyes on her.  We gave her some of our apples that we picked.  She liked that.  We ate dinner then decided to hike the Cohab Trail to the lookout points.  I was told it is a good hike to do in the evening.  There is a cloud cover, maybe even the threat of a little rain, but the temps are in the 70s and there is a nice breeze.

The Cohab Trail is across the street from the campground.  The first .3 of a mile is uphill…  steep uphill.  We walk 200 steps, then rest.  Walk another 100 steps, then rest.  Our hearts are pounding.  The elevation here is about 5400 feet.  Slowly we climb.  Four guys in their twenties hoofed it past us at a brisk pace and they weren’t even breathing heavily.  Whippersnappers…  We continued our slow climb, then the trail leveled out along a ridge.  It then winded around through a wash with pink sand, over rock faces, up and down.  We then climbed up to the north lookout.  From here, there are stunning views of the valley below, as well as the buttes and mesas all around.  Retracing our steps back, we got back to Hannah at nearly 8:30.  The deer was here again.  There was still a little daylight, but we timed it just right.









Ok, Spouse bought a new thermos.  He loves this thermos and filled it for our Cohab hike.  Given the length of the hike, we figured we could share the one bottle.  Which was almost ok… but Spouse didn’t want to carry the weight of a full bottle so he didn’t fill it!  And I didn’t know that until we were out of water about half way down.  Did you hear me yell?  Mr. Survivalist, Mr. Doesn’t go to the bathroom without a GPS, Mr. never be unprepared… yeah, that guy wouldn’t add a couple more ounces of water to the thermos…




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