Syllabus #268

At a faculty meeting right before Fall Break (which is just rude, by the way) we were asked the ice-breaker question, "Describe your fall break plans in one word, on a continuum between quiet and adventurous?"  And since "fuckthismeetingwhyarewehere" would have violated the spirit of the exercise, I chose "risky."  Mostly because that sounds vague and mysterious, where I'm sure everyone figured me for the catch up on reading and pet my cats type of agenda.

There's a time and place for resting, reading, and cat-petting, but this time, we pulled up stakes and flew out to Salt Lake City, where we rented a 4WD vehicle (a Jeep Compass that inexplicably smelled of old fish) and drove down to Moab.  We spend 3 glorious days hiking 30+ miles in Arches National Park and the Island in the Sky and Needles sections of Canyonlands.  

We woke up at 5 every morning to be in the parks and on the trails before the hoi polloi showed up in their RVs to drive from overlook to overlook and take pictures out the windows with their iPads without ever leaving the vehicle.  That is an actual behavior we witnessed in Yosemite several years ago.  This time, we saw a preponderance of wealthy-looking senior citizens dressed in what I'm going to call the Patagonia Mullet.  Adventure on the bottom, business casual on top.  From the waist down, dressed like they were about to summit Kilimanjaro, but in brand-spanking new hiking boots bearing not a speck of dust.  Waist up, dressed like they were attending a board meeting followed by a reservation at a white tablecloth restaurant. 

The first day, Monday, we bypassed Arches' timed-entry ticketing system by sneaking into the park at 6:15 AM.  We were all the way at the top of the park, starting out on the Devil's Garden trail by sunrise.  We topped it off with a drive down a 4WD gravel road to hike Tower Arch, and then we had hiked over 11 miles by 1 PM.  We didn't have anything else to do, so we drove out to Dead Horse Point State Park to see the famous overlook there, but it was so hazy with wildfire smoke that we didn't get very good pictures.

The next day, we drove an hour and 45 minutes down to the Elephant Hill trailhead in the Needles section of Canyonlands to hike to Druid Arch.  This was by far the coolest hike we have ever done.  It was just over 10 miles, with 360 degrees of dramatic topography and a nice mix of fairly flat walking through a sandy wash, walking through a narrow rock crevasse, boulder scrambles, and a rather steep slickrock scramble that was fun going up but rather embarrassing and ungraceful to descend.  

The last day of hiking, we spent the day in the Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands, where we did 3 shorter hikes.  We started the day with the 5.6 mile Neck Spring trail, which gradually descended most of the way down to the bottom of the canyon and then back up to the rim in a brief, steep rock scramble.  I was glad this was a loop and not an out-and-back, because that would have been real trash to have to get back down the same way.  Then we did the 2 mile out-and-back to the Grand View Point Overlook, followed by the 3.6 mile out and back to Murphy Point.  

By Thursday, I was ready for a rest day but by no means ready to come home.  If you hear frantic clickety-clacking in the background, it's just me desperately searching for real estate on Zillow and trying to find a remote job.  We are already trying to figure out how soon we can go back, if not to the Moab area specifically, to other parts of Southern Utah we have yet to explore.

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Analog Reading:

Let it be known to all that I have completed 1150+ pages of It and I am forever scarred.  The book wasn't that scary, honestly, but there were some really disturbing parts that will never leave my brain as long as I live.  I just have to hope that after he wrote the pre-pubescent sewer sex scene, Steve pushed back from his desk and said, "Well that was some weird shit, and it didn't feel good to write that down."

To cleanse the palate a little, I then read the shortest book on my Kindle while we were flying from SLC to Nashville - Sloane Crosley's Grief is for People.  It was a surprisingly witty take on a very depressing topic.

Now, for a work book club, I'm almost finished First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston.  I have by now fully accepted that thrillers and suspense novels are something I enjoy, but I gotta say I don't love when a romance is also central to the plot.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that cheapens things, but it just feels like a distraction, or a compromise somehow.  At any rate, the central mystery of who the main character is working for and what she's actually supposed to be using her fake identity to accomplish is intriguing.  I don't hate it, I don't love it, but I am interested in finding out how the mystery unravels.