Onion Creek

I spent New Year's Eve in Moab, working at the local charter school and hiking a local canyon. This post will not be about the filing at the charter school, though it was some great filing, if I do say so myself.

I hiked along Onion Creek to the Fisher Towers, about 20 miles west of Moab and just south of Arches National Park.  This hike isn't as fun as Negro Bill Canyon, but it's good in its own way.

The scenery is great.  Moab is known for its peculiar rock formations, and this canyon has many.

Behind this one, I heard someone say, "I can smell you."  I thought at first the rock was a person, but nope, it was just a curious rock formation, and out from behind it came a talking dog.  "No time for you," I said.  "I'm looking for wonders of nature."

The camera on my BlackBerry doesn't do these justice.

Also along the way I saw this house. The talking dog ran into it.

How did they ever get a zoning permit to allow this in the canyon?  I don't know.  It was up by some waterfall.  Probably some greedy one-percenter bribed the corrupt BLM bureaucrats and got his bread buttered.  He probably works at a bank! OCCUPY MOAB!


The canyon floor is criss-crossed several times by Onion Creek.  The trail isn't actually a trail, but a dirt road that's used, judging by the tire tracks, by off-road vehicles.  I didn't see any, but that could be because it was New Year's Eve.  Perhaps that's not the prime day to be ORV-ing a canyon in the middle of nowhere.  I did get passed by a Jeep, whose driver asked if I was "walking for my health."  Yeah, you might want to try it, Tubby.

The creek was a real adventure.  It was frozen in spots, but running underneath the frozen edges and the sometimes frozen top layer.  Every time I'd come to a creek crossing, I'd have to figure some way across by stepping on rocks, walking upstream a ways to find a narrow section in could jump, or try to walk across the frozen parts without slipping or falling through.

I totally walked across this without slipping!

Once when I was on some very slippery ice, I inched to the edge to see if I could get a decent enough grip to make the small leap to solid ice on the other side without slipping.  I was just in running shoes--I should have brought my cleats.  I don't own cleats.  I should buy some cleats.  I was inching across very slowly when the ice said, all snarkily, "Walk more for your health, Tubby," and broke.  Into the creek I went.

That's when I swore.

But I soldiered on.  I had a rented car.  Who cares about red mud on the floor mats?

The dirt road is very long and I didn't walk the whole thing.  But I walked quite a ways.  Every time I got thinking it might be time to head back, I'd see a curve up ahead and decide that I could make it that far.  That happened three or four times when I came around one such curve and saw this mountain.

It was there.

I saw an opening that could work like stairs up this thing so I started ascending.  The stairs I hoped were there weren't, just rocks that broke pretty easily and weren't buried in the dirt like they looked.  Plus, I'm kinda scared of heights.  About halfway up I was thinking that this is about far enough and how will I get down.  Then, no kidding, at that moment the next song that came on my ipod shuffle list was "Climb the Mountain of Faith" from the Oakland Temple Pageant.  That song goes, "Climb the mountain! Climb the mountain! Walk paths with respect. Climb the Mountain!"

"Okay, Lord," says I and fake it up some more stairs.  After a few minutes I came to this:

No matter how much faith I have, there's just no freaking way.

Just then the song ended, so it worked out.

Down the mountain was harder than up it.  Not least because the rocks, as I mentioned, aren't nearly as sturdy and strong as they appear.

Sometimes I'd step on a good, solid-looking rock, just o have it break apart and send me sliding down a foot or so. But I had a rental car, so who cares?

On the way back, having learned that moving slowly on semi-frozen creeks leads to falling in, I just dashed across and made my leaps with caution to the wind.  (It was a lot windier on the way back.)  That's no problem for me, because like my old pal Cliff Denney used to say, I can jump like a freaking deer.