4-Wheeling

Escalante week #2

Yes we went to Escalante again... and it was a blasty blast. We had an amazing little campsite next to a little river, with a little waterfall... Here are the pictures




Two weeks ago when we came here the Hell's Backbone road was closed so we weren't able to cross, this weekend however we were.



Here is the sign across the bridge...


Here is the edited version of the sign...


We hiked both the Lower Calf Creek Falls hike and the Upper Falls hike, the lower was better with no competition.


On our way home we stopped by Fish lake... Ok, so it really wasn't "on the way," but we wanted to stop by none-the-less. As you can see, it was mostly frozen over so we weren't able to go snorkeling, but the scuba diving was amazing... :)

Our Weekend

To celebrate the ending of another semester for Sam, we headed out to find some adventure. We are not very good at planning, and usually simply pick a general direction and then see where the road takes us :) This time the road took us to Escalante and Red Canyon.

Here is Indy the Mountain Dog



Red Canyon: We went on a beautiful hike, crossed the stream many times, encountered horses, and really just let Indy run wild.


We tried to drive across Hells Backbone, but alas, it is still closed due to snow... So we went back and took a drive down Hole in the Rock Road. Where we stopped at Devil's Garden:

Indy loved the sand and rocks



Our final destination was Egypt!!




We couldn't really figure out why it was called Egypt, but it was truly beautiful!

New addition

We got a new puppy!!! We like to call him Indy, but he prefers to be known as prince! We chose the name because of Indiana Jones... the dog, you were named after the dog...

Stary Stary Night

These were taken around midnight down in Cedar, if you look in the picture above you can see Jamie on the truck. Hi Jamie.

You can't really tell because I changed the settings on my camera so it would pick up the light, but it was really dark outside and you needed a flashlight to get around. That is the reason that Jamie is so out of focus if you zoom in because with the naked eye you weren't able to see her. In fact from where I took the picture of Jamie I could barely make out the trucks outline. These next two pictures were taken one right after the other so you can kind of see how dark it was.




The moon was out so I wasn't really able to get a good picture of the stars, but I got some good ones of the clouds.

The Performers Studio

Jamie has been involved in a 9 month singing class with the Performers Studio and last weekend was her final performance. Each of the students sang one solo and then back up for the other singers. She brought down the house as she was the only singer that did not sing to a karaoke track. You can see by the different pictures that she did not wear the same outfit twice. That is my little diva :)

She opened up the first half singing backup to "Alone" by Heart.




Her second song she sang backup to "To Make You Feel My Love" by Garth Brooks



Jamie and I (I played the guitar for her) opened up the second half with her solo to "The Story" by Brandi Carlile. Up until this point I was the camera man, but I had to give my duties to my mom who drove all the way up from Cedar City with my Uncle Rich.



This was taken during my whistling solo... Did I mention that I also whistled while I played the guitar?



Her last song she sang backup to "Juke Box Hero." She spent a lot of time learning the air guitar for this part. I think it paid off, she is quite the rocker!

I'm Scuba Sam

This is me Scuba Sam


Jamie and I went to Flaming Gorge this last weekend with some friends (Laurie and Nate) and we went scuba diving. Let me just tell you that this trip was a regular blast! This was Jamie's and my first scuba trip outside of the confines of a scuba classroom. As the old adage says "you learn a lot more by jumping into a lake with all of your scuba gear than you do in a scuba classroom."

Lesson 1, Nothing is better than a good plan... except for a nice MLT where the mutton is nice and lean...

Our planning consisted of "We are going to go down 20 feet and swim to the island." We all went under water and that was the end of communicating because how do you talk with each other under water? After about 5 minutes of floundering around we all resurfaced and came up with a better plan. The visibility was about 5 feet and it was hard not to lose each other. We decided Nate was going to lead, Jamie would go second, and I would be last. We went down again. I saw Nate slowly vanish, and saw Jamie starting to swim. I started to follow and after about two kicks I felt a little tap on my fin. I turned around and saw Nate. How in the world did he get behind me so fast?!? Also WHERE DID JAMIE GO? As I turned around to get her attention she was gone.

Here is Jamie


Lesson 2 If you can't see me I can't see you and that is a bad thing.

You learn in class that if someone gets lost you are supposed to resurface and find them because safety comes first. When we first got in the water Jamie was having trouble with her ears and that was some of the reason why we re-surfaced the first time. I thought that as soon as she saw that Nate was not in front of her and that I was not behind her she would come up and wait for us just like we learned in class. I started to panic because she couldn't stay down that long with ear problems and she shouldn't stay down that long if she couldn't find us. Well she didn't want to come back up because her ears had acclimatized, so no matter how lost we were she knew where she was and that was good enough.

(Here is a little side lesson that comes extra with the price of admission to my blog. It is easy to keep track of yourself. It was even easy to keep track of one other person, but when your attention is split with two people that is when you lose people.)

Lesson 3, If there are cops around do not admit to doing anything wrong... It will only get you into trouble!

Here is Nate


Nate and I would swim a little looking for Jamie and then surface to see if she had surfaced, then we would repeat. It was a little hard to hear while we were on the surface due to the fact that we were wearing our scuba caps and little did we know that we were shouting "I can't find her do you know where she is?" In a matter of minutes there were 5 different police cars on the shore ready to give aid at a moments notice. After about 15 minutes Jamie finally did re-surface and search and rescue was called off... for the moment. We decided that we would all hold on to our dive flag's rope that was connected to my vest and proceed.

Lesson 4, If your spiritual compass is broken it will always lead to a dam. I mean there is magnetic pull toward a dam.

Well, now I was in the lead and since we couldn't see the island under the water a compass heading was taken and I started to follow. My compass was not working, it just kept slowly turning to the right. I was trying to compensate and go left, but it was to no avail. My compass kept taking me to something that was making a lot of noise. So I would re-surface and get a visual on the island and go back down and rely on my compass. With in a matter of kicks it would take me right back to the loud noise.

Lesson 5, If there is no air in the tank you can't breath under water... unless your name is Aqua Man

Well, after searching for Jamie and all of my bad directions we were getting low on air so we had to surface and swim back to the shore never having made it to the island. When we surfaced I noticed that the loud noise was the dam and it was slowly dragging us toward it. It took a little bit of effort, but we over came the pull of the dam and swam back to shore with all of this newly acquired knowledge. As we walked to the truck we waved as we saw the police cars leaving in single file. Sorry you didn't get to practice your skills today Search and Rescue, maybe next time...

Here we all are with our divers flag