Wednesday, April 27, 2011 - Recapture Dam Recreation Area, Blanding UT
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White Canyon, Fry Canyon UT, April 22, 2011
North or south, that's the question
Which way from here. Tomorrow my mail should be in at the Blanding postoffice and I can head out. In a few days I need to start the push to get back to New York around June 1st. The rough plan has been to head north from here to skirt around the Rockies. It's really a bit early in the season to be going through them and it now looks like it may be a bit early in the season to be going around them to the north, up along the western edge of Colorado and across southern Wyoming. The last few days here in Blanding have seen record or near record cold nights. I'm tired of cold - and spoiled by the last couple of weeks in the warmth of Arizona, Nevada and southwestern Utah. But I really don't feel like going around to the south of the rockies only to end up in the usual corridor eastbound. I'm tired of that too. I'd rather take a more northerly route.
So I will. A fresh route eastbound trumps the cold.
Night camp
Boondocked - Recapture Dam Recreation Area, Blanding UT
- Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - no signal
- Locate the Recapture Dam Recreation Area on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Listening
As the poet Gary Snyder said so well, "Beyond all this studying and managing and calculating, there's another level to nature. You can go about learning the names of things and doing inventories of trees, bushes, and flowers. But nature often just flits by and is not easily seen in a hard, clear light. Our actual experience of many birds and wildlife is chancy and quick. Wildlife is known as a call, a cough in the dark, a shadow in the shrubs. You can watch a cougar on a wildlife video for hours, but the real cougar shows herself only once or twice in a lifetime. One must be tuned to hints and nuances." After more than thirty years of living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and spending a great deal of that time out-of-doors, Snyder has seen the mountain lion on just a few occasions. One of these sightings was most unusual. Gary had been visiting a neighbor and was walking down from the nearby ridge to his home when he observed a cougar sitting near one of the windows of the house. The animal appeared to be listening intently as one of Snyder's stepdaughters practiced the piano.