Four Snakes, Two Eagles, and No Rabbits

 Oh hi kid!

This week was much more standard than last week. Mom’s back to work, no Rolling Stones concert, and lots of work.

So mom’s back to work full time And full force. She’s doing her Masters on Tuesday and Thursday nights too. Your mother is strong as heck, and she powers through. But I can see that she’s not quite herself yet. I wish I was tough like her. I can tell she needed to catch up on rest this weekend.

It’s now officially spring weather here, it’s not hot yet but the weather has stabilized to really nice. Hot is not far away. I imagine the heat has found you by now in Texas. With the good weather I’m back to yard work. Monday night I had to fix a leak in the sprinkler system. I felt like I did a proper job with no leaks. There seams to be a fault in one of the valves that I’ll need to figure out next. There’s always something to do when you have a house. Tuesday night I trimmed the box woods in front of the house. They look really nice. I had strained my back muscles on Monday digging that little hole, and I’ve been feeling it ever since.

Thursday night I made dinner, Hamburger Helper, and after your brothers came with me to see a documentary about the Navy Blue Angels. The cinematography was great, but it was honestly a little boring. Your brothers were good sports to come with me.

Friday night was our turn to clean the church. I got my favorite job of vacuuming the chapel. I like being alone in there, I like that it takes most of the time. Afterwards we went to cafe Rio. While we were there Jacob mentioned that he’d like to try hunting. I didn’t know if he was serious so we started talking about going to the west desert to see if we could find any jack rabbits. 

So Saturday morning we got up to drop Benjamin off at the U for his field camp trip. He was pretty excited, in a Ben sort of way and we had him there by 7:30 in the morning. Then Jacob and I headed west through Salt Lake. We made it out to Tooele and got gas and breakfast at Dennys. It’s fun to be with your brother. I didn’t really know where to go but I remembered finding a WW2 bomb range on one of those jeep trips I’ve gone on. I had the pin saved to Google maps so we headed out. Things are always farther out than I remember when I go to the desert, and this trip turned out to be the extreme version of that.

We got to within a couple of miles of the bombs range, but the route we took ended up at a closed gate to an industrial facility. I could figure out how we had come around that last time, so I decided to find a plan B. The whole way out I was looking for any sign of jackrabbits, usually you can tell by roadkill. I hadn’t seen anything up to this point in the drive. As we were back tracking though, I ran over a snake, likely a rattlesnake. They like to lay on the road in the morning to get warm.

For the backup plan I had decided to take the Hastings cutoff road to get to Skull Valley. As we hit the dirt road we noticed activity ahead. Mind you this is in the middle of nowhere. But we came up to a small group of people who had set up their shade tents to act as a food stop. Apparently there was a mountain bike race about to come through. We asked if it was okay if we could go through and they said there shouldn’t be anyone coming through for a while. So off we drove up through a small canyon and not five minutes into the drive came the first rider in the opposite direction. Now this was a narrow canyon road with lots of blind corners. Soon there were more and more bike riders coming down. The narrowness of the road made it impossible to turn around. So I carefully backed down quite a distance with Jacob looking forward to warn me of riders. I stayed very close to the edge of the road, but it was still pretty narrow for the riders to pass. It was a bit nerve racking. I backed down through several curves until we came to a parked SUV, where did that come from? I thought that we were going to be trapped there for hours. I got out to see if I could figure a way out and decided that I could pull off the side of the road far enough to turn around. It was a little sketchy because it was a steep slope up on that side. My 4Runner climbed it far enough for me to make the turn in one shot, but I had to send Jacob up the road to tell me when it was clear. More bikes were starting to come. Luckily there was a gap long enough to make the turn and as far as I know we avoided running over any mountain bikers. On to plan C.

So plan C was to get back on the freeway to take the standard route to Skull Valley. We drove past Iosepa and Ensign Ranch then turned off and followed a dirt two track that took us away from the highway. We drove out a mile or so till the two track ended. We saw a bunch of cows but we were looking for any signs of jackrabbits. In the old days, you could see their trails and tracks and their little poop pellets. All I could see were lizards and hoof prints, oh, and lots of ants and mosquitoes too. We wandered around for a half mile or so but found no sign. The only thing we found that may have related to rabbits were some decent sized den openings. But I’m not experienced enough to know what kind of animal would make them, and there were no tracks coming from them. Eventually I had gotten enough mosquito venom in me so we decided to get back in the car and keep going.

We headed down past the entrance The Dugway Proving Grounds Military base. It’s kinda weird because the first thing you see, in the middle of nowhere is a big, modern LDS church, a moderate military base entrance, and a small Holliday Inn express. Then nothing else within line of sight.

I remembered the road to the Pony Express trail was to the left and we took it. It was really dusty but mostly empty except for a few side by side riders who, for some reason, love park smack dab in the middle of the road. I drove on that for a while planning to find the pony express road and head home, because We still hadn’t seen rabbit one. 

Now, this is where I got confused. I thought we would come to the Pony Express road and it would be obvious. And while it probably was, somehow I crossed it without even realizing it. So I just kept driving south. I finally decided that it was time to get out and shoot some guns. I hadn’t brought any targets so we shot up an ancient dead juniper tree until that got dull after about 5 minutes.

I finally decided to route our way home on google maps and was shocked when it said two hours, how could that be? Then it told me to turn north and I couldn’t believe it because I thought the pony express road was still to our south. I feel like there’s a lesson on pride in here somewhere. So, like the idiot I am I headed south expecting to run into the route home at any minute. Nope, many minutes went by then many more. The landscape began to look less-and-less familiar to me. We did see two golden eagles, one flying overhead with a snake in his talons and one sitting regally in a juniper tree. Oh, and I might have run over another snake. We finally made it to an opening in the view and far off in the distance I saw a giant power plant. I recognized it but was even more confused. It was the one by Delta, and even if it was 15 miles in the distance, I was at least 20 miles further south than I had reckoned. Eventually we hit pavement and the entrance to the Little Sahara sand dunes state park. I had never been there before but by this time I was tired, hungry, and embarrassed to have been that lost so I avoided the urge to go in. Turns out we were about 20 miles south of Eureka on highway 6, probably an area that your comp is familiar with.

Your brother Jacob was a good sport and very patient with me. When we got home your mother had made us some delicious salsa and nachos. I just did some choirs and errands after that.

Today was a very quiet Sunday. Very quiet without Benjamin. We really miss you boys when you are not around. Ben will be home Wednesday evening.

Well kid, if you made it this far you are as patient as Jacob. I love you and we’ll chat tomorrow.

Pops