Day 11

Day 11 (June 20) brought drizzly rain and gloomy skies.  We'd rode hard yesterday, so we took the morning off.  Went into Escalante and had some breakfast sandwiches and found a laundry which was timely as our riding clothes were showing the dirt from all the dust and crashes!  Amazing that this little town in central Utah, in the middle of mountains and nowhere has wi-fi connections at just about every commercial establishment.  When we asked about cell coverage, the lady at the Phillips 66 station said, "Go out to the cemetery south of town, go around to the back side of it and get up next to the large rock, people sometimes get coverage there.  Or go to the Broken Bow RV park and back in next to the dumpsters, that works sometimes, too."  Wi-fi everywhere, but essentially no cell coverage...not only do we avoid face-to-face contact, now even the internet has priority over electronic voice communication (unless you don't mind roaming charges)!

After doing the laundry and loitering about town until about noon, we came back to camp and had a nap.  Quiet campground, cool weather and light raindrops falling conspired to make us sleepy.  That and the handful of Ibuprofin I'd taken hadn't kicked in yet!  We woke up to blue skies and went out looking for a canyon to hike.  We found one deep in the Aquarius range.  Lots of good scrambling (for about 4 miles roundtrip and 1,000 ft of elevation change) and incredible views.  A thunderstorm was developing south of us and headed our way so we hightailed it out of there worried about flash flooding in a box canyon. 

Ben has been noticing wildflowers during our trip and he saw this one on the hike.

Good thing we moved fast because as we were clearing the canyon a light rain started that rapidly turned in to heavy rain and small hail.  But, before that weather hit we were just getting back near the car, climbing out of riverbed when I heard a rattle.  Turned out Ben had just passed a two foot rattlesnake and I was just about to get in its personal space.  Ben turned quickly and hit it with a rock, then stepped on its head.  He cut off its head and we brought the body back to camp.  While he was skinning it, the snake's headless body kept moving and freaking him out.  He's got the rattle (five fully developed rattles) and the skin drying.  We were going to fry up a bit of rattlesnake for dinner but couldn't figure out where the edible meat was.

We came back to camp and hiked the one mile loop from our campground to the Escalante Petrified Forest (you can see the campground from the hike in the picture below).  LOTS of petrified wood scattered around and some logs laying in pieces.  Very interesting and a nice cap to what could have been kind of a bummer of a day.  Off to Zion National Park to hike Angels' Landing tomorrow!