Well, I thought I'd try my hand at this blogging thing as it is supposed to be Matthew and Cassie and if you hadn't noticed, it's just been Matthew so far. Last week the NABS conference was in Salt Lake, which is where all the nerdy stream, river, bug, fish people like myself get together and talk about their work. You can tell how big of nerds we all are by how excited we all got at the NABS deck of cards everyone got which have a different picture of an aquatic invertebrate on each one. I'm looking forward to using them at our next poker night. It was great to see old friends and catch up with folks.



My friend Shannon stayed with us for the conference Rafael Swell. She hadn't been out there beforece and afterwards we went out to the San and as you can tell, it's one of our favorite places and there's tons to explore there. It was perfect time of year for flowers in the desert. We saw a few pictograph and petroglyph panels and went for a great hike. We had a couple cool lizard pose for us as well. The colorful one is an Eastern collard lizard and I think the other guy is a Western whiptail.


We were planning on hiking Devil's canyon and scrambling up San Rafael Knob, but we learned the Subaru doesn't qualify as a medium duty vehicle or the roads have gotten much worse since our guide book was published. I scraped bottom a couple times on the "light duty" section of the road then since it turned to "medium duty" we decided to walk to check out the road first and it was definitely not a trip the Suby would make. We found another hike we could do on the rim and then down through Coal wash which was pretty spectacular! It followed a OHV trail for a few miles along the rim we got a little lost on where we were supposed to drop into a side canyon, but after a bit of back tracking and guessing, we found a canyon to drop into which required a bit of scrambling around some big dry falls then out to the main wash scramble up to the rim then try to avoid stepping on all the cryptobiotic soil back to the car.

Today was the Utah Lake festival which is where we try to show people that Utah Lake really is a cool place; boating, fishing, birding, free food, face painting and fish hats. What more can you want? It's amazing the number of people who've lived here their whole lives and have never been out to a lake that is 5 minutes away from them and have no idea there is an endemic and endangered fish that lives there. For me it means taking Mojo out to a place where he can swim and stalk yellow headed blackbirds. He never tires of chasing them and watching him is always entertaining.