Cassie and I are not fishermen. We have either not done it enough, haven't paid a good tribute to the gods of angling or are simply unable to adapt to the necessary laziness of the sport. We lost at least 6 hooks in a single day to snags, rocks, or whatever it is that lies beneath the surface of the water and didn't catch a single fish to make up for it. Luckily our friends Chris and Emily with their mellow techniques managed to catch 3 over the course of the day. Even more amazing was that they were happy to let us eat them. We have great friends. Our crew of fishing consisted of 3 dogs and 7 people. Mojo amused himself with staring at the fish that had been caught. Strangely he was not at all interested in the animal when it was waved in his face, but rather the dark shadow in the water which moved when he pawed at it kept his attention for at least a few hours.
After having our fill of lost hooks and slack fishing lines we headed back to camp, fried up the fillets and enjoyed some dinner and smores. Sunday Cassie and I planned to head out of camp early to get some climbing in at Maple. We had seen a possible alternate route on a dirt road which leads through the mountains that might be scenic and would potentially still get us to Maple. I did say, "potentially". The road wasn't state maintained and in our little honda civic we knew there was a reasonable chance that we wouldn't make it all the way across the mountains on this road. Also, this time of year there is still much snow at higher elevations which can cause roads to be impassable. Our sense of adventure won out though and we decided to try it anyway. We made it almost to the pass which was probably around 9,000ft when we hit enough snow to force us to turn around. It was definitely not a loss though, as we had two great hikes. The first was to a couple of waterfalls and the second was through bright green mountain meadows with wildflowers blooming. We saw deer and elk and traced a little mountain stream down to it's confluence with the larger drainage which was raging. There was so much snow melt in the area that the ground on the hill leading down to the larger draining was completely saturated in some areas. Small streams appeared out of nowhere. These wet grasses soon consolidated into trickles, and the trickles became streams. No small wonder that the grasses grew so green and lush with all the moisture in the soil. Unfortunately the wetness also caused some slippery walking, and i took a nice spill with the camera in my hands. I believe I either yelled a choice expletive or it might have been "the camera!" which as I fell in top of it became covered in mud. No worries though it cleaned up and was still taking pictures. As we neared the end of our hike we noticed the thunderheads building quite ominously above our heads and thunder sounded in the distance. We hiked back to the car before the road became a muddy mess and headed downhill to the Reservoir.
After so much excitement we never made it to Maple for our planned day of climbing, but then we didn't really mind. It was still a beautiful day in Utah.
Photos from this blog post are at
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