This could very well be the most specific post I’ve written. I’ll keep it short, too, in case you have places to be.

I’ll begin with some information. I have a nice bike. It’s a bike that I really enjoy riding around. While at BYU during the fall semester I would ride to school probably twice a week on average. Then winter rolled in and by the time the temperature warmed up to the point I felt comfortable riding long distances in it, I was burned out and biking to school didn’t sound like fun.

It’s summer and I want to spend a lot of time outdoors in the thick of it, hence my desire to go camping with friends. I also want to ride my bike around for fun to nowhere in particular.

Information over. Now for dilemma.

With so much time spent out riding a bike, I would like to multitask. Namely, by listening to music, books on tape, or general authority talks. The problem with this is that it’s not safe to ride around with headphones in my ears. There are expensive headphones (in excess of $150) I could get rest outside of the ear and send vibrations to the earbones without obstructing the ears, so you still hear everything going on around you.

For any bikers out there, what do you do? Not take an ipod? Only listen to one earpiece, or even both? Any advice would be appreciated.

Recently I’ve been very much in the mood to go camping. I used to go camping all the time when I was a Boy Scout. When I was a Blazer Scout (what 11 year old hopeful Scouts are called) my dad was the assistant scout leader. He helped to organize our ward scouts in such a way that the troop would go camping at least once a month (except for December since it is such a busy month). That tradition lasted until I was 17 and decided I was too old for the scout program (mostly because all they did was play basketball).

During those 6 years, though, I got in a great deal of camping and I loved each and every day of it. Certain individual hours were among the worst of my life, but as a whole, each camp was awesome. Quick aside, some of those miserable hours were on a Klondike (winter camp with the entire scout district) up at Rockport Reservoir. The reason for my misery is that I was one of the younger scouts and my place in the tent got pushed to the back corner, where a giant hole was. I think the longest streak of sleep I had that night was 15 minutes. It was horribly cold and I was going out of my mind. The night was made even worse when everyone woke up in the morning and started complaining about how warm they had been. Guffah!

One of the camps we went on, the week long summer camp when I was 16 was to a place in southern/central Utah outside of Boulder. I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember how to get there because I want to go again. Yesterday at church I asked one of my fellow scouts from back then and he provided me with the name; Horseshoe Lake. Yay. I looked it up and checked out Google Maps to figure out how to get there. Now I am far more prepared to sell the idea to some friends that are also in the mood for camping this summer. Let me show you some details and pictures. This is the picture from Google Maps (I added the numbers)

The labeled areas for 1 and 1b are the lakes that I think we camped by. I’m pretty sure we camped at 1, but it might be 1b. The label for 2 is the edge of a cliff. All that gray is ridge a few hundred feet tall. We dropped boulders off the cliffside and watched them crush the trees in their way. Pretty dangerous if you ask me. Here’s a picture looking over the edge:

A couple members and leaders of the troop took a trip down to that clearing. The path down is marked by the number three. It’s a water run off bed, so there’s lots of rocks to climb over. This is a view from that clearing looking up:

And of course, my favorite part of this camp is the part which cannot be easily reproduced. It was a single evening, as the sun set dark clouds rolled in and only red light was able to pass through them. That night was one of the most terrifying nights of my life as a truly amazing thunderstorm blasted the sky. It. was. awesome. This was the night sky before the storm began:

The quality isn’t so great because it’s an old photo and was scanned in, but you probably get the idea.

As I was Google Mapping my way around the region I noticed that this place is very close (relatively speaking) to Goblin Valley. I started exploring the area and decided to show an ariel view and a couple more pictures from my recent camping trip. This is Goblin Valley:

I should have picked a better color to show off the locations. In the top right, the parking lot is marked by 1. All those little divot looking things are the goblins themselves. At the bottom of the image, marked by 4, is about where we found our little scorpion friend.

The little gray circle next to the number 2 in the top right is a large mound of dirt. It’s a really distinct pile in all the red and very large. Number 3 is also a large pile of gray. Here are views from them looking back towards the parking lot in order:

Fun stuff. Now for the looped canyons:

I’m not entirely sure about this, I spent some time trying to remember certain turns and the way it would have looked, but this is my best approximation. Number 1 is the parking lot. There is a slight hike along a flash flood riverbed until the two different canyons become available. Number 2 is Bell Canyon. Number 3 is Wild Horse. The entire highlighted trail is just shy of 9 miles. If you look through some of the highlighted canyon just to the left of the number 3, you can see how the canyon becomes very narrow comparitively to the rest.

There’s almost a loop just south of that line, while there is amazing canyon north of that loop, if I remember correctly, it was after we had passed that loop (on our way south) that all of the best of the best features occurred. So if you are wary of venturing into this canyon to see what I’m talking about, the best stuff is early on.