2021 Huntsman Trip, part three

This is part three of a multiple-part post. You really should read them in order. You can find Part One here, and then click "newer post" at the end of each section. Pictures taken on this trip can be seen here.

 So, a couple of developments. First, I'd planned to go over to Los Angeles for a couple of days, to tour a car museum or two and visit with a friend. I'd made arrangements to see my friend, but I got no response from any of the museums I'd contacted about interviews; so I decided to cancel that little side-trip. I'm sure that was more a disappointment to me than to my friend, but I had seen him not that long ago when I was out there for the stained glass exhibit. 

 Second, my friend Curtis can't go hiking this year. Those few days of hiking each year are the real reason I come on these Huntsman trips; the tournament my wife plays soccer in is only the excuse to justify wandering around in Nevada and Utah with Curtis and Carly. But this year, Curtis has to stay close to home to look after his wife, who is having some serious medical issues. 

 The upshot of these developments is that, this year, I'll be spending the entire trip here in Lake Havasu City, which I often say is two and a half hours from anything to do. That's not technically true, but compared to any major city, it's pretty well devoid of things I like to do, especially alone. And I don't know anybody here. So after Nancy and Bryan return to Colorado, and Sherry goes up to Utah, I'll be sitting here twiddling my thumbs, unless I can get more ideas on my List of Activities than "Watch old DVDs," "Walk dog," and "Play on computer." 

 So far, though, all I have is a plan to visit a car museum in Laughlin and meet up with Curtis there, to hand over the small box of stuff I've been holding onto for him for the last year or so. That will occupy one day; one other day, there's a soccer match I plan to watch at some local bar; leaving me with three and a half days to fill on my own. I suspect that DVD player is going to get a workout, and Carly will sniff a lot of gravel landscaping. (Grass lawns are most definitely not done in Havasu.) I expect I'll also shop for T-shirts and fridge magnets (like I need more of either) and I suppose I might as well spend an hour at the LHC history museum. If I weren't such a cheapskate I'd go drop a C-note at one of the local casinos (Laughlin, where I'm meeting Curtis; Parker, half an hour south of Havasu; and across the lake at Havasu Landing; I hear there's a ferry that will take you across). But that just seems like a waste of both time and money. We'll have to see how desperate I get. Can I convince myself that I might actually win something?

 Saturday, the finest weather returned; the sky was a cloudless blue, the morning temperature around seventy degrees, the forecast high in the low-to-mid 80s. A perfect day for a short, easy hike through the Crack in the Mountain.

 Every time I've made that hike -- this may be my fourth time -- I've gone through the Crack both ways. The hike is about three and a half miles each way; it starts with a more or less flat walk along a wash until you get to a slot canyon that is so brief and so wide (maybe twenty yards) that you hardly even notice it. Then another stroll through a gravel-bottomed wash to the Crack, where the main attractions of the hike reside. Here the walls of the slot canyon are so close together that you have to brace yourself against one side and slide your butt along the other side to get down over an eroded channel that drops just a little too far to jump; getting back up it on the return trip depends on being able to get some traction on the smooth rock. In one place, there's a belayed rope, and you have to rappel down a short drop, maybe nine or ten feet, over a large boulder. This spot is my entire experience with that technique. Somewhere beyond that, another boulder has recently (within the last 3 years or so) gotten lodged in the Crack, and there are stumps of a metal ladder placed to help hikers over the obstruction. 

 Other than that, it's just a very narrow passage with a floor of gravel mixed with rocks: not easy, but not hard to pass through. 

bighorn sheep

The Crack opens onto a longish stretch of wash that curves between two low ridges. Here, for the first time, we saw a couple of Desert Bighorn Sheep, a threatened species that has a wildlife refuge a little farther to the south. They look like deer from a distance. This is probably the longest discrete section of the overall hike, about two-thirds of a mile through loose sand, gravel, and rocks. At a certain point, the trail rises onto the right-hand ridge, then you can either go left to the trail bottom at three tall mushroom-shaped rocks on the lakeshore, or right to a point higher up that gives a view of the lake, the rocks, and a picnic area on a point of BLM land.

 This time, we decided to take a different route back, the Blue Trail, which winds along the top of the right-hand ridge parallel to the Crack trail. It involves a few short climbs; one scary point (for people with acrophobia, like me) where the trail crosses a saddle that is just wide enough for the trail; and a few very badly marked junctions. At one, the trail marker had an arrow pointing diagonally down on one side, and diagonally up on the other. It seemed to indicate that the trail goes up a very steep slope for about a hundred and twenty feet. While Sherry and Carly went up that way, Bryan tried the lower trail, which turned out to be the correct one. Thank God. I really wanted that to be the right trail.

 And there is no shade at all along the Blue Trail. Even Carly was completely exhausted and had to be carried for a stretch. The last mile or so was like a Death March, except without the Death part, just an air-conditioned vehicle at the end. I ran out of water, then got resupplied by Nancy or Bryan, then ran out again. It's now two days later and I'm still feeling the aches in my feet and legs that came from this "short easy hike." A sure sign of aging. As if I need one.

Carly at the Lake

 The plan for Sunday called for trail riding in the rail and the Jeep in the morning, and boating on the lake in the afternoon. Now, Nancy and Bryan have a lot of experience with all manner of outdoor activity, and they are our Source Authorities for all such things. Sherry has more experience with it than me, but her knowledge of such things isn't nearly as exhaustive as Nancy and Bryan's. Their knowledge of The Outside World seems to me literally comprehensive, and I defer to them in almost every detail.* They grew up doing these things, while my childhood experiences of the Great Outdoors consisted largely of rare occasions wandering around undeveloped lots bordering edge-of-town subdivisions. 

But they (and Sherry) seem to have no concept of how long things take at the house. Specifically, the getting-things-together part of each expedition. 

 I've noticed the same circumstance applies at home: whenever Sherry announces to me that she's going to take Carly for a walk, on average around 45 minutes will elapse before I hear her phone say "Begin workout"; and it's only at that point that the walk begins. I don't know what goes into the preparations for a railing expedition or a boating trip, but on those occasions when I am a part of the planned activity (that is, the land-based activities), the group seems to be ready, and then not ready, and then ready to go, and then not ready, and then ready. And then we're not ready quite yet. And then we're ready to go. (And if you're thinking, "Why doesn't he help?" rest assured that that's been tried, and it doesn't move things along. I stay out of the way while those who know what they're doing do what they know needs doing. My job is to drive in the direction I'm instructed to go.) To the uninitiated eye (mine) it all appears as random slow-motion chaos; yet everything gets done, eventually, and we never end up out in the middle of nowhere with somebody saying "Oh, we should have brought such-and-such." Well, almost never.

Jeep & Cactus

 So when they told me the plan was a trail ride Sunday morning and boating Sunday afternoon, I snorted derisively to myself, in the manner of Sheldon Cooper. (I didn't do it out loud, because there was just the slightest possibility it might actually happen.) And sure enough, about an hour elapsed between the first "Let's go" and the actual "Let's go." I put my hat on and took it off four times, perhaps five, each time thinking despite my own experience with this phenomenon that we were really ready to go trail riding.

 Our ride lasted until late-late-late in the afternoon. But it was great. Bryan had plotted a course out farther than we normally go into the desert, out beyond nearly everyone else; and we encountered some trails that proved to be a real challenge for the rail (though not, of course, for his Jeep, which seems almost to glide serenely up or down any available slope). We even found one hill the rail couldn't climb at all, but there was another, easier route up a short distance away that Sherry found after going up in Bryan's Jeep. 

 By the time we got home, it was way too late for boating, which got pushed back to today -- Monday. Preparations for that expedition got started around nine this morning, and owing to an unexpected problem with the truck (which got a trip to the auto-parts store for a new battery) they continued long enough to make lunch at the house appropriate. That done, further preparation ensued until a shade before 2PM, i.e., just now, when Sherry came in from the garage to tell me that the wind had picked up too much and they weren't going boating.

 All this seems meaningful right now, while it's happening; later on, not so much.

* The one occasion on this trip when I didn't was when they formed an ad hoc committee to discuss which of four paths to take at the start of the Blue Trail. I got frustrated standing around in the hot sun while they debated the pros and cons of three paths that were, to me, obviously wrong, so I just said "This is the trail" and left. They caught up with me about three quarters of a mile along. At the time I felt pretty smug about the whole thing, but further reflection has softened that as slight possibilities for great disaster begin to appear among the fog of what might have been.

Postscript: If you're interested (and why wouldn't you be?) you can read the article I wrote for AutomotiveMuseumGuide.com about the Laughlin museum at this link.