Back from beyond...

Hello! Well, we've emerged from the canyons of Utah happy, healthy, and with only about 80 pounds of extra silt and sand covering every conceivable (and inconceivable) surface. We're in Ashland, Oregon for a few days, after a drive straight here from Moab, Utah, with only an 8-hour middle-of-the-night delay in the middle of Nevada (where billboards proclaim Give Big Rigs Room or You'll Get a Big Ticket) for the inevitable car problem. I woke up this morning feeling like Frodo at the end of the LOTR movies - in that big fluffy clean bed - soft, spacious, clean, oh and did I mention CLEAN?


Our month on the river was spectacular, incredible, never-a dull-moment exciting, beautiful, SHORT! We started out in summer, 90+ degrees, swimming three to four times a day to keep cool, and ended in chilly fall, finally digging out my down vest, and only jumping in the river to wash off plastered sand from a wind storm (the only downside to camping on a sandbar). We hiked, swam, canoed, and hiked some more. Saw petroglyphs, ancient ruins, desert bighorn sheep, beavers, deer, snakes, a tarantula (no scorpians this year). We even canoed upriver a few times (125 or so downriver miles, 3 upriver miles), passing a raft during one of these excursions whose oarsman helpfully said, "Uh, you're going the wrong way." We watched the moon go from full to new to full again, hanging out by Jupiter for a time. We watched the stars wheel overhead, sparkling and glittering in a black sky like a fantasy backdrop, an otherworldly and ethereal view into, what? Beauty? Love? Something beyond words and time and campfire smoke?

In a few days I'll post some pictures and journal excerpts.