I tried to warn him.
I tried to mentally prepare my boyfriend, Tom, for the rigors of travel with Jim and Vickie.
Awwww! Look at him! So naive.
I had explained that Jim and Vickie would pick us up at the Salt Lake City Airport in their pickup truck and that they tended to travel with too much gear. Tom wanted to know where we were going to go and what we were going to look for. I had only the vaguest answers for him, mumbling about Utah and Wyoming and how it was "up to them."
Still, he went with me.
He is a good man.
What he didn't expect to see was a pickup truck with a camper top, packed to the gills with crates, bags, and suitcases, AND a trailer packed full with more of the same.
Too late to back out! Away we went!
Our goal the first evening
was to set up camp in the Yellow Cat area of eastern Utah, about 240 miles from SLC,
but first!
along the way Vickie wanted to try and locate a septarian nodule site.
The directions in rock hounding books and on the internet can be sketchy and difficult to translate to real time. We found our way to a gravel road in search of "a ditch on the left-hand side."
Believe it or not, we found said ditch!
Initial digging attempts were frustratingly disappointing. The ground was covered with broken nodules so I knew they had to be there. Tom found some beautiful fragments of septarians and chert nodules which inflamed my out-of-control competitive side (I swear, I'm working on that!).
I finally hit pay dirt!
The only bad part of it was that I didn't find the pocket of nodules until it was time to leave.
Talk about working at a fever pitch!
It's probably for the best because we needed to eat some canned goods and burn some firewood before we would have enough room in the truck for rocks.
These septarian nodules are much more fragile than the ones I collected last year in Mt. Carmel, Utah, so I'll have to be exploring means of stabilization.
I soaked some of my AZ rainbow wood from April in a heady concoction of acetone and epoxy as a means of stabilizing its crumbly texture.
Any day now I hope to have time to actually slab it and see it if worked.
Looking for a camp site...
this was our view.
I may tease Jim and Vickie sometimes, but they make these vistas possible.
Yup,
this camp site looks about right.
I will admit, there are times that all the extra food and water adds
a sense of mental security.
To be continued...
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