These strawberry milkshakes will always be remembered now when passing thru Blanding, Utah after five days of backpacking in the Escalante and Cedar Mesa slickrock hiking arenas.  These “small” over 10″ tall versions were a fabulous fortuitous find recommended via Yelp! in the first town where we could get a cellular signal on my iPad.  I’ll have to admit the mushroom and swiss hamburgers hadn’t been delivered to the table yet. But that’s the reason we workout and do these strenuous feats isn’t it? So we can binge on those forbidden fruit shakes?  Now I’m eager to head back to southern Utah to burn up more calories and earn the reward.

Actually I’d like to take any of you back to this desert playground for day hikes or even backpacking.  One comment I’ve always made was that I’d get around to exploring our “backyard” for recreation once I got grey and now it’s all the better since I’ve adopted the ultra-lite base weight philosophy.  You really need to try backpacking with the same load you might take for a day hike.  This recent trip my base weight was 10.9 pounds for everything excluding consumables of food and water; a new low for me and I’m soon to go sub-10 pounds once I get my new pack.  Mid March was just about the first week that hiking without post-holing in snow was possible and mid-50 daytime temps were probably as low as I’d like to spend on the trails, but all the hiking and biking in the Durango area is still snow-bound.

Mike Taylor, his lab Ryler and I, first hiked the Boulder Mail Trail between Boulder, Utah and Escalante, which was a 11.5 mile mule-packing trail between those two historic Mormon towns.  What was special about the trail is that the first 6.5 miles is almost all on sandstone slickrock with pinon and juniper offsetting the rich red rocks.  Much of the trail is marked with sandstone rock cairns to keep the hiker from descending a “pour-over” or otherwise unscalable route.  At the mid-point of the Mail Trail you wind thru the Death Hollow creek bottom which on this occasion was backed up by a fresh beaver dam.  We opted to turn round at Death Hollow and search for another loop.

Our second 3-day trip (just over 24 miles) while we were in the region, was to hike the Fish Creek and Owl Creek loop on Cedar Mesa which turned out to be spectacular as well.  Similar slickrock but this time it was along much steeper canyons that once was the terrain of the Anasazi Indians who are now called the “ancient pueblo peoples”.  We saw granaries, cliff dwellings and petroglyphs that aren’t on any of the trail maps.  Let’s go back soon, so we can pause for those strawberry milkshakes on the way.