After two days of mountain biking in Moab I drove ten miles north to the entrance of Arches national park. Unfortunately, I did not see the sign on the way to the entrance station that said permits were required for hiking in the Fiery Furnace . This was a cool place to hike and I had been there six years ago during the summer and was looking forward to going again when it wasn't so "fiery".

When I reached the Fiery Furnace area, fifteen miles in from the entrance visitor center, I saw the sign that said you needed a permit. I wasn't planning to hike there until the next day but I wasn't willing to drive fifteen miles back to the visitor center (and another 15 back) to get the permit. I would attempt to sneak in the next day.

I drove on another five miles to the Devil's Garden campground and found a very good site away from all the other spots, close to a water faucet and a rock formation with a good view of the sunset.

I then walked over to the Devil's Garden area to spend the rest of the day exploring . On the path there a park volunteer stopped me to ask if I'd fill out a survey to provide feedback on how well the park operated. I gave her an earful about not notifying park guests about the requirement for a permit for hiking the Fiery Furnace and then expecting them to drive 30 miles, wasting gas and polluting the environment, to get it.

Unfortunately, the next day she was the person stationed at the Fiery Furnace and caught me ignoring the permit signs and halted my entrance. Turns out the reason that they required a permit was that you had to sit through a video on why you shouldn't step on cryptobiotic soil. I tried to explain to her that as a high school biology teacher, I was well aware on the of the importance of the cryptobiotic soil and it's fragile nature. She finally agreed to ask the ranger, who was coming up from a tour she just led, to see if I might be allowed to go in.

But nothing I could say could convince those two pencil pushing bureaucrats that I didn't need no stinking permit. I probably knew more about cryptobiotic soil and the cyanobacteria that forms it than both of them combined…. and should have given them a pop quiz just to show them, but I didn't think of it until later.

I did hike some other spots that I hadn't hiked before so the day and my trip to Arches was not ruined.

The next day I drove from Arches to the Island in the Sky part of Canyonlands National Park. The forecast was for rain that day and I didn't want to drive the thirty mile round trip out to the furthest point on the "island" as I had been there on the previous trip. I went to a closer point on the eastern edge called Dead Horse Point and looked at the campsites there - but they weren't attractive enough to warrant spending an entire day there…so after spending some time at various viewpoints on the rim , I left to head about 50 miles southwest to Goblin Valley state park on the eastern edge of the San Rafael Swell. I was also planning to hike some slot canyons nearby and wanted to do that on the following day which was the only day rain was not forecast…..slot canyons are narrow, high walled slots carved out by centuries of stream flows and you did not want to be in one when the stream flows.

The park got it's name from the valley nearby that was about 500 meters wide and 2000 long with unusually shaped 2-10 meter formations scattered about the floor of the otherwise barren valley floor. These formations consisted of rounded hard sandstone shapes supported on top of softer, almost dirtlike, pedestals which were narrower than the tops. I was amazed that the pedestals still supported the heavier and denser tops after centuries of weathering .

It was cool to walk out among them and climb on them.

There was virtually no vegetation for miles in the park. The campsites were just large dirt spaces located next to the asphalt. It was very windy and dusty there so I ended up cooking and eating dinner about a mile away, back at the parking lot overlooking the Goblin Valley where it seemed to be a little less dusty.

After dinner I read some until the full moon came up and dusk faded into moonlight - and then went down and walking among the goblins - way cool. So cool, I came back the next night and walked some more.

The next day, however, I drove about ten miles away to hike two slot canyons - Little Wild Horse and Bell. Of the two, Little Wild Horse was the best .

The next destination was Capitol Reef National Park. When I got there by 11 AM all three campgrounds were full. I considered driving on to my next destination, down a 30 mile dirt road to a hike and camp on the western edge of the Waterpocket Fold….. but really did want to do some hiking a couple days around the main part of the park (campground area) and…I didn't want to move on to the next destination(s) too quick - there was again one day in the next seven days forecast that it wasn't supposed to rain and I wanted to time my itinerary with that day for another hike in some slot canyons near the town of Escalante.

I had to drive another ten miles to the town of Torrey and the nearest gas station anyway, to gas up before attempting the 30 mile dirt road and decided to at least have a look at the hostel there. It turned out to be a really nice hostel and was only $10 a night - cheaper than a campsite and so I decided to spend 2 nights there and commute 10 miles to the park for my daytime hiking. Unfortunately, after I paid and left to go back to the park, seven miles down the road I remembered I forgot to mark my bed in the dorm room - a key procedure to ensure optimum sleeping environments….and retraced the drive back to drop some stuff on a "good" bed - a lower bunk away from the windows.

That day I drove around the park and five miles down a canyon called the Grand Wash.

The next morning I hiked in the Grand wash from the other side to it's "narrows" area. In the afternoon I hiked the trail up from the Hickman Bridge overlook to the Rim Overlook and then halfway to the Navaho Knobs, before deciding that the storm that had been threatening all day would finally materialize in precipitation…and turned around. I timed it just about right. An hour and a half and three miles later, when I was a 100 meters from the car, the downpour began.

The next day I drove the dirt road that ran 30 miles south along the base of the Waterpocket Fold until the junction with the Burr Trail road which switchbacked up the wall of the fold. A little ways past the top was the dirt road to the trailhead of the hike I wanted to take up Upper Mulley Twist canyon. After about 40 feet on this road, I decided the terrain was a little too rough for my car and backed out and ate lunch in a dirt parking area nearby.

After having seen several families in big SUVs drive up that dirt road during my lunch and remembering that the guidebook said the worst part was at the beginning, I decided to give it another try. Though it was rough in many parts of the way, I was glad I drove the four miles of it to the trailhead because the scenery was not that great. The actual trail did not look that great either and so I just hiked around the bluffs of slickrock near the trailhead and then left to find one of the off-road campsites on the BLM land nearby.

The next day I drove to the Petrified Forest state park just west of Escalante, found a campsite and then drove 25 miles down a really rough washboarded dirt road to some slot canyons off of Dry Gulch.

After the first mile of jarring washboards I decided to test out a trick I had seen in the movie Wages of Fear - where two down on their luck, expatriots in some third world country decide to risk their lives and take a job nobody wanted - to drive a truck carrying nitroglycerin over a rough road to an oil field a hundred miles away where it's needed to put out an oil well fire. Anyway, the first hazard among the many they will face is a washboard road, and after a mile or so of going slow but still being jarred, one of them guesses that if they go fast and skim the tops of the ridges, it might be less jarring…..and it is, but you can only do it on straight roads and where there are no surprises like cattle crossing; because of the limited contact the tires have with the road you have poor stopping friction and control, like driving on ice, should you have to swerve. The last eight miles to the slot canyons was the worst and I tried it both slow and fast and decided that fast was the less jarring.

The three slot canyons were all different and all cool. The first one was at the upper end of the Dry Gulch . The walls were 30 - 60 meters high and about 3 - 6 meters apart. The floor was level sand.

The second one was called Spooky Gulch. Shortly after entering it the walls narrowed to 1 - 2 feet. The last 200 meters of it, I had to take my camelback and wide brimmed hat off and turn sideways to edge my way back into it .

The last one, Peek-a-Boo, was the coolest. The sculpted sandstone walls were so exaggerated in this canyon that they often swirled out and away from the walls and formed curling shapes and holes that you had to climb over, under and around . A 3-D cement playground.

Driving on the way back to the campground I discovered that my AC no longer worked - a casualty of the constant vibration I'm sure. The next day I called the Salt Lake City dealer service center to get some information to check the AC….and was told to call a mechanic in St. George, Utah who was supposed to be a genius.

The next couple days it was to rain and so I drove to Bryce Canyon , though I was not that crazy about Bryce the last trip out….. I needed to kill a couple days until the next forecasted non-rain day and the next slot canyon hike in Buckskin Gulch.

As it turned out I never did do that hike. I had been having an eye irritation a couple days and had tried many times to wash whatever it was out, using cups of water and also tried the old boy scout trick of pulling the eyelid over the lower eyelash - to no avail.

The second day at Bryce and third day of irritation, I noticed I had a swollen gland on underside of my jaw on that side. When I looked closer at the eye in the mirror, I also noticed some clear gelatinous substance in the lower corners of that eye as well.

As it began to snow and become a blizzard, I stood outside the visitors center on one of the park's only payphones and called my HMO to find out how to get treatment.

As it was forecast to rain for six out of the next seven days and the nearest quality medical center that might have an ophthalmologist was in Las Vegas, I decided to end my trip early and high-tail it to Las Vegas.

I stayed that night in a casino hotel about 15 miles outside of Las Vegas. I had planned to go to an urgent care center in Las Vegas the first thing the next day, but when I happed to look in the hotel's yellow pages there was an urgent care center 40 miles back up the road in St. George, I decided to go there instead and have that mechanic take a look at the AC. If the eye was not so bad and I could get the AC fixed, there was a cabin 30 miles up a valley dirt road in Death Valley that was a nice place to hang out for a couple days.

The mechanic was a very good one but the shop's AC coolant pump broke as they were recharging the system and so the AC was still not working when I left. It was too late to drive much farther than Las Vegas and so I spent another night in the Motel 6 there. I wanted to give the eye drops the doctor recommended, time to work so that when I did drive through Death Valley the next day, if it wasn't too hot without the AC and the eye felt better, I might spend a couple days there instead of heading back to SF immediately.

It was too hot and the eye was still bothering me and so I drove on to and up Owens valley to a state park called Tom's Place to spend the evening.

The next day I drove to south Lake Tahoe and took a look at a couple ski resorts thinking that if the snow was still good I might at least take a day to do some skiing. But the snow was soft and sticky and I didn't see any good moguls and so drove back home to SF.