Jackson Hole, North Side

Jax and I found a place where when the ground collapses it takes long slab rocks down the side and they are all angled. Many of them still elevated. 

It is very hard to live in silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silent. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.” – Edmond Jabes

Occasionally we came across markings, probably miner's claims. In the day all you had to do was mark out four sticks and that was your claim for some period of time to look for various minerals.

“I bought a cactus. A week later it died. And I got depressed, because I thought, Damn. I am less nurturing than a desert.” ― Demetri Martin

“Out in the desert what doesn’t kill you just pisses you off and will probably kill you the next time.” ― James Anderson

“The sand has rules. Fucked up rules, but rules nonetheless.” ― Kameron Hurley

“Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking. You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits. ~ Cindy Ross

Jax and I have taken the outer area to Jackson/Jacobs Ladder and now we'll push up against Jackson Butte on our way back. But just before we head out we see a man and woman coming on bicycles. They were on top of the Amasa Back yesterday and saw the trail coming up so have decided to conquer it by riding from town to carry their bicycles up and return to Moab via Cliffhanger.

Not long into our return we come across the old phone line that was run from Prommel Oil Well #1 all the way up Jackson Ladder and into town.

A few minutes later Jax comes across six mule deer. Just a few hundred yards from us and he takes off in their direction. By the time he gets to where they were they are a mile from there. You can see them in the middle of the picture far off in the distance.

Jax and I are almost back to the side by side. I use to get nervous if I was in town longer than an hour or so. I was missing where I lived. Now out hiking every day for weeks I get nervous when I'm going to return to Base Camp.

“Hiking’s not for everyone. Notice the wilderness is mostly empty.” ~Sonja Yoerg

Boat and a Plane

There's a boat and a plane across the river. It's hard keeping up with the Joneses.

Exploring and Sayings

 ‘I was forced to wander, having no one, forced by my nature to keep wandering because wandering was the only thing that I believed in, and the only thing that believed in me.’ – Roman Payne

When you’re traveling with someone else, you share each discovery, but when you are alone, you have to carry each experience with you like a secret, something you have to write on your heart because there’s no other way to preserve it.’ — Shauna Niequist

‘It is not down in any map; true places never are.’ – Herman Melville

“Now I see the secret of making the best person, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” ~ Walt Whitman

“We don’t stop hiking because we grow old. We grow old because we stop hiking.” ~ Finis Mitchell

“Hiking is the answer, who cares what the question is.”

“The closer you are to nature the further you are from idiots.”

Some Days

 Some days Jax and I are the only ones here. Nate is in Salt Lake for another week and Collin has an electrician here rewiring lots of stuff and installing a couple more washers and dryers so we can keep up better or function normally if one goes down. We can't get anyone to come out here and fix them so then we have to drop them in town and sometimes it takes weeks if not months. So now we have three commercial washers and three commercials dryers and a smaller set also in the Main House. On those days Jax and I hike nearby. Then they can call us from the front porch cooler walkie and meet us somewhere or wait for us to return.

Small hawk, male, sharp-shin sitting on the rock outback. Other than him the only other is a larger one who I haven't identified yet who's territory goes all the way out to Jackson Hole where I see it occasionally.

I got to say these are wonderful days. The exploring, reading the tracks, identifying the landscape. and breathing the air. Being tired, bone hurting tired, and barely being able to walk, even the cramps at the end of the day, are wonderful. I found, online other people here and there that expressed it better.

“The beautiful thing about going alone is that every triumph is yours, every consequence of every mistake is yours, everything that you have to figure out is on you. That’s a really powerful experience. And sometimes it is beautiful and positive and exciting, and sometimes it’s negative and hard and lonely. I wanted that. I welcomed that.” —Cheryl Strayed

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.’ – Neale Donald Walsch

Travel empties everything you have into the box called your life, all the things you accumulate to tell you who you are.’ – Claire Fontaine

“If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.” – Maxwell Maltz

Jackson Hole, South Side

 On this day Jax and I are hiking up against the outer wall on the south side of Jackson Hole and coming back on the north side up against Jackson Butte.

We've covered a lot of ground the last month and still a lot to do. Less than a month and it's time to go get Kobae.

One rock with white on it. Can't see where it fell from or even pieces that broke off.

We found two sets of recent, last couple days, foot prints on the south side of Jackson Hole. They are walking the creek bed and where lots of gravel and rock is. I followed one set the opposite direction for half mile or so. They stepped over petrified wood, obsidian, chert, and flint. I don't see any place where they stopped, bent over, examined something. Don't know what they were looking for.

Saw one rabbit and a rock squirrel. Lots of deer tracks and scat but never saw them and no fresh cow tracks so hopefully they'd finally all been gotten and headed down Lockhart.

Rabbits and Foxes Day Three, Maybe Four

 We're bouncing back and forth between Jackson Hole and Rabbits and Foxes and still on our last day out here we've seen no foot prints but rabbits and foxes.

Nate spent two days on crutches but he's off them now and feeling better it seems. Still a bit of a limp.

I got an email saying they shipped out my Star Link internet so we'll find out if it works any better than Hughes Net which I'm keeping so I'll have two kinds of internet hooks ups. 

I read that there use to be a storage building down the first creek bed for the cowboys long time ago so when they'd bring them out here from the south they'd have food for them but when they showed up someone had burned it down and the smoke was still drifting so Jax and I explored the first creek bed trying to find any sign that it ever existed and we didn't find anything.