Adventures with the Geocachers

Adee and Adam were in town this weekend. Amber had a Relief Society Conference on Saturday, so Adee went with her. Adam and I decided to have some fun, so we loaded the kids in the truck and went geocaching.

The first couple of hours went well as we hit some easy, rural caches. Adam was supposed to meet Adee at 2:00 and we were running out of time, so we decided to do an adventurous cache to end our day's adventures with. I grabbed a cache description that point to the top of West Mountain just south of Utah Lake. We have had some unseasonably warm weather, and the mountain didn't look so big from a few miles away, so we decided to go for it.

The road was fun and a bit muddy. Part way up we decided to lock the hubs and get into four wheel drive. We were glad we did because we ran into some snow. There were tracks where someone had gone earlier that day so we figured we would just follow them. We traversed the side of the mountain and the tops of some of it's lower ranges for quite some time. The road got rougher and the snow started to get a little deeper. As we neared the top, we noticed that there was a bunch of disturbed snow where someone had turned around. We followed the tracks up a bit further to find that the tracks that we were following had ended and the guy had turned around and went back down the mountain.

I didn't have a shovel, as I didn't think we were going anywhere too dangerous, and we were already going to be late for Adam to meet up with Adee, so we decided we had better call it an adventure and head back down the hill.

Well, the road was narrow, and the truck that had turned around was obviously shorter than my truck. We attempted to turn around but started to slide off the road a bit. We then got one tire lodged on the side of the hill and the other tires were just spinning on snowy-ice. We weren't moving very well.

We rocked the truck back and forth between first and reverse a few times and finally got the truck moving. We decided against turning around and backed a ways down the narrow snow covered road to a point where we could turn the truck around.

The once jovial kids were now deathly quiet with a few soft murmurs of dying, falling off of the cliff to the side of the truck, or never making it home. As we started down the slick and steep road, I started to think of the brakes that I was supposed to replace on the truck ten months ago. We put the truck in 4x4 LOW so that we wouldn't have to rely much on the brakes and made our slow descent down the mountain. We descended from the 6,800 ft ridge down to the 4,500 ft valley floor in roughly 30 minutes.

We really enjoyed our adventure...especially the part about getting down safely. I think the kids will remember this little adventure.

I sure was glad that Adam was there with me for moral support. I think I would have been a bit more wired being up on that mountain alone with four young kids without a shovel.