Escalante! Day 2

After a nice lazy morning enjoying the mountains, we headed out for our adventures in the desert. With lunch packed we headed out in the Charger for Hole in the Rock road. Our first stop was for lunch at Devils Garden! Because Scott forgot the can opener, we had peanut butter and applesauce sandwiches, not the tuna fish as planed. It tasted great though. Here is an arch we found at Devils Garden. We took tons of pictures! It was a very neat place to play. We climbed up hoo-doos and into narrows. Kennedy did not want to leave. This beat any playground she had ever been to.

We did convince Kennedy to get back in the car and we went to Dry Gulch, were the famous Spooky and Peek-a-boo narrows are! The hike was much more difficult than I had remembered! Kennedy and Nicole did awesome! Kennedy had the best attitude and hiked and hiked and climbed and hiked. She hiked to the point that I was worried she was getting heat exhaustion. Needless to say, she slept very good that night. I don't have words for how amazing these canyons are. You will just have to see them for yourself. We did find a lizard that had found its way into spooky, and was unable to get out. The canyon floor never sees the sun and the lizard had gotten to cold. We carried him out of the canyon and put him in the sun to regain his energy.



Hole in the Rock road was a great road driving to Devils Garden, but after we hit Kane County, on the way to Dry Gulch, the road fell apart! The washboard was like speed bumps lined up in the road! The charger started shaking so bad, that the rear view mirror fell off, Nicole kept having to put screws back in the dashboard as it was falling apart! As we pulled into Dry Gulch, the breaks fell apart. Literally. The back brake shook apart and the adjuster fell out and the brakes became completely useless. Because it was the back, the parking brake also was useless. Scott managed to drive the charger 30 miles back to Escalante. It was a very stressful ride back to town. With it being Saturday night, there was nobody in who would be willing to fix it until Monday morning.
So we were stuck in Escalante with all our gear at the cabin. It was about that time that the Bakers arrived! There tiny Toyota was completely full of stuff and there was no way that we would be able to ride in there car up to the cabin. We went out to eat at a lovely Mexican restaurant. There we met some very friendly locals who overheard our situation and offered to drive us up to our cabin!! So with the sun heading down, exhausted from our day, we hopped into there big Dodge truck and headed up the mountain.