This Journey is just the fix we need...

Day 209
10-2-2006
Started: Moab, UT
Finished: Outside Moab, UT
Today's Miles: 26.0
Total Miles: 3027.0

Moab was alive and kicking this morning. We would have to guess that Moab has the same buzz it does this morning just about every day of the year. Moab is an adrenaline junkie's heaven. If you have an outdoor adventure addiction then undoubtedly Moab has your fix! The town seems to revolve around adventure. Practically every other store throughout town is some type of rafting company or bike shop or adventure center where you can hire a guide to get on the water, go climbing, go bike riding, or even rent a four wheel drive just to go drive around the backcountry. Oh yeah, and if you need a real rush they will be glad to take you up and drop you out of a plane high above the canyons or the desert so you can get your skydiving fix. Over the weekend they held a skydiving event where they had over three thousand people jump! So, on just about any morning, even on a Monday morning, Moab is alive and kicking. We spent the early part of our day today trying to finalize our decision as to which route we were going to take out of Moab. The original plan was to follow the ADT down south and simply choose a few alternate sections that would enable us to push the jogger carrying our water supply. The more we looked at our topographic map and the more local knowledge we acquired about the options that would be best for pushing the jogger, the bigger and bigger the southern swing became before returning back to western progress between Boulder and Hanksville. The local bike guide we talked with informed us that the problem we were having was the same problem early explorers and every explorer through Utah since has encountered. There is no way to get from Moab to the Boulder/Hanksville area by simply going west. If you try to go straight west you will run into a big ditch, a ditch known as a canyon and even if you climbed down into the canyon you would be faced with the rather swiftly moving Green River at the bottom of the canyon. The options for crossing the Green River are either down to the south or up to the north, so we had to look at both options and then make a decision. We found that the north option would take us away from the ADT for about four days as we went up to the town of Green River to cross the water and then back down to the south to Hanksville. The south option would have us much closer to the ADT but still taking alternates that would be jogger full of water friendly and would take about eight days to reach the Boulder area. We took into consideration that some ADT travelers who hiked the central sections of Utah about a month ago had decided to go through Hanksville because it is a low elevation alternate to the higher elevations that would be encountered going west out of Boulder. The snow covered peak of Mt. Peale that we have been gazing at in the distance the past few days has us thinking that this time of year we may be wise to set ourselves up for the low elevation route. So after a few hours of going back and forth and using mapquest and google distance searches we managed to link together a route that would follow bike paths, old forest service roads and Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management roads up to Green River where we could cross the river and then follow old county roads and more BLM roads through San Rafael Desert back down to Hanksville. With today's hiking behind us we can say, "so far so good!" We are camped tonight out in the middle of the wide open spaces of the BLM lands and today we had beautiful hiking with Mt. Peale hanging over our shoulder, cool views of the "spectacles", otherwise known as the north window and south window in the windows section of Arches National Park and a hazy view of the large rock outcropping called Castle Rock. The weather has taken a turn for the worse tonight and we are glad we got the tent set up when we did. The wind is causing quite the sandstorm outside right now and the crashes of lightning seem to be getting closer and closer. We will definitely be getting some rain soon, but the warm and cozy confines of our tent should keep us dry. The weather is definitely a challenge when you live outside and the decisions we have made to take the routing we are taking most definitely has the weather in mind. Tonight we enjoy laying here knowing that our Journey, and our goal of utilizing the ADT to hike from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean is much like Moab was this morning, alive and kicking! It's the challenges we face and the decisions we make on a daily basis that make this such an amazing adventure. This Journey is just the fix we need!

Your Friends on the ADT,
Randy and Sheri
Follow our Journey at www.treckusa.com