Day 19…Highway 95, milepost 79 to Blanding Utah
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Woke up to an unbelievable sunrise. Watching from the ledge I slept on, I watched swirling red clouds with a blue background that changed by the minute. It was a quiet night, and not a creature was stirring…wait, that’s a Christmas story!
All the while we passed through this section of desert cicadas were calling from the scrubby junipers. Everytime I tried to locate one, they would stop as I neared the tree. So they remain a mystery as to details. I was particularly interested in their coloring.
I stopped at an Anasazi Indian ruins built into the cliffsides. I wish Jerry and I had found such a great spot to hide out from the thunderstorms.
There I met a couple in their 80’s that were hiking up the trail like a couple of young people. Chuck and Ruth return to the Utah desert each year to investigate Indian ruins and petroglyphs.
I met another interesting couple at this stop. Buzz, a retired airline pilot (I wonder if his supervisors knew he went by “buzz”!?) and Susan, a part-time dean/faculty at UCSC, are from Aptos, CA and are traveling for six weeks in their Honda minivan. They have it set up to sleep, with a bed that takes up the entire rear of the vehicle. It is raised so that they may store supplies underneath.
The most interesting cargo they were carrying was alive though. They introduced me to their two cats, Keaka and Chui (leopard in Swahili) who travel the whole way with them. Keaka never left her carrier, but Chui was happy to get out of the minivan and start wandering around.
Chui was blind since birth. She never had any eyes. Buzz found her 19 years ago wandering the street. The vet told him to put her down, but he refused and they raised her to be a loving 4.5 pound pet.
Two years ago Chui lost her hearing, but she still likes to investigate her dark and silent world with her nose. Susan told me that she even will jump to the ground from the van, not really knowing what is below!
Along the way Jerry ran into the Dutch hippie chick, Mathu. She had been down on Lake Powell following her Lonely Planet guide. She sent a postcard with a lizard on the front to me through Jerry. I kept looking for lizards the day we went on our hike in Bryce.
We crossed through a few canyons, decending a few hundred feet, crossing the bottom, and right back up a few hundred feet. Some of the grades we found were the steepest we had seen since the Sierra foothills.
We pulled into Blanding early and got a motel room. I could not wait to take a shower! My friend Lynn Repetsky would be so proud…if she could only smell me now! Lynn is infamous for her mountain bike rides on the Great Divide, where she does not bath for weeks at a time.
Blanding was kind of….well…bland. We went for ice cream and they only had vanilla. Jerry wanted beer, and had to backtrack 4.5 miles to get some. Cell phone coverage was spotty, and I could hear Sarah when I called her, but she could not hear me. We had steaks that night, and after a long discussion with the waiter, we determined medium-rare meant a pink center. Jerry ordered his medium. Both came back medium well, and a good piece of meat magically turned to leather.
It was nice to sleep in a bed again and watch a Perry Mason episode. We knocked off 50 miles today. I was in the saddle for 4 hr, 30 minutes and averaged 10.9 mph.
-Rick