Moab

Moab
Moab, UT
Sept. 2010

So funny story, I drove into Utah from Denver w/ the goal of crashing someplace outside of Moab for a night or two. I was open to anything. I had a schedule but certainly wasn't glued to it. I rolled through the Rockies w/o problem. Stopped at Grand Junction to pick up real beer & cowboy whiskey before heading across the border. I can't do 3.2 beer, simple as that. So stocked up I did.

After a brief stop at the Cisco ghost town I was rolling south making good time. I hit the 128 South just in the early afternoon. I had read that there were tons of spots to camp along the Colorado all the way to Moab. I stopped at every single one. EVERY SINGLE ONE. And didn't find a single bloody camping spot. Keep in mind I hadn't seen a calendar or the internet or civilization since leaving Maine a few weeks earlier. I had no idea what so ever it was a holiday weekend. Everyone and their brother (and their mothers, and sisters, and favorite step aunts, and priests, and masseuses, and heir... well you get the point, it was dang cramped!). I wasn't too worried though. Its Moab after all.

I headed out to Fischer Towers having no luck finding a free spot to call home for the night. After staking out a rather comfy if not dusty spot to call my own a BLM ranger pulled up. Because it was a holiday weekend (dang you holiday weekend!) free range camping on undeveloped BLM land was highly regulated. "Highly regulated" was the ranger's term, in layman's speak I was SOL and had to move along or risk temporary detainment. I'm not sure how "temporary" temporary detainment would have been. Heck knowing my luck some hung-over minimum wage illiterate government lackey barely recovered from the three-day holiday weekend would misfile my paperwork and I'd be sent of to Guantanamo on a clerical error (dang you holiday weekend!). Off I went.

Long story short, I spent another four hours watching the setting sun disappear into the amazing Moab horizon from the windshield of the car driving around looking for a vacant camping spot. Hours after the darkness had set in I found the one camp ground in town that had an available site. Pissed off about my bad luck and having missed shooting an amazing sun set and super tired from 18 hours in the car driving through Colorado and Utah I took the camp site sight unseen. Talk about a colossal mistake. The site I was given was stuck between a barb wire fence and a dumpster. I stole the picnic table from a nearby site to have something to site on (odd side note; by morning it was back where it belonged though I had no hand in returning it. Strange indeed.) The whole place smelt like burning garbage on a back street on an early hazing Moscow morning. The freeway was all of 3.2 feet away from where I pitched the tent on the other side of the barbed wire. Did I mention I paid $28 for the privileged of pitching tent in this mess for all of 9 hours? Yup, in by 0900, out by 0600 in the dim AM.

If it wasn't for me having the foresight to stock up on 8.5 beer & cowboy whiskey in Grand Junction earlier that day I would have been royally screwed. Thankfully the hoppy goodness helped ease my bruised ego just a tad. Just a tad.

(4)20.

Night.

Morning.