This week Dani was scheduled on a 4 day Desolation Canyon river trip, but the morning she was supposed to leave she got pretty sick and didn't want to risk being 100 miles away from civilization still feeling crappy, so she stayed home. Unfortunately, I had already made plans to keep me busy while she was away with double EMS shifts, a long day at work on Friday, and a campout with my brothers. The time Dani had off was good for her to rest and recuperate.
Because I was going up to Springville to work for my dad this week (a 20 hour day), I took Wednesday off and left Tuesday evening to take my younger brothers on their first backpacking trip. We drove to the Gold Basin trailhead in the La Sal mountains, where we were bombarded with mosquitoes as soon as we stepped out of the truck. We're all Boy Scouts and none of us brought bug repellent. As we hiked the mile to our camp the buggers were relentless, and we finally donned our full rain gear just to keep them off of us. We enjoyed appetizers like cherries, carrots, and jerky while we waited for the cheese and broccoli soup to cook (Dani kindly packed all our food, thanks darlin'). When we settled down for the night in my two-person tent, I was surprised by how comfortably it fit the three of us.
A forested area that had been cleared by an avalanche last winter.
The peaceful tarn at the bottom of the basin.
In the morning we left our sleeping gear in the tent and took off through the woods in an attempt to summit Mt. Peale, the tallest peak in the La Sals. As we tromped through the underbrush we woke thousands of mosquitoes, and if we stood still for more than 10 seconds they would swarm our bodies. We kept thinking, "It will be better as soon as we're on the rocks above the treeline," but as we began our climb high above the forest the insects got worse! Finally we called it quits, we had had enough.
On our way back to our basecamp we stumbled across an old decayed cabin site, without any apparent roads or trails.
When we had packed up and come back home, we concluded that our trip was a success despite the annoying mosquitoes that plagued us constantly.
After work on Friday Dani came from Moab to pick me up on our way to Layton to check out an apartment for the fall. We stayed the night at Grandpa and Grandpa Hall's and enjoyed their company until we left in the morning to go look at a promising basement apartment. We arrived a bit early, so we drove around the neighborhood and noticed the nice balance of older classic homes and newer ones in the area. When we toured the apartment, we both were pleased with everything: a tiled bathroom, gas-burning fireplace, well-lit rooms, and lots of storage (heaven knows we have a lot of outdoor gear). The only downside to it is the small kitchen space, but for just the two of us it'll be just fine. We love that it includes all utilities (wifi too!) and is more than $200 cheaper than we budgeted for! We're pretty excited to move in, and everything is coming together for us this fall.
This week was pretty laid-back with lots of work and some play. I had a backcountry call out to a mountain biker that fell and broke his arm near his wrist. He was fine otherwise, so we gave him pain meds, packaged him up, and drove him out on the SAR rhino to our ambulance. It was a pretty uneventful call, but I really enjoy using 4WD to get out to a patient and treating them in the wilderness. I'm so lucky to get these cool opportunities.
For Matthew's birthday, Dani gave him a trip down the river with a buddy, so we took some duckies after work and floated the rapids. Matthew and his friend Everett had a blast exploring side-streams and swimming and they had some great hits. At the take-out they had fun playing in the water while I hitch-hiked back to get our truck from the put-in.
Everett and Matthew after a successful run of Cloudburst.
While exploring they found some tiny reptiles!
It was his 12th birthday, so he was ordained a deacon today after church. Bishop Garrett remarked that he remembers when Matthew was born, and now he's the last of the Andrew boys to receive the priesthood!
This week I had the chance to shadow the anesthesia department at the hospital. A brother in our ward, Laird Clark, is a nurse anesthetist and offered to show me what he does at work. I observed a couple hernia repairs, a tubal ligation, and laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal), but the gist of anesthesia was the same for all of them. As a nurse anesthetist, the patient's face is your workspace - you need to have control of their airway and breathing, and you monitor their vitals and responsiveness throughout the surgery. I left that day feeling very excited about potentially pursuing a career as a CRNA. It was Olivia's birthday this week and for Dani's gift to her she took Olivia and a friend on a river trip! Olivia had a blast, and later I took her out for milkshakes at Milt's.
After a long week on the river, Dani was pretty burned-out and so we escaped to the LaSals for a cool weekend. I got a year-long fishing license (first time ever!) and we went to Medicine Lake Friday afternoon. We had the entire lake and campground to ourselves, and by the end of the day I had caught my limit. Dani enjoyed reading "Desert Solitaire" while I cast for hours.
Our favorite quote from the book so far: "A man on foot... will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. Better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount of time." -Edward Abbey
My salmon pictures from Alaska put these small rainbows to shame, but I was pretty happy to catch what I did!
Saturday morning after cleaning up camp we hiked around in the woods, grateful for the cooler mountain temperatures above the sweltering Moab valley.
Saturday evening I responded to my first "code" -- a patient with absent vital signs. We performed CPR for about 30 minutes, which ended unsuccessfully as we could not resuscitate our patient. As a new EMT I've looked forward to using the skills I've trained for in this type of situation, but also (for obvious reasons) I would never wish for a reason to use those skills, if that makes sense. The scene went smoother and calmer than I expected. I was surprised that the hardest part was after cleaning up, going home, and actually having time to think and analyze the event, prompting some hard-to-answer questions. The fact that it was a suicide made it even harder. I learned the less I know about the personal lives of patients the easier it is to handle. Luckily after a sober evening I was able to put it out of my mind and move on. I'm so grateful for this opportunity to work in the saving of lives.
After work one hot evening, Dani and I rode one of the trails out by Klondike Bluffs. This blazing weather must have scared the tourists away, because we only saw one other couple out there. We had a nice ride on the Jurassic trail singletrack.
My sexy, hard-core, mountain biking woman
For dad's last weekend to train before his hike, we went to the mountains to hike Mt. Tukuhnikivatz (or Tuk for short, I sure can't pronounce the full name). The trail was only about 5 miles round trip, but we were at 10,000 ft elevation and we hiked to the summit at 12,482 ft. The last quarter mile to the peak was a lung-busting 45 degree angle climb, but at the top we were rewarded with views in every direction forever -- we could see the entire Moab valley, Arches and Canyonlands, the San Rafael Swell, the Henry Mountains, and even the peaks near Telluride, CO. We enjoyed lunch up there before the controlled burn on the other side of the range clouded the sky over with smoke.
Looking back on the approach to the ridge
The beginning of the ridge to the peak
Just snow and scree
Dad lung-bustin' up the 45° ascent in the snow with Mt. Peale in the background
At the summit! 12,482 ft, Moab valley behind us
I'm afraid that these "training hikes" have been more fun than they have been training. Dad will have to hike over twice as much as he's hiked in one day when he treks the Grand Canyon. It's hard to find somewhere with the long distance without getting bored of walking.
Our week was busy but uneventful; Dani is on the river almost every day during June, and when I'm not at the office I pick up as many EMT shifts as I can. Several times a week we are called on transfers. Moab Regional Hospital sends a lot of their patients to surrounding hospitals for different reasons. I say surrounding, but the other hospitals aren't very close - the nearest transfer is St. Mary's in Grand Junction at an hour and 45 minutes, and the farthest transfer we do is to SLC, 4 hours one way.
I don't hate transfers, it's just exasperating when I'm riding in the back of the ambulance with my stable (read: not exciting) patient towards one of these hospitals, and we hear on our radio the backcountry call that just went out to the back-up crew. I have to remind myself that quality patient care is most important, and try not to grumble about the fun the other EMTs are having.
With only two weeks left before Dad's rim-to-rim trek, we needed to put some miles in. A friend of ours suggested doing a trail in Island in the Sky (Canyonlands NP) that would give us a challenging distance and elevation. On Saturday morning we began the Murphy Trail, descending to the white rim. We followed the cliffside, exploring some of the neat rock formations. After we completed our loop, our total mileage was 12.4mi and 1,400 ft elevation gain/loss.
Insert from Chris, just because he was so excited about his first backcountry call: "On Tuesday at 19:00 we were paged to a mountain biking accident on a remote trail north of Moab. The other EMT and I staged our ambulance near the trailhead with search and rescue and we headed out on their ATVs to the scene. It took almost two hours on the rugged trail to reach our patient, but fortunately it was only a fractured clavicle and not critical. We administered some pain meds, put his arm in a sling and took off on the bumpy ride back. By the time we returned to the station it was around 01:00 in the morning.
One of the SAR rhinos for backcountry patient transport.
On my previous shifts I haven't had very exciting pages - I've been a "call killer." So I was pretty stoked to get my first backcountry run! Due to the remote nature of Moab's surroundings, I'm looking forward to many more interesting calls like this."
Now back to Dani: The highlight of our week was definitely when my brother Jacob and three of his friends came down to visit! Jacob's birthday is June 7th, and he talked some friends into carpooling down to Moab the weekend before to celebrate it in Moab. Chris and I planned some fun adventures. They left Provo around 7pm Friday night, and when 11 o'clock rolled around we were anxiously waiting their arrival when I get a call from Jacob telling me that they were going to be a bit late... "Where are you guys?" we asked. "... about 14 miles outside of Saint George." "Uh......"
Yep... St. George is 5 hours away from Moab, on the opposite side of Utah! Apparently everyone in the car thought somebody else in the car knew the way, and nobody bothered to say anything. Luckily they drove safe and the crew finally arrived here around 4am.
Knowing how tired everyone was, we let them sleep in a little as Chris and I ran over to the warehouse to borrow some river gear. Once everybody was awake we ate a good breakfast and then headed down river road to ducky the daily (a ducky is a two person, sit-on-top, inflatable kayak). Since nobody else had river experience Chris and I kinda got into "guide mode" with a safety speech at the put-in and step-by-step instructions on how to run all the rapids. We all had a lot of fun enjoying the river, and nobody flipped.
Jacob and Carley in White's Rapid
Our boat bent in HALF when we got surfed in the wave!
A quick lunch followed the river and then we headed back out to play. We originally planned on going to left-hand (a waterfall with limited cliff jumping) but thanks to it's popularity in town and online, it was too crowded to enjoy. We chose instead to hike up right-hand which is a much better kept secret. At the end of the hike there's some natural waterslides, and though the water was really high with snowmelt there was still a small section we were able to slide down. Afterwards we went to the much larger (and crazy fast thanks to all the flowing water) natural waterslide by the power dam. Everyone had a blast sliding!
Our busy day of exploring combined with their late arrival wore everyone out, and we spent the night with snacks and a movie. After church Sunday morning we had a family lunch and I surprised Jacob with a birthday cake. Jacob and I have always been HUGE Harry Potter fans, so it was only natural that I drew inspiration from Hagrid for his birthday cake.
It was sad to say goodbye, but I'm so grateful that Jacob and his friends were able to come visit. They all agreed that it was worth the 9 hour drive here, so we must have done something right as hosts/tour guides. We're just glad that it only took them 3 1/2 hours to get back to Provo.
After a week of recovery from our big hike, I hit the trail again with my dad, who is training for his rim-to-rim trek at the end of June. We hiked from Hidden Valley to the Moab Rim, and after scrambling around off trail it ended up being about 8.5 miles and almost 1000 ft elevation gain and loss. At the end of the Hidden Valley trail we visited some neat petroglyphs that I've never noticed before. There were a lot of desert critters, including a couple of bull snakes. It was a lot of fun to spend the time with my dad, and I'm looking forward to helping him train more.
My dad and I have very similar hiking styles. If we see something that looks cool, we'll go explore it... even if it takes us off the trail for hours, scrambling up rocks on the edge of a cliff, while jumping through pokey bushes. Unfortunately, we've both burned bridges with the rest of our family (who--for some reason--don't appreciate these kinds of adventures), but we sure enjoy exploring together!
That evening after Dani got off the river we went over to the Moab Arts Fest and bumped into one of our old buddies, Jason, who was selling some of his ceramics. We invited him and his new wife to float the river with us on Memorial Day before they left town. One of my other friends, Sheena, was in town for the weekend with her husband, so we invited them too.
On Monday, Dani and I grabbed a few inflatable kayaks from the Hazlett's and met up with our friends and their spouses to raft down the daily section of the Colorado. There was no whitewater carnage, but we had a good time!
You know that moment when all of a sudden, out of the blue, you and your best friend have the same days off work so you feel the NEED to go on a fun adventure? Well Chris and I had that moment. And decided to take a spontaneous trip to the Grand Canyon...and hike rim-to-rim.
We didn't have much time to prepare for this endeavor so we simply ran to the grocery store to get some goods, packed our bags and made a plan that went like this: drive to the Grand Canyon and then hike. After a quick post-work nap we left at 1am on Wednesday for our grand adventure. During the drive I learned a few things about my husband, #1 he knows every word to every Celine Dion song ever written and has the vocal chords to attempt to hit them and #2 he has a theory that if you sing as loud and as ugly as you can then you will sound exactly like Guns N' Roses and can sing along to any of their songs (I tested this theory and he's on to something big). When we came to the crossroads of the sign that said "North Rim <- South Rim ->" we took a wild guess and decided to start at the South Rim, just because.
Thanks to a time zone change - which we totally forgot was going to happen or we would have slept in longer than 1am - we arrived at the Grand Canyon just as the first light was coming up. It's a little surprising, because you're driving in a fairly flat desert--and then suddenly--the world drops off in front of you. It was amazing to watch the sunrise, especially since all the other tourists were sleeping--giving us the opportunity to feel some solitude. We then headed to the backcountry office right as they opened to see if we could get a permit to camp inside of the Grand Canyon at some point that weekend. As you can well imagine, those permits are hard to come by and we had no such luck. This lead to our decision to spend the day seeing sights around the visitors center, and then begin hiking the next morning across the canyon in a day.
Snapped this photo just as a thunderstorm rolled in.
We had fun playing tourist, but definitely felt like we were missing something as we stood at the edge of the canyon looking down. It felt too "Disneyland-ish" and void of the awe factor we had been expecting. Knowing that we needed more out of our Grand Canyon experience we went to bed early to catch a good night's rest before our big hike the next day.
Our alarms woke us up at 3:30am so we could take down camp, catch the first shuttle to the trailhead, and start hiking down Bright Angel Trail by 4:45. The descent into the canyon was spectacular! The farther we hiked, the larger the canyon became, and we finally felt like we were really seeing it. We hiked. And hiked. When we felt like we had to be at the bottom of the canyon there was another canyon wall to descend. When we finally got down to the Colorado River we felt a pang of longing, as we know we will never really feel like we've experienced the Grand Canyon until we've rafted it (mark my words--one day it will happen). The bottom of the canyon was stunning with the black granite, refreshing creeks, and a surprising amount of shade.
It wasn't long after we got to the bottom that we realized we should have planned our trip better, or rather at all--as going south to north meant that about a quarter of our hike was downhill and the rest was going to be uphill. But an uphill battle wouldn't stop us as we continued on. We hiked. And hiked. Annnnnnd hiked. We saw a lot of pretty things along the way, but mostly we just dripped in sweat and thought about how smart everybody else was who we met who had trained for this hike and had daypacks instead of full overnight packs. Since we hadn't planned our hike in advance, we carried all our camping gear to stay at the North Rim. Let me tell you - the size of your pack makes a big difference.
As we approached the north rim we were blown away with how different the terrain was from the south rim. We were no longer in Visitor Center chaos of the desert but had entered a much less populated and beautiful Aspen forest. We were lucky to be able to walk up and get a tent spot in the "hiker/biker communal site." After a quick dinner we crashed and slept like rocks throughout the night.
"We made it!" thumbs up.
Chris threw together the video below, pretty much summing up our big hike.
When our legs wouldn't move in the morning, Chris opted to take the shuttle back to the south rim to pick up our truck. During his long drive I made fast friends with some neat hikers who were in the communal site. When Chris got back we drove to Page, Arizona, where we had a big all-you-can-eat Chinese dinner and found a campsite near Horseshoe Bend. We were too tired to set up our tent so we just laid our sleeping bags in the truck bed and crashed like we had never slept before.
When Saturday rolled around we once again woke up at a ghastly hour (though slightly later than the previous two days) and drove to Horseshoe Bend to see the sunrise. Our tired legs hobbled the longest quarter mile we have ever experienced to the overlook. Once again our planning, or lack thereof, shone through as the sun rose in the opposite direction of the Horseshoe Bend overlook! Regardless, it was a scenic and peaceful morning. We met a sweet couple from Japan who Chris offered to take some pictures for. The husband then gave me a small pillow to sit on so I wouldn't have to sit on the cold hard rock, and then insisted I keep the pillow (which had tags in Japanese!) when we left. It was such a kind gesture, and was a wonderful reminder of how little acts of kindness can brighten somebody's day.
When we were done taking pictures we limped back to the truck, began singing a mix of Celine Dion and Guns N' Roses, and headed back home (where we agreed that upon return we would do nothing other than eat and lay in bed for the foreseeable future).
Our highlight of the week was backpacking in Arches Nat'l Park. On Friday Dani swung by the visitor's center to pick up a backcountry permit and when I came home from work that evening, mom kindly shuttled us to the trail head for Courthouse Wash. After a short hike we found a beautiful sandy campsite in the narrow canyon walls, overshadowed by the cottonwood trees. There was a slight chance of precipitation, but we didn't even need our rainfly over our tent. Even though I grew up in the desert, I still appreciate the beauty of the red rock, sand, and distinct arid smells.
Dani prepared some delicious overnight oats (pre-mixed containers of oats, craisins, walnuts and brown sugar you just add water to the night before) for breakfast which we enjoyed before we began hiking again. It would be pretty hard to get lost - you just follow the stream in the deep canyon. We found pools, waterfalls, and even a wild turkey. Considering it was a weekend in one of the most popular National Parks in the state, we were pretty lucky to have the canyon all to ourselves! We didn't see another soul the whole trip, disguising the fact that we were less than three miles from the road in either direction.
Sometimes our carefully-placed camera on self-timer falls over. And we pose anyways.
I was officially hired on as a volunteer EMT for the Grand County EMS department this week! I will continue to train until I feel comfortable running with only one other medic. Early this morning we were called to a unconscious vomiting patient in a campground. After a quick assessment and treatment we took him to the hospital. As my first "real" call where I got to actually transport a patient with a medical emergency, I was pretty excited to administer care in the prehospital setting. It's going to be hard to go nursing school this fall when this is so much fun!
