Journeys: Salt Lake City, Utah Area - Winter Adventures

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Salt Lake City, Utah Area - Winter Adventures

I finally got some pictures from Rob of all our winter adventures. I haven't totally gone into hibernation, but I spend alot less time outdoors now that it's so cold and snowy. I'll take the 110 degree summer desert heat anyday ... but that's still a few months away. It's fun to see some of my favorite summer spots transformed into white frozen landscapes. It will be more fun when it all melts.

Back in November Rob, Lucy, and I went up to the Uinta mountains to do a late season hike before road closed for winter. There was a little more snow than we expected but the lakes and mountains looked spectacular.

There have been a few snowshoeing trips into the Cottonwood canyons, but all the avalanches this year have kept backcountry trips to a minimum.

On New Year's Day Rob and I went out to Antelope Island (thanks mom for the state park pass!) to wander around. Not enough snow to snowshoe but lots of ice to play on. It was my first time to the island during the winter and it was so peaceful - a great start to the new year.

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards"

-- Edward Abbey

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. "

-- John Muir

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

-- Terry Tempest Williams

"There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?"

-- Margaret E. Murie

"I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?"

-- Everett Ruess