Smoot

Short Version:
A long drive. A bland ride. Mooses! Moab in the dark.

Long Version:
We arose in fog and left Yellowstone without seeing much more than the inside of a cloud. The sun was shining on neighboring Grand Teton National Park, though, and delicious eggy burrito brunch at String Lake was accompanied by phenomenal views of serious mountainage. We stopped in Jackson, Wyoming, to have our picture taken with the arches made of antlers, then drove on, through Alpine, and Cokeville, and Smoot. Cokeville should really be renamed Roadkillville; we saw the carcasses of two deer, two raccoons, one cow, and a really stinky skunk, all right on the edge of town.

A quick stop at the Fossil Butte National Monument made us more smarter; who knew that owls and ducks were such ancient species? We took a hike up to the old fossil quarry and looked at rocks and petrified critters, then carried on south and west into Evanston, where we found a huge liquor store with huge bottles of delicious beers, several huge gas stations with huge pickup trucks at the pumps, and a huge Wal-Mart with huge customers inside. Then we made a run for the "nearby" Wasatch National Forest. It took a long time to get there, and by the time we reached it we were in Utah. The full moon was shining on high desert tablelands, and it gave us just enough light to twice narrowly avoid high-speed collisions with road-grazing deer.

Next morning dawned cloudy and cold, and it got colder as we went higher; up past Ruth Lake and over the 10347ft Bald Mountain Pass before dropping down into Park City, which hosted the alpine events at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. We hit a bike shop for info and wandered out again with a free copy of a not-free map, which proved mighty handy during the two-and-a-half hour ride that followed. The haul up the Spiro Trail was pretty good, for a climb, although either the cold or the altitude or both had our lungs burning unpleasantly. The traverse along the Mid-Mountain Trail was underwhelming, partly due to gearing issues, and the descent back down into town was rescued from being borderline arse only by the close encounter with the cow and calf moose, which was kind of cool.

We left town after a minor stop for delicious foods, and made our way to the university town of Provo, where we browsed an enormous thrift store with minor success before hitting the road to the mountain-biking Mecca that is Moab. The driving got pretty tough, with torrential rain and strobe-like lightning making life difficult on the cats-eye-free highways, but we made it to and through town eventually, and out to the muddy dirt of Kane Creek Road, where all the campgrounds were full and we ended up sleeping surprisingly well in a pullout at the side of the road near the top of a steep hill.