Spiders

Short Version:
Tired. Return to Moab. A ride in the desert (funny, that). Bad bank.

Long Version:
We were tired when we arose the day after our Western Rim - Zion Curtain - Kokopelli mission. Actually, I tell a lie: I was tired. Someone else was claiming box-of-birdsness. Still, there were no complaints emanating from Lovely Wife when the leisurely start to the day dragged on a wee bit longer than originally planned: delicious caffeiney goodness was drunk, bikes were fiddled with (in an entirely appropriate way), sun was sat in. Eventually, though, we got back on the road, heading back westwards, back into Utah, and, in the end, back to Moab.

Lovely Wife had been somewhat put out when we left Moab without earning ourselves a spider sticker by riding the Poison Spider Trail. This was somewhat surprising, given that she's been known to wake her long-suffering husband in the middle of the night to demand that he "Get them off me!" Extra irony points on the grounds that aforesaid husband is equally, if not more arachnophobic than she is*.

Still, the dinosaur footprints halfway up the cliff at the trailhead were pretty cool, and the trail itself was... actually the trail itself was, as everyone who'd ridden it had told us, an ordeal. It comprised three parts energy-sapping wheel-hugging ankle-deep red sand to one part bone-jarring rock ridges, almost all of which were arranged perpendicular to our path. Little Arch was the definite highlight: at the edge of a sheer cliff, high above the river and highway, and climbable. Fantastic combo, except for the amost falling off part.

At the end of the Poison Spider Trail, which is shared by bikers, hikers, horses, motorbikes, and 4x4s, one turns around and comes back the way one went out. Unless one is a motor-vehiclist with a decent map of the convoluted subsidiary trail network, in which case one can go play on small, sketchy dirt roads to one's heart's content. Or unless one is a hiker or biker who is not particularly risk averse, in which case one can take The Portal.

People have not died on The Portal.

People have died after falling off The Portal.

Apparently it's quite easy to do. Especially when it's getting dark.

Being a manly man, I argued the case for riding The Portal in the face of Nene's stated desire to return to the trailhead via the Poison Spider. I was careful not to be too persuasive, though, and soon we were headed back the way we'd come, albeit with a few wrong turns as the setting sun washed out our ability to spy trail markings. It took just under an hour to re-cover the ground we'd taken two-and-a-half to cross on the outbound leg, and we arrived back at the van just in time to nip another bout of nappy-rash in the bud before using the Moab Express Laundromat's free customer wi-fi connection to call the National Bank in NZ, in another attempt to get them to actually do some stuff they'd been promising for over two months. In the end, we had to get tetchy, but they promised to have it done overnight, which was soon enough for us to not starve or be stuck mid-desert without gasoline, but not soon enough to keep our custom long-term.







* = Seriously, in our house a spider of any size has more comprehensive squatter's rights than humans get even in the most liberally-inclined societies, just by being too damned scary to evict