Friday, May 18

Remember the intro to the Mary Tyler Moore show?  There she is on a busy street in Minneapolis, of all places, flinging her beret into the air with a flourish of newfound freedom and reckless abandon?  The camera is spinning around in one direction as skinny little Mary is spinning in the other direction, faster, faster....

Okay, keep that image in your brain, but put my little face on Mary's, and instead of her shiny up-curl, put my haven't-showered-in-a-week hair, matted and lank, in a top knot with my semi-floppy hat on (a family friend gets these great hats from Ecuador that have a straw brim, elastic band and the top is open).

And instead of her Jackie O. button jacket, I have on a t-shirt that says, "I live here" with a palm tree, stained, sweaty, soft.  And instead of her pencil skirt picture me in my mini skort, short enough to get 93% of my legs tanned for early summer.  Now, I am not wearing hose like Mary Richards of course, but you can visualize my lower legs a maze of runner-like scabs and tender red abrasions from the brambles, sharp grasses and sage brush that I have been wallowing through in canyons.  I am not sure what Mary wore on her feet but I can bet she has some matronly square-heeled pumps.  Instead of those picture my summer hiking sneakers, soaked, caked with that white sugar-sand you find on the panhandle beaches of Florida, tendrils of slimy algae wound around my laces, the seams starting to fray and split open.

Now.  Beside me is my husband, looking pretty much the same except for the mini skort (he chose shorts for obvious reasons).  I am not tossing a hat into the air, as neither of us is letting our hats get to far away because it is around 90 degrees in the sun.  What we are both doing, instead, is standing motionless not on a city block, but in the high desert of the Escalante, Utah region, knee deep in cool clear perennial spring-fed stream, with a white sandy beach on one side, a lush hanging garden in an alcove on the other (maiden-hair ferns, moss), maple, cottonwood an birch trees lining both sides, with the occasional gigantic ponderosa pine interspersed.  And instead of skyscrapers, picture 800 foot sandstone walls as our backdrop.  We are not smiling.  Our mouths are agape and the only word we seem to be able to grapple with is "wow" in all different inflections and lengths.  "Wooooooowwwwwww."

So I guess it is nothing like Mary Richards, but I think you get the idea?  

I don't even know where to start.  We did a 5-day backpack which proved to be a magical mystery tour of hot dry overland slick rock and deep cool sandy stream explorations.  We then visited the outpost town of Escalante, and did a 2-day backpack with a whole other level of wonders:

The while 10-day extravaganza involved discovering a whole region of Utah neither of us has spent any time in, honing our route-finding skills, streamlining our backpacking methods with food preparation and gear, some pretty major exercise with 7-8 hour days of stream-wading, bushwhacking, scrambling... the list just goes on and on.

I will add more later but for now, here is the link to all our photos: https://plus.google.com/photos/102760975496575085468/albums/5743691273034611953?authkey=CMvOn_P84vDoUA.