Sleeping on the Bear’s Back II

Bears Ears #36

2024-06-06

This morning, I lay in the tent watching fast clouds. A thought pops up. Ute, a tribe that I always associated as one of the plains tribes. This is Ute-ah, Utah! Duh! The evident finally occurs to me. There is a rich history of the Ute.

Another restful day, we find that the trail across the road from us is a road to another look out. We walk down it maybe halfway, just to enjoy the morning, carrying nothing, unrestricted, unscripted. Even the flip flop shoes come off at a point in the road. We’ve decided to walk it all…later.

DF takes to catching up on some reading, while a she finds cool comfort in the shade.

I get out my rubber straps, a portable gymnasium machine. I like to use them for upper body strength.

Most of my hard exercise here involves walking. There is a bent over tree near camp.

I test it and declare its strength for safety and stretch my back, pulling up.

DF feels her spine also straightening as she hangs and gets her picture taken.

In the afternoon, we take the hike. Not feeling it so much, we head out anyway. A sense of adventure will soon envelope us, one wonder at a time and with that comes energy.

We stroll up and down rolling hills of green.

It is pleasant.

Eventually, we come to a barbed wire gate. It is the counterpart to the cattle guard that is near camp. About a quarter mile further, we find a campsite with a view.

There is a pleasant bedrock to sit in the shade nearby.

We sit meditate, just listen and look out across a vista. No rock formations, just a forested valley at the base of a cliff.

We can see the Bears Ears standing out of the verdant pine forest in the distance.

It gives us a sense of our position on the maps.

In time, it is decided to head back to camp. We’ve been traveling a few weeks, a new camp nearly every day and this feels like peace at last.

These are great days in a great place.

Nobody is out here within a couple of miles. There is just a pair of camper trailers closer to where we pulled off of the main road.

Utah has so many nude hiking opportunities and moments of solitude.

There have only been three vehicles passing in three days.

In the evening, after dinner and before sunset, we take a walk back toward the main road to see if we still have distant neighbors. That question is answered as a vicious acting white dog begins to get excited. I grab a rock from the side of the road, but the big guy keeps in his safe territory, putting their camp on alert.

The next day, we walk into the forest along a fence to a deep trench gully to the north of camp. We have followed the barbed wire fence through the forest; it keeps us safe so as not lose our sense of direction. Eventually, the fence serves no more purpose, plunging into what is the beginning of a canyon. We wander the area, a mangled old tree is little more than the twisted remains of the mass of tangled branches that once towered high above the forest’s floor.

It is a quiet walk, one of those just to see what is there and enjoy the quiet. Naked, surrounded by nature, sometimes there are small curiosities, or wonders, maybe a twisted tree, a lone flower. There are odd tunnels of termites, looking more akin to a gopher’s tunnels, raising above the ground’s surface.

Stumps of huge trees 200 years old plus were once cut down here.

It feels cozy, free and safe. There are plethora of scents, pine, grasses in various degrees of moister, dust, decay of wood, all feel familiar.

Calm air draped around bare bodies, sometimes cooler and then warmer, or just right.

A day in a life.

To be Continued…. (As we drive many miles across this scenic National Forest.)

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