Brother's Campout 09

My brother's and I went on our inaugural Brother's Trip over June 12 - 14th down to Goblin Valley. I've decided to try to do a brother's trip every year from now on and this was our first attempt. I think that it was a smashing success and I loved the opportunity to hang with Russ, Robbie and Mike. Unfortunately Dad and Aaron couldn't make it... something about Dad having to shoot a wedding and Aaron being on a cruise in the Caribbean with Emily! Lucky punks!

So no pity on Aaron, however we felt bad that Dad couldn't make it. We drove down Friday after work around 4:00ish. Our stop in Price, UT was for very important items... hot dogs, buns, ice and a wiffle bat and ball (smart purchase, eh). :)

We ended up forgetting the ice... doh! But I'll get to that later. We didn't want to eat chain food for dinner, so we thought we would grab some local grub before the next 1.5 hour drive to Goblin Valley. Our choice was a place called Sherla's or some crappy name like that. It was right across the street from McDonald's (where we should've gone).

The food at Shmerloos was terrible! I got the supreme burrito and it ended up tasting like cheap store tortilla wrapped around old lettuce and cheese with some refried beans out of a can. And it was small... never going there again. Sharla's was gross! As you can tell I can't remember the name to the place... nor do I care to remember.

I drove the rest of the way to our camp site and we rolled in around 8:50 pm... right before dark, phew! We pulled off towards Little Wild Horse Canyon and found a side road leading to a few hoodoos where we dry camped for the weekend. This was the coolest camping spot ever. Nobody around us, loud as we wanted and plenty of room for the dogs to roam. Oh yeah, we took Alta and Mocha along for the ride. This was Mocha's first trip and campout and she did awesome. I felt bad leaving Lucy behind, but I didn't want to deal with three dogs.


We had a huge fire that night and sang some church hymns together. It sounds corny, but we had a great time and the spirit was really strong. That next morning we spent running around Goblin Valley. It is such a neat place and there are so many places to hike and explore. One could easily spend days there and not see everything.

Alta tried to be brave and jumped off a hoodoo that was pretty high and took a nasty spill. She ended up limping the rest of the time. Mocha, aka rugged-mountain Chihuahua, did great and this was a perfect little playground for her.

We needed ice badly to save our milk and hotdogs so we jumped in the car and drove the 20-something miles to Hanksville where we got ice, goodies and dog food. Alta needed it... fatty pants.

After spending a few hours back at camp and shooting Robbie and Mike's .22s we headed out to the slot canyons.

Alta is still limping. We didn't remember how long the loop was but we found out soon enough. It ended up being an 8-mile loop. We began going up Little Wild Horse Canyon which was a long uphill hike full of fun. We waded through water (Alta knocked me in the deep end and got me super wet) and climbed tons of big obstacles. Many of which we had to lift Alta up because it was too high for her to jump.



We came down Bell Canyon and that went really fast. Good times for sure. Alta and Mocha were so tired that they hardly could move back at camp. We played with the wiffle ball and bat by hitting up a hill by our camp and it would roll right back to us... simple pleasures, eh.

That next morning we jumped up and packed pretty quickly to get on the road and head back to SLC. Mike had a meeting at noon and so we had Russell (led-foot) drive home and we pulled in around 11:30. Perfect timing.