1996 was another good year in Moab, but then all of them are! This year was chapter three in the "Big Muddy" installment (See Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 for the previous adventures.) We went out with our friends, Steve and MaryAnn, and decided to show them how much fun Little Wild Horse really was. We first wanted to do Muddy Creek and see if we could get up to a mining camp from the creek. This time it was Steve that got bogged down. After almost burning the winch out, we got him out and decided we'd continue the adventure another year. On the way back we took a marked, but very unused route back and had to climb up a number of dry waterfalls. One was so bad and so off camber that we both almost lost both Jeeps, but we got back in one or two pieces. Once back at Goblin Valley, it took hours to hack the mud and sand out of the rear drums in Steve's Jeep. It was packed like concrete and makes a good argument for rear disks.

So now we head off to Temple Mountain to explore the old mines from the uranium boom of the 1950s. We had a great time going into the old mines and looking at the original equipment. I've got a Geiger counter so we used that to poke around and find small veins of pitchblende. After we got out and were back at the Jeeps, the Geiger counter was still popping away. We couldn't figure it out until we realized that we were parked right under the old chute where the raw material was dumped. No wonder it was hot!

Here we are in front a "handyman's special" in the mining region around Temple Mountain. This is typical of the many neat things in this area of the San Rafael Swell. The wheeling isn't that hard, never even used 4WD but what a lot of fun this was! This is all public land that the eco-terrorists haven't closed down (yet) so we made sure that we stayed on trails and didn't remove anything. I'm the one on the left that looks like I just crawled out of the shack!

One of our favorite trails is Pritchett Canyon. We've been on this trail forwards, backwards, and in the dark. This year we had time to play on the Rock Pile, so named because you need to pile rocks on the bottom to get enough traction to make it up to the top. The weather was perfect - 80 degrees, pretty blue sky and a good group to travel with. It doesn't get much better than this!

See what I mean!

Not the best photo but this will give you an idea of what it's like looking up from the bottom of one of the "hot tubs" on Hell's Revenge.