Weekend away from it all…

Ahhh, school is out for the summer.   We start back earlier than usual next year, so I headed up to the family property (which we call The Back of Beyond Ranch) my very first day of vacation.  I got there earlier than the rest of the family, so I just hung around taking pictures of things, then followed some dirt roads to nowhere.

Just because we live in a desert doesn’t mean there aren’t any colorful plants around.

My Jeep in my personal parking spot, right next to my camper.

The sunset lit up some trees, while others were left in the dark.  This is looking out over our east 40 from the cabin.

My old 1965 Jeep that we zebra striped for use on the ranch.  It ran for a couple of years, and has been sitting ever since.  We’re going to tow it down this summer and junk it so someone can use it’s parts.

The cabin.  It’s just a 16’x16’ single room, but that’s perfect for family dinners and someplace to play cards when it decides to rain, or to stay warm when we come up in the winter.

More sunset shots.

I really liked how this one clump of needles was lit up on an otherwise darkened tree.

Here, the same shot, but I played around with the lighting.

A deer hiding in the brush?

Nope, just an antler out there by itself.

Looking down on SR40 from a high spot on our land.

More colorful foliage.

Everyone else finally made it up (we ended up with 11 adults and 6 children), and the next day the kids started digging for fossils.

Cider wanted some of my grand-niece’s breakfast.

My grand-nephew learning to ride his motorcycle from his father (my nephew-in-law?).

Riding solo.

Looking out over the Strawberry Pinnacles from the ridge just south of Back of Beyond.

A closer look at the cliffs.

Humanity rears it’s ugly head, even up 6 miles of dirt roads.

Looking northwest from the same ridge.

A dead tree right on the ridge.

A nice little valley you can see from right next to the dead tree.

Back at the ranch, we needed to make some of our own shade to accommodate the 17 people that were there.

At the beach on Starvation Reservoir, just outside of the city of Duchesne.

The water was still a little cold, most of the adults just got their feet wet.  My grand-niece was the only one who did any actual swimming.

This poor boater fought the wind for about 10 minutes, standing still in the water, until he gave up and took a perpendicular route to the shore.

So much for the “War on Drugs”, these guys looked like they were waging a “War on Fish”.

A seagull, out in the middle of the desert.

Unlike that smaller boat, this one had the power to beat the wind, but not without some major spray.

Dinner that night was my nephew-in-law’s famous Dutch Oven lasagna and a mixed-fruit cobbler.

My niece brought her bow and arrow.  Some of us were so good that we completely missed the target, and at one time we had lost 5 of her 6 arrows.

We finally found all but one of them.  We couldn’t figure out how this one got in this position, it looked like it had come straight through the tree.

Of course there was some tree-climbing.  that red blur in the middle is my nephew, half way up the tree.

The last day my grand-nephew was out on his motorcycle again, but this time he had his own self-proclaimed pit crew.

I had my GPS with me, and I was surprised to see that a lot of the dirt roads were actually named.  But it was these two roads that really confused me.  A fairly nice, obviously used, dirt road showed up as “Unpaved Road”,

Whereas this one, that was quite rough and not as commonly used, was given a name.  In Utah, a lot of the roads are named for how many blocks, in a given direction, they are from the center of town.  Even roads with actual names also have their number, for example the street I lived on while I was in high school was Vista View Drive (3150 East).  So, 39100 W means that this dirt road is 391 blocks west of whatever they consider the center of town.  If they use the same scale as we use here in Salt Lake, that’s about 56 miles.