Adventures in year one of living in Utah: When it started.. Moab November 21st 2015

So before moving out to Utah, I was a semi, sub par, average, mediocre outdoors lover. I am an eagle scout and I had been camping many times before; along the Potomac River, in the Appalachian Mountains and in various places from New Jersey to Missouri. Despite being able to know how to tie a few knots and pretend that I would be able to save a life with my knowledge from the first aid merit badge, I was quite unaware that I loved the outdoors. It almost seemed like I had been sheltered from them. I had no knowledge of what a national park was even though I had been to various parks before. I didn't know there existed such things as natural arches or hoodoos in the vast Southern Utah landscape. I knew nothing of the steep granite walls of Yosemite or the deep canyons of Canyonlands. This would change though when I made the right friends who introduced it to me all.

My first camping trip in Utah was planned at 1:00am in Rancheritos on a Saturday night with some friends. It was November, and it was freezing out but for some reason we thought it would be a great idea to go camping. It seemed like a whole lot of fun actually. We made a list of things we would need and assigned certain people to get certain things and then set the date for that next Friday night. We would leave Friday, camp, hike on Saturday, Camp again and then drive home Sunday morning in time for church at 1:00.

Tyler Thornton was a mission companion of mine, we met in the airport in Salt Lake City on August of 2013 and then lived together for six weeks in Eldorado, Argentina while walking in the rain, heat and cold teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. Kate Foster was a pretty cool girl that happened to live in my apartment complex and we happened to be in the same family home evening group. We kind of thought that we were the coolest kids around so we didn't bother going to family home evening very often and then ended up becoming pretty good friends as we held our own family home evening activities (which usually involved studying for physical science or watching Charlie Brown movies). Genevieve Smith was Kate's best friend who I happened to meet for the first time driving home from the famous Utah State Howl, Halloween Party. Last but not least was Sara Davis who I also met that night coming home from the howl. We had started to hang out pretty frequently as a group but little did we know, we would become the best of friends our freshman year of BYU, somewhat thanks to our first little camping trip we planned to Moab.

We packed our things up and ended up leaving a little late, about 8:00 and drove down to Spanish Fork to pick up some firewood from some guy that was giving it away on KSL. Then we proceeded to head through Spanish Fork Canyon, SouthEast towards Moab. The drive consisted of politics, dancing, GV, Kate and Sara yelling at me to turn the music up and me yelling back at them to keep doing their homework (since Kate almost didn't come because she said she had a lot to do...) We arrived in Moab at 10:30 and Gv had just finished her essay that she had been working on for a few days and the whole car ride (we made a deal that every sentence that she wrote we could turn the volume up one notch). We arrived at Mcdonalds so that she could use the wifi to submit her essay and it was closed so she sat outside waiting to get a connection when all the sudden... Her laptop died. I thought it was halarious and even better that she didn't bring a charger, but luckily for her, her TA was pretty forgiving.

Our intentions as cheap, poor college students were to find a free campsite, so using a freecampsite.com website, we were directed to a dirt road that basically destroyed the bottom of my car due to the big bumps and rocks and that ended up leading no where. So after going slowly in reverse for about 20 minutes we reached the main road again and proceeded to ask a receptionist at the closest hotel (remember it was about 11:30 or 12:00 at this time) where the best camping spot would be. We finally made it to Moonflower campgrounds, which were super nice, and we find a spot about 200 yards back. We set up our 10 man tent... for the five of us... took some overexposure shots of the stars and went to bed.

We woke up the next morning and made some pancakes over the fire and headed out to Arches national park. We stopped by balance rock where Tyler chased a jack rabbit through the field and then went over to Delicate arch. Despite it being 16 degrees while we were sleeping, it was about 55 during the day, so it was perfect hiking weather. Our final stop was double arch, where we proceeded to take pics just like the first time tourists we were and then headed out of the park. It was super fun day overall and my excitement for hiking and exploring increased exponentially. On the way out of the park there is a sandhill right in front of the entrance where we saw some kids running down so we decided we would try it. After trekking to the top, which was extremely difficult due to how steep it was, we ran down as fast as we could and the object of this is to get going super fast until you tumble and then just flip, flop and plummet your way down to the bottom of the hill trying to avoid rocks.

Afterwards we wiped all the sand off of us and headed back to the campsite where we made a fire and cooked hotdogs and sat around and talked for a while. Due to how cold it was we went to bed and got up pretty early so that we could head back for church. While drinking mountain for breakfast, we made the three hour trip home and made it for church. It was a memorable first camping/hiking experience in Utah and the first of many. After seeing all the cool pictures and videos we got I was hungry for more. Unfortunately it was just beginning to snow and turn into winter, so It would have to wait.