little miss messy hair

2005-06-01

lazy lizard trip - day 4

in which we head out on our bikes once again, this time in search of the elusive Lamp Stand


the road right next to our camp at the cottonwood tree (as i type this i realize that i am sticking out my tongue in concentration; i am a lousy typist) is confusing. not that it is extremely winding or has a lot of side roads; it is confusing in that when you head out you feel like you are going downhill, but you have to pedal hard for the simple reason that you are actually going uphill. it makes for a nice treat when you are heading back to the tree, but it throws you off a bit when you are leaving.

on this day, we headed out on this gravity's fool road through long canyon with a side road leading to an item noted as 'Lamp Stand' on the BLM map.

this part of the road starts out with about 6 miles of road winding through the canyon: massive cliffs and rock formations on either side. Then you head up over a rise and get to look down into this:

you can hang out at the long canyon overlook and watch the swallows catching air. in my next life i want to be a swallow and just cruise around catching breezes.

following the overlook, you get about 1 mile of steep downhill and then cruisey rolly hills. Five miles later, we took the dirt road for the Lamp Stand.

Now, let me insert a few comments on BLM maps here. First, i am very glad they are available. Second, in their effort to turn BLM maps into tourist maps, they have added icons at point of interest. These icons are perhaps a little large for the scale of the actual map. Looking at the map, it would seem that Lamp Stand, and an arch right next to it, should be visible from the dirt road we followed. Of course the icons covered approximately a square mile each of actual map space, so it maybe was a bit misleading...

the road to Lamp Stand, or something near Lamp Stand, is dirt and sand and FUN. and we got to our buddy Jack and a number of his relatives, also:


we found an old uranium mine and a cool camp site, but we did not find the Lamp Stand, even up on the rocks of a nearby mini-canyon:

where could that thing be?


oh, and i should mention that as my estimation of my fitness level had fallen considerably the day before i was very much NOT looking forward to going over the overlook again, but it was not nearly as brutal as i had feared. So much less brutal that it was quite a lot of fun.

1 Comments:

At 10:05 AM, Blogger Bone Hunter said...

Hi...I have ran the deserts for 5 decades...my father owned many of the Uranium Mines in the Circle Cliffs....the Lampstand is a huge singular mesa that stands by itself near the northern end of the Circle Cliffs. One of those times you can't see the trees for the forest....

 

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