Moab is a madhouse. For that matter, everything/everywhere within a fifty mile radius of Moab is equally a madhouse. Its the height of Spring, the annual Jeep Safari is gearing up, and everybody from everywhere has arrived, and all those thousands have come to go Eastering. ('Eastering' is an actual term in Utah; it translates roughly to I really want to be five states away! But I'm not, so I'm left to find sanity in places people don't go. Like in the South Fork of....... well......... a canyon not far from home.)

The barberry (Fremont mahonia) are presently resplendent in yellow. In a few days, millions of tiny pale yellow flowers will bloom, and the fragrance of their aroma will be divine. A few weeks from now, those flowers will fade and fall, and will have transformed into slightly tart but succulent red berries. Remnants of those berries will show up in the scat of raccoons and badger and desert big-horn sheep, and in the droppings of ravens and cliff swallows and red-tailed hawks. Those berries will also be a hiking snack I prize above all others, and I suppose their remnants will be found in my scat as well.

But though there may be neither road nor trail, one should not think that nobody has passed this way. Big-horns turned the corner. People did --and still do--, too.

Moab is a madhouse. For that matter, everything/everywhere within a fifty mile radius of Moab is equally a madhouse. Its the height of Spring, the annual Jeep Safari is gearing up, and everybody from everywhere has arrived, and all those thousands have come to go Eastering. ('Eastering' is an actual term in Utah; it translates roughly to I really want to be five states away! But I'm not, so I'm left to find sanity in places people don't go. Like in the South Fork of....... well......... a canyon not far from home.)

The barberry (Fremont mahonia) are presently resplendent in yellow. In a few days, millions of tiny pale yellow flowers will bloom, and the fragrance of their aroma will be divine. A few weeks from now, those flowers will fade and fall, and will have transformed into slightly tart but succulent red berries. Remnants of those berries will show up in the scat of raccoons and badger and desert big-horn sheep, and in the droppings of ravens and cliff swallows and red-tailed hawks. Those berries will also be a hiking snack I prize above all others, and I suppose their remnants will be found in my scat as well.

But though there may be neither road nor trail, one should not think that nobody has passed this way. Big-horns turned the corner. People did --and still do--, too.