Welcome to Allred mountain.

After a wonderful morning at a grandson's baptism, Dave's son, Mike, wife, Susie and their kids, Genika, Daniella, Brenton (the baptism boy), and Kambria, loaded up their four wheelers and side by side, and took us up a wonderland called Waterholler.  Dave had talked frequently about an amazing piece of his father's land called Waterholler and he had promised to show it to me someday, so I guess this was the day.  We, being the old folks, were allowed to drive the side by side, as it was the easiest ride.  As we started up the winding, rocky trail my senses were assaulted by sights I could barely find words to describe.  I just kept thinking,  why didn't I bring my camera?

Bouncing along the mountain trail, a beautiful deer poked his head out of a grove of maple trees and then hopped and bounced along with us just outside the tree line before darting back inside the cover of the groves of trees.  We climbed higher and higher up the side of the mountain and came to pine springs where clear, cold water oozed from a pipe in the side of the mountain.  We filled our jugs and let the crystal liquid flow down our throats like sweet nectar.

From pine springs, we continued to climb up, and up the mountain.  We finally reached the top and peered over the edge of the summit.  Below us were the beautiful oak and maple trees cloaked in the colors of fall.  Green, gold, orange, and fiery red foliage flowed down the rolling mountains and into the many valleys below us.  Beautiful, green draped hills and groves of trees filled our view for thousands of acres as far as the eyes could see.  The air was so clean and crisp that when you breathed it in it tingled with effervescence inside your lungs.  Looking up, you feel so high you are just sure you can reach your arms up and scoop up handfuls of the blue of the sky.  All afternoon we drove the trails of this mountain.  Dave delightfully recalled stories from his childhood days in these groves of trees and beautiful, protected meadows.  I'm afraid had I been given the chance to spend my childhood here, I would have ridden my horse into the mountain the last day of school in the spring and not come back out until the day before school started in the fall, probably looking like the girl raised by wolves.

As we headed back down the mountain the moon was shining brilliantly above the Eastern rim.  Flat, layers of fluffy white clouds rested on top of the peaks.  The sun had just dropped below the Western peaks and the purple of dusk drifted down on the mountain like a leaf fluttering from the branches of a tall tree.  On the road ahead the caravan came to a stop and we turned off the engines of the atv's.  As we walked to the rim of the peak, legions of crickets were furiously chirping their night song.  Our little group walked silently through the clearing and watched several elk graze quietly on the face of the next mountain.  The night air grew cool as we bounced out down the rocky, dirt road.  I looked into the darkening night sky and took several deep breaths of the sweet, clean air and thought to myself.  When I die and hopefully go to Heaven, it will be this amazing place called Waterholler on Allred mountain in the ranges of San Pete county, Utah.

The Allreds, A Series of Unfortunate Events

"Do not go gentle into that good night

Old age should burn and rave at close of day

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light"

                   William Shakespeare

This is my motto for life.  I just turned 55, double nickels, as my sister said.  There was a time in my life when that would have sounded old, maybe when I was 20 and my body didn't ache and creak and I didn't need more sleep than a newborn baby.  Then, I thought of 55, and it seemed ancient.   Now, I realize that old is only in my head.  In spite of the fact that I creak when I get out of bed, and am falling asleep by 8 p.m., I am not old.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.  I will not go gentle into that night, but I intend to ride a wild stallion into the golden years and not stop until that horse throws me off.  And so, with that said, we headed off on what could only be described as "The Allreds, A Series of Unfortunate Events".   However, I don't see these as unfortunate events,   but instead, just part of the screaming, silly, giggling adventure I call life.  Each "unfortunate" event nothing more than another chance to test our problem solving skills and over come the event.

Labor day.  Summer's one last hurrah, the last big weekend to run off to the wilderness and get your fill of fresh air, big open spaces, and dirt....lots of dirt.  We love to exist like pioneers.  No indoor plumbing, running water or heat.  Living in a big tent, cooking on a two burner propane camp stove and eating from the same pans we cook in, is exhilarating and makes life seem so large.  The whole process of planning, packing and loading the truck for this four day period of our lives is more complicated than the pilgrims sailing for the colonies.  Add to that the fact that we had to travel over two hours each way to Salt Lake for an essential appointment the morning before we left, and the task seems impossible.  But, in the spirit of determination (or stubbornness,  you choose your adjective),  I had everything pretty much ready to go and loaded in our old beast, a 1985 Ford F250 3/4 ton pickup I like to call General Patton.  At precisely 10:15 a.m. I picked Dave up in the parking lot of the Chamber of Commerce where he was attending a community development meeting and we were off to Salt Lake City.   Obstacle number one, overcome. 

We have come to the conclusion, since we seem to be driving so much, that even this time should not be wasted.  This is the time to listen to scriptures and have lively debates about the tower of Babel, the ferocity of the Jaradite people,  and what advanced skills may have been possessed by the Nephite people.  When we have exhausted ourselves with those topics, then we turn to books.  I read while he drives.  We have finished one book and started on another.  Taking in the wondrous beauty of the forests and mountains we pass through to reach our destination is always included in our discussions.  Before we know it, we have arrived.  Appointment,  lunch, and since we are in the big city, some minor shopping, and we are on our way back to Green River.  Obstacle #2, overcome with finesse.

Now, it's 6:30 p.m.  We have finished loading General Patton with the final equipment,  coolers, food, and anything else we must have to live "simply" in the Wyoming wilderness.  Dave queries, "should we wait and leave early in the morning so we aren't setting up camp in the dark?"  I just stare at him like he's speaking a foreign language.  General Patton is stuffed to the gills.  He looks like the Beverly Hillbillies moving out.  Ice is packed in coolers.  Adrenaline is flowing, is he crazy?  Of course I don't want to wait until morning.  Let's go!  Obstacle #3....check.

Now, it really gets interesting.  General Patton has a little boo boo.  His starter doesn't work so good.  Since he is a standard transmission,  as long as we park on a hill we can always pop start him, so the starter thing has never been a real issue......until we got to Rock Springs to buy gas.  Here comes obstacles #4 & 5.  Pull up to the pump, no hill,  but the starter has been working okay, so off went the ignition.  Card in the pump, error message, pay inside.  Dave walks inside, cashier explains there's something wrong with the card reader, leave your ID and he'll turn on the pump.  Okay, back to the pump.  Hose in the tank, squeeze the handle, get 24 cents of gas, pump stops.  Long conversation with cashier, who finally suggests moving to a different pump.  Turn key in ignition, starter grinds, sputters, and reluctantly turns the engine over.  At this point, with time wasting away, night coming on, I'm watching Dave and looking for signs of the steam of impatience and frustration to start oozing from his ears.  But, nope, he's as cool as a sliced cucumber on a summer salad.  Pump in tank, squeeze handle, 3 cents of gas, pump stops.  Conversation with cashier, several turns on the now grumbling and complaining starter, move to last set of pumps, pump in tank, squeeze handle....rinse and repeat.  Cashier finally concedes the pumps are broken and we will have to go across the street.  I'm watching Dave closely now.  Not even a flush in his cheeks or a grumble under his breath.  The biggest problem.....General Patton's starter has decided to throw a temper tantrum and stubbornly will not turn over, and we are not on a hill.  I looked at Dave, he looked at me, we looked at the attendant, the attendant peered back fearfully and with a quiver in his voice inquired,  "should I help you push?"  I guess we both gave him the , "ya think?" look because he quickly put his shoulder to the wheel and he and I managed to push General Patton fast enough, in reverse, for Dave to pop the clutch and start the engine.  At this point, a discussion ensues.  The engine is running, should we go back, get a starter tomorrow and install it, and try this again, or do we forge ahead and defy the odds of another unfortunate event.  Me:  "Can we park on a hill where we are going?"  Dave: "yes".  Me:  "are we going to need to shut General Patton off again before we get there?"  Dave:  "no."  Me:  "are you nervous?"  Dave (with complete calm): "nope."  Me:  "let's go."  Across the street we pump our gas, with the engine running, in spite of the dirty looks from other gas pump patrons, and with the sun well below the western horizon and miles left to go before we could sleep, we were on our way.  Obstacles 4 & 5, slam dunked.

You have to ask yourself, how many of you would have the intestinal fortitude to continue on at this point?  Well, I guess we both have guts, because we forged ahead with excitement.  Now, our destination of choice was not well known.  In fact, the last time we were here, we had been looking for this particular gold claim and drove around the Wyoming wilderness for hours trying to locate it by gps and maps, thinking we didn't find it, only to discover later that we had actually been on the claim.  So, with this information in our arsenal and our memory (old and short as they were) of visual landmarks we had seen.....in the daylight......and Dave's much researched and marked out gps trails, we bravely turned off the main road and began our venture into the wilds of giant sagebrush, muddy, deep rutted trails, and the deep purple of night.

Driving along, Dave glancing frequently at the glowing screen of his I phone, we come to a cattle guard and he pauses.  General Patton rumbles angrily in the cold night air.  Along with his ailing starter, he also suffers from an exhaust leak that causes his engine to spew load noises that often makes conversation inside his cab difficult at best.  After much scrutiny of our location, Dave decides of the many cattle guarded turn offs, this is the correct one and we bump and bounce off the more established dirt road onto the road less traveled.  Bouncing along, General Patton rumbling in the dark, we come to a fork in the trail.  Dave glances to his right and questions me, "is there a stone marker over there?"  I think to myself, "are you serious?  It's as black as tar out there.  I couldn't see the Washington Monument if it was there, let alone a stone marker."   But what I say out loud is, "I don't know."  I was pretty sure Dave could tell is was dark outside and I didn't need to state the obvious.  Using my valuable observation of  "I don't know",  he took the road to the right, a road we would later learn was the wrong way,  or actually, the long way.  Soon the moon has dropped below the horizon, the night grows later, and General Patton is roaring monotonously along.  Dave hands me the I phone with it's glowing screen and asks if we're going the right way.  I look at the screen and try desperately to decipher the dots, lines and terrain before me.  It's hopeless, I have no idea, but fearing that Dave will discover my complete incompetence as a navigator I confidently reply, "sure looks like it to me."   It wasn't a total lie, I didn't know which was the right way, so it did look right to me.  More driving, more pausing so Dave could examine his maps, more time passing, when finally, as we crested yet another hill, we both recognized the rocky draw ahead of us and realized we had at last reached our destination.   It was 2 a.m. and through perseverance and an undaunted sense of adventure, yet another obstacle had been defeated.  We parked General Patton facing downhill and finally turned off his engine to rest.  Quickly we unloaded our supplies, erected our luxury canvas tent, set up our cozy queen size airbed and draped it with warm bedding.  Since our lovely antique wood cook stove Dave's parents gave us was not quite ready for this trip, we set up our two burner cook stove inside the tent in it's place, added our big buddy heater and lit up our glowing coleman lanterns.  The sound of a burning coleman lantern is one of my favorite sounds.  It brings on waves of nostalgia and opens the floodgate of memories to my childhood and camping in our big green canvas tent,  Dad tucking us in to the sound of the coleman lantern.  Watching the dark flood the tent as the glowing lantern moved outside.  Outside my little sanctuary, Dave called for me to come look at the stars.  It was 3 a.m.  The sky was inky black and washed by clusters of glittering lights in the sky.  The milky way and the big dipper were enormous overhead.  It was truly magnificent,  but the cold night breeze drove me back inside and Frank, the gold sniffing wiener dog, under the queen sized cot.  Dave had more resistance to the cold than me, but by 3:30 a.m. we were snuggled up, cozy and warm, and drifting off to sleep at the end of a long and very eventful day.

 We woke up early in the morning, well, I guess we went to bed early in the morning,  so I should say we woke up later, to Frank shivering violently under the cot.  The poor little guy is not equipped for cold weather out door sleeping.  Dave took great pity on him and invited him inside our blankets.  This simple act made Frank Dave's best friend for life.  Later, when the sun had had time to warm the air, we finally got up and while Dave set up his equipment,  I practiced my gourmet outdoor cooking skills and made breakfast.    The new day was astonishingly beautiful.  Wide open spaces where green sage brush rises up to meet deep blue skies devoid of clouds.  The jack rabbits hopped wildly back and forth like an old video game.  On one horizon there is a herd of antelope while black cows moo softly across the plain.  Frank is wandering about finding passable trails for his short little legs through the sagebrush that towered over his head.  Breakfast is cleaned up, Dave is sampling the dirt, I'm going to take a nap, just a short one to make up for lost sleep from the night before.

Two hours later.....what a great nap.  The weather is chilly.  In my sleep I dreamed a solution to how to bake biscuits without an oven.   I quickly went to work and made my biscuits and designed my stove top oven from aluminum foil and stood back with pride at my personal ingenuity.   In a matter of minutes I had delicious hot biscuits with fresh peach jam.  We decided to do a little exploring, so Dave went to General Patton and cranked the wounded started.  After some grinding and complaining, the engine roared to life.  He walked to the tent to tell me he was ready to go, when I suddenly heard him shout, "oh, shoot" (or some variation of that expletive) and stuck my head out just in time to see him running after General Patton as he roared full speed and driver less down the road and into the side of the opposite mountain. Did I forget to mention his parking brake is inoperable as well?  Two things I am grateful for.  1:  General Patton is a beast  and 2:  The side of the mountain was soft.  The only casualty of the general's little jaunt was the tailgate carrying rack.  It suffered a wrenching boo boo that left it bent and twisted.  Dave looked at me and stated, "tomorrow we are going to Lander and getting a new starter.  I smiled and nodded in agreement.

   The sun went down, the night got cold.  Dave devised better sleeping arrangements for Frank with  a camp chair and a coat.  Frank burrowed himself into his new bed, we snuggled under our blankets and drifted off into a peaceful slumber.

With the rising sun and breakfast cooked, eaten, and cleaned up, he carefully coaxed the General's starter to life and without exiting the vehicle, informed me he was ready to go, and we headed out of the wilderness and into Lander.  On the trip out, the Wyoming wildlife was in fine form.  The antelope played, the jack rabbits hopped, sage grouse flew and we watched a beautiful family of wild horses lope across the hills.  I pulled out the camera and took several pictures of the magnificent stallion, his mare, and their foal.  Now, in the spirit of weirdness that seems to accompany us wherever we go, as I was viewing the pictures I noticed a strange object in one frame that I hadn't seen when I was taking the picture.  I expanded and enlarged the anomaly and after much scrutiny, I determined that it looked like a flying saucer.  Now, whether you believe in flying saucers or not, it was certainly something and I'll leave it to the reader to decide for themselves.  As for me, it was not something you would normally see in the sky, flying with the horses, deep in the Wyoming back country.   Other than the siting of an extraterrestrial object, the trip to Lander was uneventful.   We arrived at OReilly auto parts, purchased a new starter and a bolt to replace the one missing on the engine exhaust, and with ease that left me in awe, Dave quickly replaced, both and the general purred to life with the smoothness of soft butter and was minus his angry roar now that the exhaust leak was repaired.  He sounded happy again.  A trip to Ace hardware for repair parts for the sluice (since we were in town), then to the watering station to fill our 55 gallon water drum (since we were in town), to the grocery store for chicken gizzards and a steak (since we were in town), and we were headed back to the wilderness. 

About ten minutes on the road and I started to feel a familiar, and uncomfortable pain in my lower back right side.  It quickly increased in severity and radiated around to the front.  About now, my sister Sally, is reading this and nodding her head and saying, "oh no!  Not that!"  Yup, it didn't take long before I knew I was doing battle with a gallstone.  I twisted to the right and my face tightened into an uncomfortable frown.  Dave was talking animatedly next to me as I then twisted to the left trying, but knowing it was impossible,  to find relief from the increasing pain.  After about the third uncomfortable twist Dave inquired if I was ok, to which I could only reply, "no".   He looked at me, writhing and twisting, and deep worry creased his eyebrows and he asked what he could do.  Unfortunately,  there is nothing he or anyone can do.  I just have to endure it until the little beast makes it way through the tube inside me and passes.   My writhing and groaning increased, as did his concern.  "Should I go back to the hospital? "

"No, there's nothing they can do and they will charge us thousands for doing it." and with that, the pain came in a wave so severe, my face tightened into an ugly grimace, tears flowed without control from my eyes, and I groaned loudly without constraint.  With that, Dave couldn't take it any more and pulled to the side of the road.  "There has to be something I can do."  Between clenched teeth I told him that on occasion when this has happened before, and it has happened several times before, that thumping on the right side of my back has brought some relief.  So, he immediately started to pound on my right side back.  To his dismay, I burst into uncontrollable laughter.  As he stared in concerned disbelief,  I explained that first, I have a bad habit of laughing wildly when I'm in pain, and second,  "thumping" my back is very different than punching me in the kidneys like a world class prize fighter.  I understood he was afraid and disturbed by my discomfort,  but maybe he could try to stay calm and gently thump on my back.  I promised if he would relax, I would stop laughing like a maniac.  What a sight we must have been there on the side of the highway.   After about ten minutes the pain stopped coming in torrential waves and became bearable,  I'm sure that last horrible stab was probably the stone passing and now I would just have to deal with the dull, but bearable ache of recovery.  I assured Dave I would be fine and we headed back to camp.

By the time we arrived back "home", and with the help of a prescription pain killer, I was feeling much better.  Dave cooked up our little steak and  added some creamed corn and mashed potatoes,  and I enjoyed a delicious dinner before being gently tucked into our cozy bed.  And with that, we closed our eyes on yet another day filled with events.

 

Next day, the morning ensued nicely without any events of an unusual nature.  As the day went on, we decided to do some more exploring.  We hopped in the general, put Frank, the gold sniffing wiener dog, in the back seat and headed out through the unexplored wilderness.  After awhile, Frank started standing up and peering over the seat and whining.  Dave asked if he needed to go to the bathroom.  I thought he was just being whiny. (Frank, not Dave. )  Dave decided to stop and let him stretch his tiny, little legs.  I put some water in his bowl and he sniffed it and ran off.  Guess he wasn't thirsty.  I walked back to the truck, Dave looked around a bit, and then we were off again.  We drove about five miles down the road, passed our camp, and up a hill where we drove around in the sagebrush field for awhile.  It was a rough and bumpy ride, so when David stopped,  I inquired of Frank, "how ya doing,  buddy?"  Not even a whimper from the back seat.  I turned around and looked over the seat.  No Frank.  About that time Dave opened the truck door.  "Is Frank with you?"  I queried.  "No."  was his reply.  We looked at each other, both of us with the same look of awful realization,  we had left Frank behind.  The sun was starting to set as we quickly backtracked the way we had come.  I worriedly thought to myself, surely he would have chased us and we went past our camp so he would stay there.  As we approached our camp, there was no sign of Frank.  As we drove back down the road I looked frantically in the tall brush to the sides.  No sign of Frank.  It was getting darker and he is black.   What if he ran off through the brush?  What if a wild animal got him?  What if it got too dark to look for him?  With worry and fear we drove silently down the road.  Dave's voice broke through my cloud of concern,  "there was a puddle in the road where we stopped.  We should be able to find where we left him."  I nodded my head in silent,  concerned agreement.

As we crested the next hill, we looked ahead and saw the large puddle in the road where we had stopped.  There, like a statue next to the puddle, was Frank.  He was patiently waiting with a look in his sad little eyes that said, "You left me, but I knew you would come back for me if I waited here."   We scooped up our little baby and he buried his head in my lap.  With that, we returned to camp in relief and with dinner filling our stomachs, retired for our last night in the wild outdoors. (At this rate, probably a good thing.)

Another restful night, Dave gold panned himself into exhaustion, I broke camp, we loaded up and amazingly, we returned home without further incidence.

All unfortunate events aside, it was a fabulous time.  Life is adventure,  and we certainly intend to get our share of the ride.  If given a choice between the carousel and the roller coaster, I'll take the roller coaster every time.  And so, the series of unfortunate events is ended.......until next time.