Tuesday, June 10, 2008

all hikes should end at a bar


while at torrey, three of us decided to go on a long hike. it was a hike i remember doing with dags and john years ago. both sofe and coley tried to convince me to go on a shorter one, put i was persistent. i remember the narrow red rock that surrounded the most of the walk, the waterfalls, walking in the water on the shiny, poky rocks...

the first 5 hours of the hike we were doing fine, we had enough water, none of us were too tiered yet. in fact we found a skeleton of an elk. the whole thing was still there, it was pretty cool. we saw cougar prints and beautiful flowers. as another hour or so passed and we couldn't see the end of the hike (visitor center), we began to panic a little. it was mostly sofe. she made us get off the hiking trail and we started to head up toward the top of the mountain, very tall mountain, so we could see over and see a road perhaps... after another long hour or so, we found a road that was a dirt road but there were some car tracks on it. as we followed the road in the direction that seemed to make most sense at the moment, but for no particular reason, we walked and walked and walked and ended up at the entrance... to the patio, the only local bar in torrey. not only we didn't anticipate that at all, we thought we were hiking totally different direction. when we walked into the bar, we must have looked pretty bad, because when we asked the bartender if someone could give us a ride to our car, which was back in the park, he said, absolutely no problem but sit and have some water and beer first. which we did. we had one and two and three, happily. we stayed long enough to make friends, i think there was tim who likes to play music, lorain who collects rocks and rollerblades, mr.x who wore his shirt open really low and kept asking us if needed a ride, kile from loa who was really proud of it and said small towns in utah are like mafia families, it is all about which family one comes from, and there was doug who i knew from long ago and who bought us many beers.

although lost for a while, this hike had the best outcome and the best destination ever.