School's Out for Summer...

So, school's over.  What now.  On Friday, our teacher check out day, I decided on the spur of the moment to go scout a route I'd come up with on bikely.com for a bike ride.  I found a road that went up a canyon from Herriman and over to Tooele.  The streetview on Google Maps showed what looked like a gentle ride up a flatish road, but didn't go all the way through.  I assumed it was because the road crosses a spur of the Camp Williams Military Reserve, and it was some kind of no-no to photograph.  So I drove it.

Bikely has a nifty elevation profile that you've seen on some of my ride maps.  I didn't bother checking it

since it looked so docile on Google Maps.  I failed to take into account that the Oquihrrs are some big freaking mountains.

Driving up it was amazing.  The road is about ten feet wide, and

 leaves the floor of the canyon to wind along the mountainside.  There are some really steep pitches with tons of hairpin curves.  It felt like driving in the Alps.  (That's a suspect statement since I've never left the continent.)  There was a lot of rock fall from the heavy rains we've been

 having, so even through the road was paved it didn't seem paved.  I definitely wouldn't want to try to ride on in on a road bike.  Also, with the curves and

 the steepness, there were a couple of close calls with other traffic.  It's really just one lane.  After one of them I had a huge adrenaline rush and wondered what I was doing there.  It was scary.

The other side of the pass isn't paved, and I was really getting scared.  I was praying that I was on the right road.  There was no sign, and there were several other roads that went elsewhere.  I just stayed with the widest one.  But after falling fast through some tight curves it levels out and becomes paved.

I drove out of the canyon and past Tooele on a country road that dropped me in Stansbury Park, just south of where you catch I-80.  I was looking to see if there was any way to get around having to ride on the freeway.  I've done it before on some of the big rides we took when I was a little kid, but now that I think of it it is kind of terrifying.  Anyway, there's no chance.  I-80 seems to be the only road that passes on the north side of the mountains.

As I was driving past I saw the exit to Saltaire and decided to go out and walk down to the water line.  I'd been to the water at the Great Salt Lake once when I was a kid and thought I'd regret it if I didn't stop for a moment.  So I did.  Walking down to the water was absolutely disgusting.  I was wearing flip-flops and my first step on the half mile long "beach" resulted in my foot sinking in really foul smelling quicksand.  This continued for a while, but eventually I made it to the water and washed my feet.  The thing was that the water smelled just as bad as the muck I'd walked through.  The lake was pretty though.  There was a rain storm that squalled over while I was there, and the water was blowing in toward me.  It wasn't like the tide you sometimes get at Bear Lake.  Rather, it looked almost like a river flowing very shallowly toward and away from me at the same time.

Anyway, on the way back my flip-flops got stuck in the muck and I had to walk back to the water to wash them off.  Then I walked back to the parkinglot barefoot.  I found a shower station at the building that I'd missed before, and washed off, but everything still smelled, and I wished I had soap.  Come to think of it I should sanitize my steering wheel and gearshift.  I used my hands to get some of the muck off.

I found that there was a really bizarre frontage road that runs from Saltaire to the Airport by driving along it.  At one point it is just a bunch of uneven unlined cement slabs.  Strangely there was a bunch of very slow moving semi-truck traffic on it.  I kept passing these weird little derelict buildings too, that were covered in graffiti.  At one point I saw a tag that one of my stranger students had put on her class binder during second term.  She'd written that it was some meaningful mark to her in one of her journals.  I wondered how she'd gotten all the way out here to make it on a chunk of cement by this road, and with whom she'd come.  I'd never heard any of the kids talk about this place.

Anyway, it was kind of a weird adventure that day.  More stuff happened, but I'm tired of writing and it wasn't as interesting as the rest.  Mostly it involved me driving around looking for houses that had for sale signs, but weren't listed.  Not much to say on that.  Then I got dinner and went home.  Oh, well.

Now I've got ten weeks stretching in front of me, and it's both far too short and far too long, and I don't know what I'm going to do.  Such is life.  My life anyway.