It could have been worse. When we first decided to do the trip, I thought we'd camp at Rock Springs Bench. But with snow in the forecast, Dr. Kelly pulled the trigger on a couple of cabins at the Cannonville KOA. It was a good call. The biting north wind blew all weekend and my stove was so coated with ice this morning that I couldn't get it started. If we'd been out on the Monument with three kids and a wind chill in the teens, it would have been a true suffer-fest.As it was, we were relatively well rested and nourished for a tour of all the popular Cannonville sites. (Actually, we skipped Kodachrome, which I will leave to Kelly and Martin to accomplish on their own.) We started with Bull Valley Gorge, which I had not properly scouted, and soon found that it was too difficult for the kids (and probably for me, too). Martin made it to the bottom, but wisely decided to turn aound at the first bad waterfall. Instead, we went back to Willis Creek and enjoyed about a mile and a half of splashing while the women ran down to Sheep Creek. After an afternoon nap, we all piled in for a trip to the ghost cabin in Pardner Canyon. There we encountered a bit of a rat attack, but made it back to the KOA in time to welcome forty Frenchmen.
After a cosy night while the wind and sleet battered the cabins, we huddled over the rime covered stoves trying to coax enough hot water out of them for a taste of coffee. Kelly commented that, "You know it's cold when you set something down that's been in your cooler and it melts the ice on the picnic table." We eventually rallied for the trip down to Grosvenor Arch. It seems like Kane County hasn't graded that road for about a decade and it was as rough as I remember it. After a good time of hiking, climbing, and playing, we turned south towards Big Water, while Kelly, Martin, Quentin, and Landon headed back to Salt Lake. We went only as far as the trailhead for the Cottonwood Wash narrows and did a short hike down and back. The bitter wind had limited the crowd of tourists to about 30, but I can imagine that the line-up on a nice June day is about 10 times that number. I thought about going down to Big Water, and then home through Kanab and Glendale, but decided not to spend that much time on the highway. We went back to Cannonville and made it home before dinner.
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