Ben Cleggs - UEA

Sorry this is so long.

It was UEA this last weekend, which signifies the last chance for a family outing for the summer. So Thursday afternoon we loaded up the old Suburban and headed into the wild on an adventure, and were not disappointed.
Janet's great, great, great grandfather had blazed the Burr trail that cuts
across the bottom of Utah through in what is now the Escalante Grand Stair
Case National Monument. He had carved his initials in the rock, and while
we had taken the older kids to see this, we had not ever taken the little
ones. We stopped and had lunch with Megan who seemed a little relieved
that she was just a stop along the way and not in on the adventure. We
reached Torrey and stayed in a motel.

The next day we headed out on the Burr trail. I had forgotten my map from earlier, so we stopped at the little trading post to double check my memory which proved to be a bad choice. The kind, earthy lady running the place said she had been to the spot, and showed us on the map the trail head was located. She said if we had a four wheel drive we could drive down the
canyon a ways and then it was only a short 45 minute hike to the
hieroglyphs. The last time we had done it, the hike had taken us most of
the day. Thinking the road had been changed since we did this ten years
ago, we passed the trailhead and headed down the four wheel drive path.
Things started to look familiar, so we thought, and not wanting to drive the
whole way, we stopped after a few miles down the canyon and started to walk.
Three miles later when the whining had reached an all time high, I turned
around and ran back to get the Suburban we had left along the trail. I
caught up with the rest of them a mile and a half later and there were many
joyous shouts. We loaded up and headed down the trail expecting to come to
some place where we would have a short 45 minute hike. We came around the
corner and there to our surprise was the trail head that we had started from
the last time.

Rallying the troops we headed down the supposed 45 minute trail. 2 ½ hrs later we reached the inscription. The Sun was going down and the little
kids had moved beyond whining and were know starting to cry. They had
already hiked about 9 miles. We knew we had a three hour hike back. We
stopped and had a word of prayer and then Wyatt loaded up Brooklyn on his
back and I took Andie and we started our March out. As the setting sun
faded from the red rocks, the full moon shone down to light our way. It was
beautiful. We sang every primary song, cowboy song and hymn we knew as we
stumbled and walked our way out. Finally around 10:00 O'clock a shout was
raised as we sighted the Suburban. It was another two hour drive back to
the motel but the whimpers and sobs quickly faded to snores. It was one of
those rare instances when stupidity allowed us to see things and experience
positive things that we could not have engineered.