Goblin Valley

Over the weekend I went to Goblin Valley for a scout camp out, and had a blast. Also I learned a lot: watch out for very large speed limit signs, how much speeding tickets cost, how many calories a Baconator is at Wendy’s, why scouts don’t normally stay in hotels, how small of a town Green River is, wear tall socks with your hiking boots, don’t climb higher than you can get down, and so so much more. So let me tell you about this campout. (I have pictures and a video at the bottom) So after school on Friday we left for the four-hour drive to Green River Utah where we would be staying the night in a hotel. We left around three and drove until Price where we stopped for dinner at Wendy’s. I was starving so I ordered the famous “Baconator”. It was great after I wiped off all the grease. No but I all seriousness it really was good. So on our way out the door to go to the car to finish our journey I went to the front desk ordering place to get a refill on my drink. While I was waiting I saw a Nutrition Facts list and guess how many calories my Baconator was. 830 Calories. I just about threw up. I figured that my whole meal with fries and a drink was 1500 calories. So leaving the restaurant a little queasy I got in the car and about an hour later we made another stop but this one was unexpected. As we entered into another small city called Wellington my scoutmaster didn’t see that the speed limit had changed the speed now to much much lower than we had been traveling. We noticed that right as a cop pulled behind us and turned on his lights. The rather large cop got out of his car and explained to us how there were four 4x10 foot speed limit signs telling us about the change and three more signs before that that said “Reduce Speed Ahead”. Somehow we missed all of those and got an $82 ticket. So after the short stop we continued on until we reached Green River where we would be staying the night in a hotel. We got to the hotel unpacked a little and went to go get ice cream. The problem was there was no ice cream. No restaurants, gas stations, stores or anything else we could find was open, and it was only 8:30 at night. So that should tell you how small of a town it is. We finally found this small little restaurant called Ben’s Café but it turns out they have no ice cream. So instead we ordered scones nachos and pie. We got back to the hotel about 9:30 played football in the pool and were ready for bed by midnight. All the leaders were in one room and me and three others in another. It was nice because I got a bed all to myself. So after the other three finished playing cards until 1:00 we finally went to bed. We got up the next morning ate breakfast packed up and went to the car. We drove another hour to Goblin Valley. We got out hiked around climbed up the giant rocks, explored caves and had lots of fun. We hiked back to the cars after a morning of fun to eat. Back a few months ago my Bishop bought a Ford Bronco because he likes to go 4-wheeling with his car. So since that’s what he drove to Goblin he decided that he wanted to take us all off-roading in the desert. So I got into my scoutmaster’s GMC Yukon and we went to follow the Bishop in his car. We thought the Yukon wouldn’t make it because it is lower to the ground than the Bronco but we decided we would follow as far as we could. After doing donuts in the sand we set off the 4x4 trail. We hit two intense bumps. One we were going about 60 mph on the dirt road and a small foot deep ditch snuck up on us so we couldn’t stop in time. Then the other we was the same situation but we stopped in time but still was going to fast and the back of the Yukon hit the ground and we all flew up into the air and hit our heads on the roof. After about 1-½ hours of speeding along dirt roads, climbing over rocks and skidding through sand along the trail the Bishop drove into a ditch. He was really stuck. So we got out a tow strap and hooked it to the Yukon and as we pushed and the car pulled we finally got him out. There we turn around there and drove back to the main highway. Then on the way home the weather went from sunny to cloudy to rain to harder rain, to snow, to more snow to blizzard then to slush then more rain all the way home. I am glad the snowplows were out to plow the canyon road or else it would have been really bad. So I eventually got home late Saturday night. As you can probably tell it really was a blast.