On Safari in Four Corners

I have made it home after a wild weekend in Salt Lake City for CONduit. More about the convention later, I want to talk about the drive.

The drive from Rio Rancho to South Jordan (where my mother lives) is somewhere around 600 miles, and about 10 hours. I always try to leave early so that most of the drive will be in daylight, but that doesn't happen as often as I would like.

We finally got out of town by 11:00 am, and we were on the way. This trip was unusual because Kevin wasn't driving. He didn't get time off work for this trip because we'd spent it in March for World Horror Con.

Everything was going well, I was feeling good, my assistant, Jamie, was with me, as was my son, Morgan. About 20 minutes out of Cuba, New Mexico, I noticed some movement by the fence on the left side of the road. It was a bear. He was probably a yearling, about 100 to 150 pounds, and he was a blonde. We usually have black bears in this part of the country, and this is the time of year we see them most because they wake up hungry. But I didn't expect to see a Grizzly-colored bear. We looked each other in the eye, and he took off running up the hill, I assumed up to where his mother was out of sight.

This was not the only wildlife sighting. Some hours later, north of Moab, Utah, and almost to Crescent Junction where I got to drive on the freeway for 20 minutes, there was the inevitable road construction. The contractor was almost done re-surfacing the road. It's a two-lane, with about as much traffic as anywhere in the state of Utah.

The contractor had painted a double yellow line on the unfinished blacktop, to try and mitigate accidents. Cars were going 70 miles an hour, almost bumper to bumper, both directions. I was paying close attention to the road and my fellow risk-takers.

Suddenly, it looked to me like the center yellow line stood up, and I realized that there was a prairie dog taking refuge in the middle of the road. I could see a hawk and two large ravens circling the highway, and realized that they were looking for lunch. Unfortunately, the prairie dog took exception to their ideas, and was using the cars to keep the predators away from himself.

We also spotted some pronghorn antelopes, and some elk. I loved seeing the wild things, and Jamie was a little frustrated because she could see them, just not get them recorded on her camera.

Fun trip, glad I got to sleep in and take two naps today. I don't think I'm getting too old for this, but I do have to leave myself time to recuperate afterwards.