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There's a place close to town which is a wonderful spot for a walk. It's a couple of miles of a seriously eroded gulch in shale, clay and sandstone, sprinkled with the usual high-desert vegetation of sagebrush and piñon. It boasts a few spires, hoodoos, pinnacles, beehives, goblins, and similar formations; we joke that it's our low-rent version of southern Utah.
After discovering
this incongruous chunk of BLM
land, I swore I'd never write about it, since that's the
only way to protect the good places of our landscape. But
just a couple of weeks ago, two local writers issued a
guidebook to local hiking and biking routes, and there it
was: Castle Gardens, also known as Castle Gulch. So now I
feel released from my never mention it
oath.
Since Castle Gardens is BLM land, and the BLM barely has enough staff to do important stuff like leasing for natural-gas drilling, there isn't a lot of regulation at Castle Gulch. So we pedestrians can take our dogs for leash-free outings, while dirt bikes, ATVs, and mountain bikes sometimes tackle the terrain, too.
What keeps Castle Gulch tolerable is that several big boulders have been placed to block the entrance from SUVs and similar full-size four-wheel-drive vehicles. Nobody drives up there to camp, picnic or party, and thus there's not much trash.
But every now and again, some intrepid fool in a four-wheel-drive vehicle finds a way around the entrance boulders. My wife and I saw the tire tracks as we started our walk up Castle Gulch this Sunday morning with our dog. From what we could tell, there was only one set of tracks. So whoever was up there hadn't come down this way, and we wondered if there was an exit road up at the top that we hadn't known about.
As we walked, we saw smashed vegetation and churned ground, then the remnants of a broken side mirror, all new since our last visit a few days earlier. We wondered what kind of half-wit would try driving up this rocky, twisting creekbed that teemed with places to punch an oil pan, break an axle, or snare a differential.
The tracks left the creekbed to climb a steep clay
slope. Look up there.
Martha pointed. There is
some justice.
A white SUV -- likely a Jeep Cherokee, though I couldn't be sure -- perched precariously on the bare hillside. It had gone about a hundred yards up the soft clay slope to a saddle, then turned to drive the ridge. It didn't stay on the ridge; it had slid down our way a few feet, and it looked ready to roll over, and then over and over, down the hill. The occupants must have been about ten kinds of scared as they eased themselves out of the precarious SUV and then hoofed it down the hill and back to town.
I must confess that I have some experience in driving into stupid places and then extricating the vehicle, but I couldn't see any obvious way to get this one out. You might get a small truck with a winch to the saddle. but as soon as you started pulling on the stuck SUV, it could roll down the hill and take you with it.
This seemed like perfect justice. Nobody got hurt, but some motorhead was out a few thousand dollars for a now-useless marooned SUV, plus whatever it would cost to remove it whenever the BLM gets around to it -- perhaps with a helicopter.
Or maybe the BLM will just ignore it. We've named various formations in Castle Gulch. Some of our vernacular names are rather inappropriate for public consumption, but there are the Three Apostles, the Big Castle, Lizard Head and Camel Head. If the SUV stays there, we'll have another landmark: Motorhead.
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