What a weekend.

First, a little background. John and Paul Louthan are Moab, UT locals, born and raised. Since they’re such good guys, they decided to get a big group of friends together in ’06 for a Moab excursion.

It was such a success that they decided to make it an annual event. So when the next summer rolled around, preparations for the second annual Massive Moab Trip (MMT) began to take place. By this time I had met the gregarious, oh-so-charming Austin Baird, who extended an invitation. So Kristie and I joined the party and ended up having an absolute blast.

So this year, things got bigger, better and even more organized. The trip had official admins, campsites, excursions, maps, medical contacts, you name it.

Although the trip officially began on Thursday (with people heading down for 4-wheeling, mountain biking, climbing, etc), I could only afford to take one day off of work. So at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Kristie and I hit the road for the 4 hour trek down south. The weather forecast before we left predicted 99, 102 and 97 degree temperatures for the three days we’d be down there. Moab in the summer feels like a red sandstone oven…but it’s terrific it you want to get some sun.

We arrived in downtown Moab right after dark and spent some time walking around the local shops. From there we set out to begin searching for the group campsite for that evening. I had a map, but we couldn’t manage to find our group 10 miles into an obscure canyon where they were supposed to be. At one point, the dirt road got especially rough, and I ended up running our poor Ford Escort over a deceptively tall rock. After the initial jolt, my stomach sank when I heard the awful noise the car was emitting. I jumped out with a flashlight to survey the damage, and didn’t see any obvious fluid leaks. I suspected it was the exhaust, but didn’t know enough to be sure. I was just hoping it didn’t die this far out of town.

After climbing back into the car, we met up with a couple other cars that we likewise lost, and we formed a caravan that took us back to the town, where we eventually connected with the main body of the group that was arriving late from a night hike. A couple guys checked out the Ford and seemed confident that it wouldn’t cause much trouble besides the annoying noise and a slight ding in our gas mileage.

The first night was fun, meeting up with old friends and setting up camp. We brought our trusty two man tent and crashed at about 1:30, with alarms set for 6:45 to wake for the rafting trip the next morning.

Friday began early as we made our way to get outfitted with the World Wide River Expeditions rafting company for a trip down the Colorado River. If interested you can read their description of the trip on this page.

Around eighty of us made it down for rafting. If you can, imagine eighty 20-somethings on 5 giant rafts with an additional 4 inflatable kayaks. It was madness.

The Colorado was moving fast, and it was cold! I think everyone was pretty happy about that however because the sun was scorching. The trip was probably an 75-25 split between flatwater and rapids…and when we weren’t on rapids, we were generally capsizing nearby boats, playing king-of-the-raft or doing something else that kept us wet.

From the river we headed to the Moab city park, a rendezvous point of sorts, to nap in the shade of the trees and play ultimate frisbee.

Kristie and I packed all kinds of good food and fresh fruit to keep expenses down and make things easy. At 6 pm we all regrouped and jumped in cars to head up to Arches National Park to hike to the famous, breathtakingly beautiful Delicate Arch.

Even though Kristie and I hiked Delicate last year, we had yet to be there for sunset…which was gorgeous. Our group was everywhere, which made for fun pictures and fun times.

That night we spent another long stretch looking for our designated campsite, but finally arrived in time for bed. As we were setting up our tent, one kid overturned a rock a found a huge scorpion about 15 feet from where we were working. This was somewhat upsetting to Kristie, but we settled down anyways, hoping that scorpions would stay put where they were.

Saturday morning we awoke and met up with Theron, Fudge, Katie and Molly, who arrived late the prior evening. They joined us for a trip to the giant sand hill, one of my favorite spots around town.

As usual there was the normal horsing around and pictures to prove it.

At 1:00 we met at the park again and headed off to the Left Hand trail head to hike to the swimming hole and cliff jumping spot. Left Hand was another highlight of last year’s trip that we were eager to revisit. We spent the afternoon catching sun and launching ourselves into the blue oblivion into the water below.

Unfortunately, like last year, a member of our group sustained a major leg injury. Last year a guy dislocated and badly fractured his leg, and this year a girl jumped too far and broke both her tibia and fibula. If you don’t gauge it right, the water gets just too shallow to absorb the impact. Not fun.

We regrouped at the park by 6:00 pm for our much anticipated MMT barbeque, with Austin “Steak Night” Baird at the helm. Nothing short of a miracle, he managed prepare or coordinate the preparation of:

• 40 pounds of grilled, marinated steak
• 40 pounds of grilled, marinated chicken
• 50+ vegetable kabobs
• Gallons upon gallons of homemade mint-lime mojitos
• Loads of liquid nitrogen ice cream
• Coconut Bananas Foster
• All for 130+ people in under an hour and a half

It goes without saying that this weren’t no burgers n’ hot dogs affair…it was a barbecue oasis. Everyone ate until they were stuffed, and there was plenty extra to give to our river rafting guides and other locals that we’d invited (some of which had let us borrow gas grills for cooking).

The trip officially ended after the barbeque, and many left to go home. But, like last year, we stayed for the unofficial after party. After setting up camp for that night, we joined a bunch of friends to sneak into a hotel hot tub to relax for a few hours before heading off to bed.

Sunday morning we went to church and then took off to enjoy a little more of Arches National Park. We discovered two additional hikes that we had missed last year (The Windows and Sand Dune Arch) and had an absolute blast exploring and taking in the natural beauty of our surroundings.

Windows:

Sand Dune:

From Arches we hit the road back to Provo, exhausted, happy and completely in love with the great outdoors. Our busted Escort sputtered the entire way home, but held out like a champ.

MMT ’09, anyone?