A Few Days in Vernal

This past weekend, Richelle and I hopped in our Toyota time-machine, set the dial for the Cretaceous Period, and traveled to Utah's "Dinosaur Land" (a.k.a. Vernal Utah for the non-paleontologists out there) . . . in other words, Vernal is Tyler's hometown, and we followed him home for spring break like a couple of lost Apatosauri.

It's not like we haven't been there before - last summer we spent a couple of days there camping, rock-crawling and spelunking (which turned out to be quite the Indiana Jones-esque experience . . . you'll have to ask us about it sometime) in the Ashley National Forest not far outside of Vernal, and a day with the MacKay's deer hunting there this last winter (a venture which produced nothing . . . but then again, when has hunting in a blizzard ever been very fruitful?).

So, I took last Thursday and Friday off of work, and Richelle and I drove the 2 hrs and 45 mins to Vernal . . . actually, I should probably say that I drove, while Richelle slept. I always seem to get the short end of that stick.

Salt Lake to Vernal

We didn't have much of a plan, really - it was kind of like, "Hey, let's go to Vernal and do whatever we want," which is pretty much what we did Thursday. We made it to Vernal around 5:30pm, and then proceeded to spend the remainder of the day doing little, if anything.

Friday, we headed East of town to go looking for deer sheds. Tyler followed the road till it was too muddy/snowy to proceed, after which we headed cross-country for quite awhile. Eventually we came upon a fairly large group of deer (about 30-50), and we figured it was as good a place as any to get out of the jeep and start looking for sheds. Overall, it turned out to be pretty successful:

Tyler, Justin and Richelle in search of deer sheds

Here's Richelle holding the first find of the day

The view from a ridge - looking South towards the Dinosaur National Park

A deer shed we found, just waiting to be picked up

The day's haul

Saturday we headed back out into the wild, but didn't make it very far before Jason, Tyler's friend, got stuck in the snow. That necessitated a change in plans, so instead of a day bonding with nature, we headed to the gun range to bond with metal and gunpowder instead:

Jason's Rubicon stuck in the snow - Tyler's pulling him out

Tyler taking aim with Jason's M&P 15t at the Buckskin Recreation shooting range

However, it turned out that we had limited ammo on hand, so we didn't end up doing much shooting, which was a shame . . . I'd forgotten my ammo-box back at the house, so we ended up calling it quits after only 30 minutes. If the snow hadn't been so think, we probably would have headed back out into the woods, but Mother Nature wasn't exactly cooperating.


We did cap off the night with an all-meat dinner. Tyler had a ton of meat in the freezer from several deer and elk, and we decided we'd try to put a dent in the supply. We grilled up a pretty sizable pile of venison, and did our best to devour it. Overall, I was pretty satisfied with the meal. I doesn't get much better than that.

There really isn't much else to report. We headed to church on Sunday, which unfortunately started at 9:30am. We came back, packed, had a nice Sunday lunch, and headed back to Bountiful. It wasn't the most exciting trip Richelle and I had been on, but it was just what we needed . . . low key is often just what we're looking for.