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Category: Dad's Dirt Roads: A Blog
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on Mon May 13, 2013
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by Mark Stephens
The best places to roll out the sleeping bag, cook a meal, cuddle with your sweetie and gaze at the stars are rarely easy to get to. Rightly so. I'm a believer in the yin and the yang, that there must be a price to be paid when you want the ultimate campsite. One of these high ranking sites, in my book, is the oddly named Murphy Hogback camp found nearly dead center in the backcountry of southern Utah's Canyonlands National Park.It doesn't have much. Just three lonesome sites that share a pit toilet and no running water. Sounds like fun, doesn't it . . . ?
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Category: Dad's Dirt Roads: A Blog
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on Fri May 10, 2013
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by Mark Stephens
Before my wife became my wife, she gave me a backcountry permit for the Grand Canyon. So we spent a spring break with four friends camped on the Colorado River at Phantom Ranch. It was March 2001. Other friends who didn't join us hooked us up with some bulk dehydrated meals that they had stashed away years earlier in preparation for the Y2K bug that they were certain would collapse modern civilization on January 1, 2000. "Well," they laughed, "we don't need them now. Why don't you take them?"
They were big bags, too. Like the size of a giant bag of Tostitos, but 3 or 4 pounds apiece so they could feed 10 souls in one go. Despite the funky apocalyptic juju, we took the meals and left for the Grand Canyon . . .
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Category: Dad's Dirt Roads: A Blog
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on Sun May 5, 2013
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by Mark Stephens
My oldest daughter, Chloe, is 5 years old and bonkers about My Little Pony. And I'm not. One night last fall I fed my newborn baby daughter a bottle around the time Chloe was supposed to be headed to bed. But this night the little girls were alone with me, my wife out for a couple of hours, so things were—how do you say it?—a little behind schedule. So Chloe asked me to turn on an episode of My Little Pony for her. Yeah, right, I thought. Instead, I fired up Netflix on the Apple TV and found National Geographic's Appalachian Trail. I know, I sound like such a damned stick in the mud, but just wait . . .
