Coal Wash Loop December 2000

This is one of my favorite trips. Mike Nelson and I left his car at the reststop on the north side of I-70, just to the east of the Eagle Canyon bridge, and climbed down into the South Fork of Coal Wash. We hiked downcanyon a ways, then camped. We got snowed on that night, but woke up to a pretty nice morning. However, when we started hiking again, fog rolled in, and the rest of the day and that night was one of the most bizarre hikes I have ever done. Everything was washed out, with the fog sometimes getting so thick that you could barely see 30 feet. Hiking down the canyon, you could not see the tops of the canyon walls, they simply disappeared into the fog. We went downcanyon to the intersection with the North Fork, then up the North Fork until we were at the ZCMI mine. I wandered around in the fog until I found the mine. The fog got really, really thick as night fell, but the moon was also full, so we wandered around in the dark in a sort of glowing mist. Very, very cool evening, kind of like being stuck in a black and white movie. I kept expecting to see someone in a trenchcoat standing under a streetlight smoking. Anyway, the next day was nice again, though cold, and we climbed out of the canyon on the North Fork Trail, which took us along the rim of the North Fork and out by Dutchman Arch, then we paralleled the highway back to the car.
When we got back to the car, Mike had a flat tire. Anyone who knew Mike knows how poorly he treated his car, so of course his spare tire was also flat. We put the spare on and he took the real tire and hitchhiked with it clear into Green River. A guy named Mr. Crazy (I"m not making any of this up!) gave him a ride in his truck. I sat their and froze my butt off for a couple of hours, until Mike returned with a nice older couple who had given him a ride. As I had been sitting there, I had been watching a storm slowly flow off the cliffs above Castle Dale and march across the Swell right towards us. We were just finishing putting the tire back on when the snow started falling. We headed east as fast as we could, but didn't make it far before we were driving in a blizzard. Finally we got behind a semi and somehow managed a white-knuckle ride into Salina, where it wasn't snowing, and then we cruised home.