An appeal of our type of hiking: We make discoveries, and find mysteries

We have now taken 580 hikes in less than six years, a total of 3100 miles.

Why?  What keeps us energized for doing this?

The are obvious appeals to hiking.  One is the exercise factor.  We don't take monstrously long hikes any more, preferring more frequent, but shorter hikes.  Our hikes average 5 1/4 miles, and generally take us 3 hours.  We both believe that at our age unless we exercise daily that our quality of life will deteriorate quickly within a few years.

The second appeal is to experience the beauty of nature.  We experience it from seeing beautiful views, from smells, from seeing wildlife, from examining rocks, from walking on different types of surfaces.  That part is spiritual.

But another factor that is important to us about our hikes is due to the fact that we rarely, very rarely, go on established hiking trails.  Almost all of the time we are making up our own hikes.

And because of this type of hiking we make discoveries.  We discover interesting natural formations, like we recently did in Bears Ears when we came upon a ledge that was the size of a football field.  Or historical features, like the amazing old road that was carved into a mountain many years ago, with bodies of 2-3 cars that had gone off the edge below in a ravine.  We discover old mines, old homes, old rock structures.

In short, our hikes are frequently intellectually interesting---they make us curious about what we have seen, and keep our minds engaged trying to learn more about what we have seen.

This piece of hiking cannot be seen any more clearly than one we took this week in Valley of the Gods.

Our "goal" was to try to hike around the top of a very large series of canyons, staying at the top.  We had explored some of the washes within the canyon, but wanted to get as far around it as we could.  So, we did that.

And from the top of the canyon Vicky looked across to the other side and said "There's an old road there."

Here is what we saw:

It is a little difficult to see from the photo, so here is a better look.  It runs from the lower left to the upper right, in a straight line into the wash. 

And as one of the characters in the film Prometheus said, in nature there aren't straight lines.

It was clearly hand built.

Of course, we altered our hike to explore this unusual old hand-built road.  Here is Vicky walking down it. 

It was still in good shape, all things considered.  Our puzzles were:  Who built it, why, and when?

The best we could come up with concerning the why was that it was built so that cattle could descend into the wash to get water.  However, that had to have been many years ago, as there is now a fence across this "road" that would prevent cattle from doing that.

Is the road 40 years old?  80?  100?  We'll never know. 

Now, talk about winning the daily double, when we were about to descend the road Vicky (aka "Keen Eyes") looked across the canyon and said she saw something that looked like icicles.

We didn't think they could be icicles, but they did look unusual, so we had to go find out.

They were.  Icicles.

Now, icicles aren't really that rare in the world, but here?  The past two night have had sub freezing temperatures, but today during our hike the temperature was about 50.  And prior to that the weather has been warm, with nights about freezing and daytime temperatures of mid 60s.

How could this be?  How could these icicles have survived all of those warm temperatures?  How could there be this much freezing, over a long enough period of time, when we are approaching winter, not leaving it?

The area was protected from sun, we could tell that, and it was definitely cooler in this spot than in other areas of the wash, but still.  What is going on?

The weather is supposed to warm up in the next few days, so we think we'll come back to this spot on our final hike to see what has happened.

What a mystery.  We speculated a lot.  There is a lot of lime in the area (in fact, the main washes are called Lime Creek).  Would the lime drop the temperature of the water so there would be a higher freezing point?

It just makes no sense.  We've never seen anything like this.  We are at 4500 feet, not 7000 feet.  But these icicles had been there for a very long time.  They were two inches thick.

We have learned something.  We don't know what, but something.  If nothing else, we have learned that there is a lot we don't know, and a lot we'll never know.