Following the rabbit

As luck would have it, I knew a place to spend the week before making the leap over the Rocky Mountains. Rabbit Valley BLM is a large area of land straddling the Utah and Colorado state line. I have over-nighted here a few times in the past, but this time it required more of a woman’s touch to where exactly we would camp. We unhitched the trailer and took the truck deep down the rabbit’s hole, scouting each and every dirt road to find our perfect spot in Rabbit Valley.

Kerri would take lead on the decision making process. I tend to take the easiest place while she tends to take the most scenic place in the known universe – case in point, our spot on the cliff of the Virgin River. So we find a spot and Kerri says, “this is our home” and I do not argue [much, often]. We pull the trailer down a long, rutted, winding dirt road and come to a perfect solo an seclude spot right on the edge of McDonald Creek Cultural Area.

We spent the week sharing the land, and the rock walls, with the long-since-past Fremont Indians who I ran into a few years back  at Fremont Indian State Park in Utah. If weather were more cooperative we might have taken the BLM challenge to “simply explore the area” and find some of the cliff dwellings and artwork found among the rock walls. Multiple drizzly days kept us inside, with just a few excursions right outside the trailer to keep the dogs, and my inner-explorer, happy.

At one point Moose did take off down a rabbit-chasing-hole. It took nearly an hour to find him, barking an hauling ass chasing more rabbits well over a half-mile out in the trees. Moose does come back to voice and whistle, once he has tired himself out, but it still required me to climb the hillside behind camp so my voice could reach out too him. He slept well after that.