After hiking Negro Bill's canyon, we were going to hang and then hike Delicate Arch and get there to watch the sun set, which as I understand is an amazing view. Well apparently the national park doesn't allow dogs on any of the hiking trails (and seeing as we had three) and it being overcast that evening we didn't go hiking in the Arches National Park. We instead found a place to car camp at the second Big Bend "recreation area" headed out of Moab. When we got up the next morning we hit the Pancake Haus in Moab for breakfast and then headed to Castle Valley. Which from the roadside information made it sound like there would be a ghost town and many neato hikes. Well I've come to find that no matter how many maps one buys (by the way if anyone needs a map for the MOAB, Blanding, and Monticello area check with me as I have a bizillion) unless they mark the trailheads the map does no good. Renae and I drove past Castle Valley which is apparently a small community of live people not ghosts and saw a road where several guys with trucks (imagine that) were parked. We flipped a U and parked there too. Come to find out it is the trailhead to Castleton Tower and the guy that runs the property (private land) from Utah Open Lands was there. He told us sure take the dogs but I would like you to stay on trail as many people go around the 5 foot scramble because the dogs can't make it up. Again guy said "A" 5 foot scramble. No problem we said so we put on our day packs and headed up the trail. Well we hit the first 5 foot scramble within a matter of minutes, not to much problem with that. All the dogs made it up with little to no difficulty. At this point we learned Bandit is a rock hound, he very quickly makes it up these rocks. The second 5 foot rock scramble proved only slightly more difficult than the first. After some negotiating all three dogs made it up the rock. However the third 5 foot rock scramble proved more difficult even for humans. See picture of dog claw marks (technical note, just because I wanted to put a picture right here in the text doesn't mean it goes there, see bottom picture above for claw marks). Anywho Bandit was the only one that made it up this with no real difficulty. The forth and less technical 5.9 route (just kidding) all made it up with little difficulty (it would be coming back down that would prove interesting). After finishing with our rock scramble we saw the Castleton Tower which was a monolith of a rock jutting up from bookcliff like formations (see picture of monolith and Bandit ((it is still several miles off in the distant but it looks like bandit is near it)). There are more flowers here than I have ever seen in a desert of course this desert is at 5,000 feet above sea level. The blue bells are very pretty as are all the flowers in bloom here. Renae and I deciding we didn't want to continue hiking upwards decided to follow a jeep trail along the canyon bottom for a while. There was no water here so we only hiked along for about 30-45 minutes. The next picture is of me on a boulder I climbed with bandit. So we headed back to the 5 foot scramble to get back to the car. Second thing learned is that if you throw Zeus down the rock (ok maybe a gentle push) he gets down a lot faster than if he trys to manly find his way down. This is what happened on the second down scramble because the first took 15 min for him to decide the way we came down was indeed the best way. This also continued on the third down scramble because in trying to COAX Zeus down I pulled his collar off his head so he paced back and forth looking for the best way down for 15 more minutes, to much disgust from Renae and yes she does speak good French. We reached the car after about 2 miles of hiking and decided to stop at the Red Cliffs Lodge to see how much their horseback riding cost. After that (no, no horseback riding) he stopped at Onion Creek. For those of you that hate off road vehicles, motorcycles, ATV's, and little golf cart looking things with big tires you will not like this trail or area. Renae and I decided to drive up the road a bit "just to see" says Renae. Well she splashed 2 motorcycle riders and a ATV rider in the creek crossing. Which by the way we did 24 times in the round trip "just to see". Apparently the creek crosses the trail/road 27 times to it's terminal point. This road was littered with campers and tents, which really suprised me given the traffic on the road and the creek crossings. It had really cool rock formations and the dogs were happy to stop and play in the water. After heading out of this area we stopped one more time and then back to Fruita for Munchies and lunch (for those of you who don't know Munchies is a hamburger joint in Fruita).
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