Day 3: Spring Creek Hut to Columbine Hut
On this day we climbed 1,800 feet and descended 1,800 feet. Metaphysically, this was a thorny issue for me
and I must have said "why" to myself scores of times - especially on the uphills. We followed Divide Road for thirty five miles through mainly pine forest. There was a long, steady climb all morning on gravel, which made the going quite hard even though the weather was cooler. We had lunch at the top having passed several groups of boy scouts who were doing the same trip as us but with a support vehicle and tents. It was splendid at forty five years old to overtake the struggling teenagers!
After lunch we had a fifteen-mile steady descent with a very strong headwind which lead to Tabeguache overlook. Here we all posed for photos to capture the magnificent backdrop of mountain scenery.
We had a birds' eye view of La Sal mountain range which still looked alarmingly far off: we were going to have to cross La Sal mountains in order to swoop back down into Moab on our last day. A little further on, we came across a dilapidated four-wheel drive vehicle newly stuck, engine running, over the edge of a small precipice. The front wheels were spinning and it took the muscle power of the intrepid mountain bikers to push the car back up onto the road. The equally dilapidated owners were very grateful and then sped off, wheels spinning in the gravel, dust clouds in their wake. I'm not surprised they skidded off the road. Still, it brightened up a somewhat uneventful ride for us and we were less than a mile from our destination.
Columbine Hut was in the same vein as our previous two homes but there were fewer windows and the ubiquitous metal food cabinets were planted in the middle of the hut,
which made communication and movement a little awkward. The focal point of the evening was yet again the meal, a delicious salmon risotto with tinned asparagus in hollandaise sauce prepared by our chefs who by now had established that they preferred cooking to clearing up. This suited the less imaginative cooks amongst us very well. I'm fine with washing up even if you are limited to a few pints of water and a metal bowl. Columbine Hut was probably our least favorite - pokey and dark with, as I perceived it, an evil atmosphere - perhaps someone was murdered there, I fancied as I couldn't get to sleep that night and felt claustrophobic in the dark, dark room.
