Grand Staircase Bike Tour

As we looked at the opportunities for a fall bike tour, the desert loomed large for us this year.    After protracted and challenging traveling in Peru we were planning for some good adventure that was logistically easy, there are always opportunities for adventure in southern Utah.  When we told someone we were going they exclaimed "But I thought you had done that before!", and while yes, we have, there are many, many opportunities down there to explore the labyrinth of dirt roads that connect between each other and paved roads, through incredible, remote, and beautiful terrain.  And while we rarely drive anywhere to "go hiking", doing a bike tour through areas with amazing hikes seems to be very natural.  So off to the Escalante Grand Staircase National Monument we went.

Ever since President Clinton's surprise 1996 announcement (worth watching) of the Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument (at the south rim of the Grand Canyon; sorta weird!) it's been the favorite whipping post by the likes of Orrin Hatch and other conservatives who barely have any teeth left after gnashing them for - already - 19 years at Clinton's audacity.  And despite the fact that we've been down there a fair number of times, we hadn't really explored the breadth of the monument, and Ash's keen eye had found a couple of somewhat-obscure remote roads that enabled a medium-sized loop.  And armed with The Author's (Michael Kelsey, prolific Utah desert adventurer and dizzying-guidebook creator) book on the area we had a lot of great, non-technical canyons and hikes we could do en route.

Boulder was a natural spot to start; the unusually-good Hell's Backbone Grill and Boulder Grill provide great pre-and-post tour meals, we knew we could leave our car there, and Highway 12 - between Boulder and Bryce - is a remarkable section of road that we've been wanting to ride for 15 years.  And it was as good as we anticipated, with amazing views and little traffic:

with some exciting descents:

We needed some lube and I found a character in Escalante who has a motorcycle repair shop in a back shed, and I figured anyone who had a sign that said "Welcome Bikers of The World" would be keen to help out a cyclist:

 And I was right.  He wisely moved there and started up just after the Grand Staircase-Escalante (heretofore referenced as GSENM) was designated in anticipation of the tourism it would bring, and has thrived (more on that later).

Near the end of the day we caught up with David, a guy who's been touring over half-time for the last 30+ years:

Whom we bid adieu at the Kodachrome Basin turnoff, since - even though he'd never been there despite going past it "probably 10 times"  - he didn't want to pay the entrance fee.  I suppose that's part of why people are able to make a career out of bike touring.....

But our camp fee was offset by the nice fellow campers who   -as always  -were happy to donate some cold beer to the scruffy cyclists' cause:

who could resist this smiling young thing when she's begging for beer?

Kodachrome Basin is great; as beautiful as a national park but with very few people, and unlike a national park, you can ride on their easy singletrack trails!

and they have hiking-only trails as well:

getting ready to jump?

 here's to some progressive park management! (maybe we should give Utah control over all the federal lands?!?!)

And speaking of federal lands, I never really knew (actually, had given much thought to) why it was called the "Grand Staircase".  Basically it's a 'staircase" of thick rock layers that work their way up from about the Grand Canyon level upward.  Here's a schematic:

We had been told that southern Utah had had it's rainiest summer/fall ever, and it showed:

mushrooms growing near cacti.  

And the rains had created some interesting situations:

ah, we'll be fine!

After hiking and riding around Kodachrome for half a day we noodled down the closed Cottonwood road for a few miles to Round Valley, where we found a good water source;

And a great slot canyon:

the remains of the last poor chaps to attempt this burly canyon

it rained late that night, and when I woke and heard it, I also started hearing the many voices in my head that had said "Cottonwood Road is a desperate mudfest after a rain".  Fortunately the next day dawned bright and clear, and the road dried quickly, except for a steep, north facing hill that was indeed a bit "desperate!"  

We stopped at the amazing Grosvenor Arch

some folks we had met the previous day said that you could get up to the edge but "you wouldn't go out on it!"  so I did.

the base of the arch had a couple of things that made me re-think my enthusiasm for state park administration:

The geologic and historical info is nice, but "nature's lullaby" gets a bit carried away....

maybe the park service ran out of money and could only afford half of a bench?  or they figured that anyone who could drive to an arch parking lot could lunch while sitting unsupported?

We continued our progression down the Cottonwood Road, which is famously beautiful and -because it was closed - was totally car free.  

halfway along the road is another roadside slot that's a great 1-2 hour sidelight:

Ash can't resist kicking up her heels at how awesome this is!  (and look at the height of that jump!)

More sublime riding took us down the road:

 with only one creature we had to share it with:

the road was beat up in places:

 but all was great until we hit a patch that hadn't dried.  Ash decided to plunge through:

With an hour of cleaning the unreal goo resulting:

We kept working our way down the Cottonwood road pretty slowly, since there's so much good hiking.  The Cockscomb Ridge is to the east:

and the surreal Yellow Mountain to the west:

and Castle Peak looming to the north:

Gratuitous "the two of us in someplace cool" shot...

We got to the Paria Box, which became infamous a few years ago when some rogue locals did a flagrantly illegal ATV ride up into the wilderness study area.  It's clear that they haven't changed their ways much:

that's a "wilderness study area" sign

When we had made David with his Bob trailer and his flag waving merrily behind him I realized I had forgotten my own flag.  But later I happened upon a flag alongside the road that I appropriated, and hoped that it's message would alleviate any possible acrimony we human-powered types might face:

yeehaw!

ironically, the Paria Box is nice, but not that special, relative to many other places in the area:

and boy does it have some burly hiking!

the Paria made some cool conglomerate balls when it flooded recently

Back on bikes, Ash was super stoked;

we saw a bit more road damage due to lack of culverts:

There was one culvert on the entire stretch:

and then we arrived at the obstacle that had the road closed:

We were able to navigate around this, but it will take a fair bit of effort to repair.  Apparently it's indicative of the animosity between the local and federal jurisdictions:  it's a county road through a federal monument, so who pays to fix it?  

Our next stop was the White House campground near where highway 89 crosses the Paria river, 40 miles above the confluence of the Paria with the Colorado at the Lee's Ferry GC put in.  A beautiful spot:

sunrise, with the full moon

Our mission was to get a shuttle to go around to the Buckskin Gulch/Wave trailhead and then hike back the 20 miles to our bikes.  Buckskin Gulch is regarded by many as The Best Slot in the World, and while the criteria of "the best" may vary, it's remarkably beautiful, and is 13 miles long!  

Red Leader, we're goin' in.....

In

moss in the desert; this place doesn't see much sun this time of year....

there was a bit of mud

and a bit of water 

channeling my inner Colter for an artsy shot of sunlight shimmering on muddy water....

The wading started to get serious, so serious canyoneers got serious

Katie Lee, Glen Canyon, 1961:

Ashley Patterson - doing her best Katie Lee - 2015

Anastazi cartoon

Cartoonish guy trying to act all Anastazi

it gets sorta tight in sections:

with some bigass boulders

the old i-phone can capture good light pretty well....

another gratuitous "in a cool place" shot.  It's a pretty cool place...

One little downclimb had some "moki" steps (like fire rings, white men need to go big...)

and then we hit the Paria, took a left (important!) and walked 8 miles of a slightly-bigger "slot" back to camp.

We knew that rain was coming, which made us go deviate from plan A - which was go return to Escalante by the Smoky Mountain Road, an 80 mile section of remote, waterless road that climbs up to and traverses the Kaparowits Plateau and has an even-more fearsome reputation for a road surface that turns to gumbo in the rain - and head for Kanab.  

back on the rainy road with plastic bag gloves, but she's still smiling....

knowing that a motel room and warm shower awaited!  

 Rainy riding is tiring:

But the storm moved through quickly and we were back on the road the next day in clear skies.

Our plan B was to go 16 miles up the paved Johnson Creek road to a Y, then take the Skutumpah Road back towards Kodachrome Basin.  Another dirt/gravel road with a good handful of easy slots to do. The crux question:  how much gravel vs dirt was there, and how fast would it dry?  We hit the initial section of dirt and it was damp but very rideable, so we kept going.  

 but after another dozen miles we hit a new layer, and it wasn't good:

 Ash prides herself a bit in her ability to grind through sand, up super steep climbs, and through sand and mud, but she got defeated by this one:

18 miles of pushing through bike-stopping mud wasn't realistic, so we turned about and strategized about Plan C.  we went back to our Y and then headed NW towards highway 89, to take us up to Bryce on the main highway.  

happy to be back on dry dirt:

We figured if this car could make it, we could:

and eventually onto the World's Nicest Cycletrack from Red Canyon to Bryce:

From Bryce it was about 70 miles back to Boulder on Highway 12 (with some more great slots we hiked on the outskirts of Cannonville) which, though it was indeed our plan C, we had to admit it's about as good as road riding gets, and seeing over a dozen Euro bike tourers on that road reminded us that people come a long ways to ride this iconic section of highway.  

As we traveled through the GSENM I had a recurring thought:  "what is it that makes people so uptight about Clinton's designation of this?"  It's no different now than it was before, with the exception that the communities on the perimeters are thriving:  the aforementioned moto mechanic has made it happen in Escalante, there's another new gear store in that town, a nice new school there, and in Kanab there are three new big hotels going in, probably tripling the existing bed count.  The owner of Kanab's (excellent!) Rockin' V restaurant said he regularly has people waiting two hours for a table!  Brian Maffly did a great investigative story on the area and it seems clear that the old school types in that part of the world refuse to acknowledge the benefits of the federal designation, something that the Rockin' V guy corroborated.  And cattle grazing continues - with BLM grazing fees at the silly level of something like $2.35/cow/year.  The big exception is that there is no mining allowed, and apparently it's that simple fact that feeds the likes of Senator Orrin Hatch's bitterness ("When President Clinton designated the Grand Staircase-Escalante a monument, I called it ‘the mother of all land grabs.’") that must have rotted out what few teeth he may have left.  

Regardless of Orrin's blatherings, it's a great place for a bike tour/hike combo, and we'll be back with our steel camels to give our plans A and B another go.  

Final Ruminations on the Wasatch 100

Over the last month + as I've recovered from the Wasatch 100 and gotten back out on my bike and  - finally - running again, I've had a lot of people ask me the obvious question:  will you do it again?  And the answer is.....a definite maybe.  Or maybe not.....

Doing the hundy ("running" it seems like a bit of a misnomer) was hard; I anticipated some good sufferage, but it was actually a bit more than I anticipated.  I was hurting bad, but despite saying many times "I don't know if I can do this" I'd just chug out of an aid station and keep the wheels turning, and did so enough times to shuffle into the finish.  And though we fortunately don't have a very good memory of pain (a good - or bad? - survival strategy), I do remember pretty well being fairly miserable for many hours.  But if I don't do another hundred it won't be due to a dread of the sufferage, it will be more a function of the commitment to The Event.

I realized in the runup to Wasatch that I don't like tapering; I saw blog posts by people and updates from the race directors to the effect of "enjoy your taper!", as if being forced to do fewer long, fun, challenging, big outings were a good thing.  I find this ironic because the reason that we all get into this silliness is that we enjoy doing more of the long, fun, challenging, big outings.   I always revel in the ability to get out and get after it on a daily, weekly, or spontaneous basis, and being on a "program" that inhibits that ability  -especially shutting it down - is a bit of a crimp.  In fact, many times through August I was asked how my "training" was going, and I was always a bit uncomfortable with that term; even though I had this big Event looming out there, I didn't feel like I was "training", I was just gettin' out and given'er.  Which is probably why I've never - and never will be - the fastest of the fast; strong - yes.  Top notch?  Never have, never will. Because I've been too interested in doing fun stuff with fun people than doing intervals, being on a program, and "training" for an event.

That said, for many people, The Event and The Training for The Event is great; it's a somewhat fabricated, but socially-accepted goal that looms out there and provides incentive for people to get out and indeed, git 'er done.  That's why the New York Marathon - happening in 10 days - gets over 50 thousand participants!   But why does it take The Event to make people push themselves so hard?  I saw this photo:

after the Bear 100 in Northern Utah and have been haunted by it:  the trail is pretty much flat and buffed, yet this guy is not only down, it appears that he's collapsed and it's debatable whether or not he's even able to get up, much less finish however many hours/miles he's got to go (he did not).   But because it's The Event - and there are expectations associated with The Event - we must persevere, and finish within the realm of the expectations that we have  - or others have - created for us.  For example, for the Wasatch 100 I said that I didn't have any real expectations, but that's not really true:  I kind of assumed I could do it in about 24 hours, partly because others I know who I feel are comparable to me have done it in that time, but also because 100 miles and 24 hours are nice round - yet still relatively arbitrary - numbers.  But I was slower than that.  And based on who they were, people's expectations of me and my finish were varied; many people have given me lots of kudos about how I "crushed it" and was 18th place! but the truth is that it was "the worst" placing I've had in any trail race relative to the field.  Was I disappointed?  Not really; I knew I was a bit undertrained and I knew that I'd suffer a lot and learn a lot, which is what I did.

But afterwards I read a couple of accounts by "contenders", who seemed remarkably pissy about the event; one guy thought he could win - in his first go at a hundy - and as he started to fade (and eventually finish 5th) he whined that it "wasn't worth finishing".  And the woman (Obsessive Runner Girl) who ultimately got 2nd apparently - by her own account - pretty much added Tantrum Girl to her moniker as it became clear in the later stages of the race that she wasn't going to win.  The 5th place guy caught some heat by a 30+ hour finisher who was resentful that fading to 5th place was not worthy, rightly pointing out that for many  -in fact, for the other 298 of the 303 who started the race  - 5th place would be great!  And ironically, these lofty expectations are being applied to a race that has notably lost its luster in the ultra world; none of the best national/international people do Wasatch any more due to bigger races nearby on the calendar, so anyone out to win is trying to be a large fish in a small pond.  To his credit, 5th place guy backed off his post quickly and apologized, but again, it's a function of expectations, and he wasn't fulfilling his own. Was that worthy of bitching about it and consider dropping out?  Apparently so, because we are endeavoring under the pretenses of Events, which encourage that type of behavior.

That said, lately some compadres have been doing some great outings that are not Events: a one-push effort to do all of Utah's 13'ers by the indomitable Jason Dorais and Tom Goth, a new big ridge linkup in Utah County by Noah Howell and Courtney Pace, and the Wasatch Ultimate Ridge Linkup (WURL) saw a lot of late summer action (by Chad Ambrose, a couple of ladies who did the fastest (only?) female time, and route pioneer Jared Campbell).  All going as fast as possible and inexplicably pushing physical limits, but doing so using naturally-occuring ranges/peaks/features to enable the routes and a possessing a simple desire to do The Thing (which is much different than The Event!).

But for many/most folks, having an agreed-upon Event is probably the best incentive/excuse to train yourself to truly go as fast/best you can; lots of people can stay generally fit by consistent exercise, but it's Events that make people push themselves into that last five, ten, or one percent of their ultimate potential.  And that can be pretty fulfilling.

So will I do it again?  I wouldn't say "I'm hooked" by any means, and not only am I leery of the commitment, the frustration of the taper   -and the recovery, which is not insignificant! - but also feeling self-conscious about asking others to commit their valuable time to your Event.....it's a lot.   But for the same reasons that I was intrigued by the concept of a new, big adventure that Wasatch represented, other Events - like the Hard Rock 100, which apparently is another level - represent new, big adventures (and now that I finished Wasatch I actually qualify to get into the Hard Rock lottery, where I'd have a 1.5% chance of getting in!, but I have to do it now, or I'll lose my ability to get into the ridiculous lottery, since there's a time limit on qualifying races! Yes, it's madness.....).

Or maybe I'll just do more silly Things in lieu of silly Events....

Mr T-Dawg Goes to Washington

I had the unusual opportunity this week to go to Washington to talk to the esteemed Utah congressional delegation about environmental issues, and it proved to be pretty interesting in a few different ways.

Ostensibly, I was there on behalf of the Outdoor Alliance to encourage our congressmen and senators to vote yay on a program that I hadn’t previously heard of called the Land Water Conservation Fund (LWCF).  This is very reasonable gig:  the US government receives royalties from the petroleum industry for leasing offshore areas for drilling, and a portion of those royalties is allocated towards preserving/protecting/enhancing lands that are in need of specific care, usually in the form of purchases.  Many times it’s used as “in fill” to buy up parcels that may otherwise be too small or too complicated for other federal/state agencies to protect/shore up.  One of the best examples of this that I have taken advantage of is the river put in/take out at BZ Corner on the White Salmon; when I first started paddling there it was private land and challenging to deal with; you had to hope that the proprietors would be there and be sober enough to take your money, parking was limited and a junk show, getting rafts into the gorge involved a high, complicated cable system, and the trail into the gorge was an erosion-fest.  The LWCF came in and created a model situation by recognizing the need, buying the land from the owner, creating an environment that has plenty of designated parking, a nice (and necessary) toilet, a well-hewn trail down to the river, and a clever slippery-rail-on-the-trail system for sliding rafts down to the river.  In fact, we “used” it just this summer when Ash and I took her niece there to show her one of the most beautiful little sections of river we know. 

The LWCF has been in place for 50 years and has had bipartisan support and is now up for renewal, and though it’s hard to imagine that it’s controversial, many of the Western states’ congressmen are on such a bender to eradicate federal control of lands that they are threatening to scuttle it.  Ironically, the money to be allocated – across the country, with many suitable sites in the East, the South, etc – has historically been $900M, but only about $350M has actually gone to the program, and the remainder has apparently gotten scuttled away into other programs, but still the Western folks don’t like it.  Regardless, the annual showdown over the US budget is happening now with a fairly high likelihood of another shutdown (this time caused by protest over Planned Parenthood, even though they are forbidden by law to use federal money for abortions…..c’mon people!).  So with that deadline looming the Outdoor Alliance rallied people to the Capitol to meet with their congressfolk to see if we could convince them to support the program.  Ironically – and we tried to point this out – part of the money also gets allocated to the states for them to utilize in the same way, so any opposition also inhibits states’ ability to take more control over their lands. 

Our Utah delegation consisted of myself and Julia Geisler and Nate Smith of the Salt Lake Climber’s Alliance, and since we have all been intimately involved in the Mountain Accord process (to create a comprehensive management plan for the Wasatch) we wanted to also tell them to make sure to introduce/support the permanent protections should hopefully come out of the Mountain Accord.   Although Carl Fisher of Save Our Canyons has rightly suggested that national monument designation is probably the best tool to accomplish the desired goals for the Wasatch,  the concept of any “national monument” is anathema to Utah’s delegation, who are inexplicably still furious over Clinton’s 1996 Escalante/Grand Staircase proclamation despite considerable evidence that it’s been a positive thing for that area (covered recently by Brian Maffly in the Salt Lake Tribune).  Even though national monuments are also able to be designated by Congress, the widely-held perception is that it’s only done by executive order and the congressional delegation doesn’t want to play into that, so the Mountain Accord is looking into other options.  The most likely scenario:  a “Conservation Management Area”, though Ski Utah’s Nathan Rafferty apparently recently freaked out at this possibility and is demanding that it be a “National Recreation Area – a less-protective designation, which is contrary to what The People spoke when the Mountain Accord had it's public comment period in the spring -  apparently so that he can have a better shot at finding a loophole to complete his pipe dream – and maintain his tenuous relevancy – to create interconnected ski resorts. 

Representative Jason Chaffetz was our first target, and – for better or worse – our contact was a woman who had been with the Congressman for…..a month.  “I just graduated with a degree in poli-sci from the U!”  Yikes.  

But to her credit, she traveled to the OA office because Congress was in a security lockdown due to the pope’s visit, she was very sharp, up to speed on both the LWCF and Mountain Accord, and assured us that she spoke to Chaffetz daily.  It’s our understanding that Chaffetz has agreed to be the one to introduce the Mountain Accord legislation, so it was important that we get in front of at least someone in his office. 

Our next meeting was a bit more fulfilling; we met with Representative Chris Stewart’s Senior Policy Advisor (Tim) and I assured him that as a Sugarhouser I had huge sway over a wide swath of voters in his district!  Stewart seems to be an interesting character:  he’s a former Air Force pilot, has written a bunch of novels and the definitive tale of kidnapped/rescued Elizabeth Smart, and….is a big climate change denier.  How smart people think/do dumb things is a question I find myself asking all-too often. 

 

Rep Steward is very proud of his books.  Ironically, his Elizabeth Smart cover was not included here. 

Tim is clearly a good politician himself; a big, gregarious, self-effacing guy who is easy to like and agree with….until you realize you don’t agree!  But he too was clearly well-versed in both LWCF and Mountain Accord, heard what we had to say, assured us that Rep Stewart was also well-aware of the importance of both programs, and introduced us to “Payment In Lieu of Taxes”, or PILT – the program that allocates federal dollars towards counties in the West that have almost no population and therefore no tax bases in addition to big chunks of (typically) BLM land but still have the expenses associated with county governance, so the federal government effectively subsidizes these counties.  I found it ironic that the same rural westerners who cry about the federal lands are also getting subsidized by the fed (not to mention the effective subsidy of the frozen-in-time cattle grazing fees of something like $2.50 per head per year); it reminds me of the battle cry of “Keep the gub’ment’s hands off my Medicare!”

The most critical member of the delegation couldn’t meet with us:  Rob Bishop is the chair of the House Natural Resources committee, and is notoriously vehement about giving extractive industries free reign and very suspicious of any sort of protection, and he howls – and makes headlines with his howls – at Obama’s recent national monument and wilderness designations.  He also has created something called the “Public Lands Initiative”(or PLI) that effectively means “Let Private Companies Drill As Much As They Possibly Can On All Public Lands in Eastern Utah Regardless of Location or Impact” (not as good of an acronym), and apparently he has expressed interest in tying this pet initiative – which apparently is losing support as the boom and bust oil and gas industry is now in its most-recent “bust” phase – to the Mountain Accord deal, even though they are so different that they could be in different states.  We encouraged Tim to try to influence Bishop’s office to convince him that this would be a bad idea.

Our last meeting was with a couple of the venerable Orrin Hatch’s legislative assistants.  Another politician-in-waiting, Ed Cox is also a friendly sort who endeavors to create a good connection and assure you that he is one of us.  He too was well aware of the LWCF and Mountain Accord, and said that the “pragmatic” Senator Hatch would like to see some compromises made in terms of divvying up the LCWF wealth, and/or have a tie-in to the PILT program.  This led to a discussion about Utah’s state leadership and their efforts to “take back their lands” from the federal government; he felt that this was a fruitless endeavor (as did Rep Stewart’s guy Tim):  not only were those lands never the states’ in the first place (they were public lands before statehood) and it’s unconstitutional, and it’s unfortunate that Utah has allocated $14M to file a lawsuit against the Fed for this reason. 

It was somewhat encouraging to see that all the reps and Hatch had big glorious photos of Utah's natural landscape as the most prominent art in their offices.   

That said, these guys are bound and determined to chip away (and rail against) federal lands due to their perception of woeful mismanagement by the federal agencies, mostly the BLM.  He started talking about harvesting the zillions of acres of pine bark beetle-killed timber in Utah that was simply a fire hazard.  Really?  Where, pray tell, are these vast groves of beetle-kill forests?  It’s happening for sure, but he made it sound like all of Utah’s trees were “ready to be harvested”, and then – disturblingly – he started talking about other natural resources to be “harvested”: oil, gas, etc.   and how much better the state could do at administering the lands.  I pointed out to him that the state’s own state parks were equally  - or worse – poorly funded/managed than federal lands, and how could they expect to do any better?  By “harvesting”, naturally.  He railed about how pinyon junipers were the scourge of public lands (which I am dubious about; they native to our desert) and then shocked us by talking about how – in the context of the Mountain Accord – the “environmental community always get what they want, and they have the ‘currency to spend’.” I couldn’t resist this bait and called him out on it:  actually, in the Mountain Accord there are many folks who are saying that the ski resorts are the ones who “always get what they want”, and if indeed a train and/or tunnel ends up in the Cottonwood Canyons, not only will it be a huge give by the enviro community it’ll also be a multi-billion dollar taxpayer-subsidized project (“oh, but not all of that would come from the state” – ah right, more federal meddling in the states!) to essentially benefit four businesses!  I began to realize that our time was running out and these arguments could go on for days and no one would be convinced. 

We closed by asking him to try to exert some influence on Rep Bishop to not tie his Vernal lands deal to the potential Mountain Accord legislation, and he replied that “Congressman Bishop doesn’t like the Senate too much”, which again got my eyebrows up.  Does Congressman Bishop like anything, or anyone?  Baseball!  He really likes baseball.  Hmm.  Not very encouraging. 

So this week – as the nation bites its nails watching Congress posture about the 2016 budget and threaten to shut down the government over the Planned Parenthood red herring (but will very likely create a “Continuing Resolution” to address it again in December) we’ll be watching to see if they will include the LWCF. 

As everyone knows, the pope gave an inspiring speech to Congress, and while we were unable to get tickets to get onto the Capitol steps for the huge throng watching the pope on the jumbotron, they had smaller jumbotrons on the mall:

One of our Alliance compatriots get tickets to the steps and said that after giving the speech in English, he then spontaneously bolted out to a balcony and hollered “Buenas Dias” to the crowd, which roared its approval.  Good pope!

We were able to fit in a 45 minute tour of the Capitol, which included one celebrity sighting:  presidential aspirant and rabid right-winger Rick Santorum (do yourself a favor and google “Santorum”). 

a little blurry...shot from the hip. 

In the Capitol each state has the opportunity to have a statue of a citizen, and it’s up to the state to decide who it is:

the priest who the pope canonized last week

Rosa Parks, the most recent addition

Utah's statue:  Of course, Brigham Young

Thanks to the Outdoor Alliance for sponsoring our trip and rallying a great crew of folks to DC, and to Julia and Nate for being good partners in lighting some of these guys up.  On one hand the Utah delegation is going to be as un-eviro-oriented as they are going to be and no amount of “lobbying” will do anything to change their views, but it’s also good to know that we can at least get close enough to them to make them realize that at least some of their constituents are taking careful note of their actions. 

Ready To Lobby!