I'm sunburned and windburned. And probably dehydrated.

Eleven and a half hours, out in the country. Not really desert, I guess you'd call most of it a sage prairie. Swiped the wife's SUV, and headed out, with maps to over 50 benchmarks in hand. Took plenty of water, but really, it wasn't enough. Had to refill at Independence Rock, on the way home.

Almost all of it in land I'd never seen before. Exploring. And hunting benchmarks at the same time. A real good test of my map reading skills. Only got lost once, just because they put in a new road. And fixed that within a mile.

And found benchmarks. Lots and lots of benchmarks. Somewhere between 40 and 50. Most intact, some demolished. A few in between. Basically, I took the old road from Virginian Town to Central City. Probably 60-70 miles of straight dirt. Built back when a bladed road qualified as a "highway".

Horribly frustrating in the beginning. Looks like many of these brass disks in their cement "monuments" were destroyed, either by road upgrades, or by a zealous road graded widening the roadway. But once I got onto the old roadway, there were benchmarks a plenty. Roughly one every mile or so. Most undisturbed for forty or fifty years. A few been waiting there for over 60 years.

Managed to force a barb of a highway fence clear through the fingernail of the right middle finger. And that was early in the day. Left a blood trail for most of the 0.1 mile trek out into the prairie to look at a cairn.

Can just see some poor coyote latching onto that blood trail, pacing back and forth between the rocks and the highway, trying to find the injured critter.

A few of the positives of the day:

Surprising a loggerhead shrike who was loafing in the shade of the cairn mentioned above.

The family of Say's phoebes waiting for lunch at the junction in Section 17.

The huge gypsum crystals east of the shrike's cairn.

The broken arrowhead by RIM.

The huge flock of ravens, with a few eagles and magpies thrown in, working on the cow carcass in the creek.

Nobody to talk to for 11.5 hours. Not even heelers. I don't include nodding at the two nonresident families that were zipping around in the same country in their two little SUVs, which I passed or met several times. Looking for petrified wood, I would guess, judging by where they were walking.

Nor do I count waving at the two teenaged boys that were riding at a fast clip the other way on the road north of the rim.

Riding on the back of their Mom's Suburban.

As in, standing on the bumper, and peering over the top of the vehicle as they held on to the luggage rack on the roof for dear life. (Well actually, they weren't holding on that tight, since they both waved. But they should have been.)

And finding the benchmarks. So many, right where they were supposed to be. And a few after a fair amount of searching.

And perhaps best of all, the ones I didn't find.

So I get to go back again.