It’s all fun and games until someone rolls an ankle!

29  Sept, 2017; Needles area of Canyonlands NP, Utah

Up bright and early for a day of hiking!

I’ve packed snacks, plenty of water, both cameras, my binoculars, sketch pad, the kitchen sink and everything else I can fit into my day pack and set off the park.

Ancestral Puebloan Granary

Hidden up under a rock face, is a remarkably preserved granary dating back to about 950 ad.  Ancestral Puebloans were farmers who cultivated squash, corn, and beans.  Supplementing this diet with gathered seeds, fruits, roots and hunting deer and big horn sheep or snaring small animals and birds.  It is suspected that an extended drought and possibly pressure from other Native American tribes moving into the area caused these early people to abandon the area in the late 1200’s.  Along the path to the granary, interpretive signage identifies many of the plants used by natives: Yucca, juniper, green ephedra (morman tea),rice grass, pepper grass, sagebrush, barberry, saltbrush, pinyon and prickly pear.

Slick rock trail

After stopping at all the view points and taking short walks(under 1 mile RT), I decide to walk the one under-ten mile hike in the park.  It’s a loop trail over slick rock that provides great views of the Needles, canyons, and lots of potholes on the top of the slick rock stacks.

Potholes, natural depressions in the rock, hold water after a rainfall, this is great for local wildlife – but it also provides habitat (short-lived as it might be) for a ton of unlikely critters like fairy shrimp, clam shrimp, tadpole shrimp, various larvae,insects and snails.  Sure enough, I could see all sorts of tiny things swimming about in the rapidly evaporating water of the bigger potholes.

Hiking on slick rock is usually pretty easy.  I guess it’s only ‘slick’ when wet, I find it very grippy and easy to climb.  Cairns mark the trail.

There are some pretty big step-ups and step-downs which have become more problematic with the reduced flexibility in my knees.  I take one such drop-off about 2/3 of the way through the hike.  My knee doesn’t bend quite as much as I would have liked, which results in my right foot landing not on the flat packed sand as planned but further out on a wobbly, loose rock.  My ankle rolls over with my not inconsiderable weight on top of it.  Ouch!  If I was the screaming sort, I’m sure they would of heard me as far North as Salt Lake.  As the initial pain resides, I find that I can bear weight on it – so just a sprain (YAY! I won’t have to get rescued!).   Fortunately, I have the tag end of a couple of rolls of Vet-wrap in my pack (from when I was always patching up one or the other of my two fragile greyhounds).  So, I wrap my ankle and get walking - I figure I have a little less than a mile back to my car and I want to get there before the swelling gets too bad. I see very little of the scenery back to the car – totally focused on where to plant my next step.

I get to my car and head out for Needles Outpost – a private store/gas station/RV Park just a couple miles outside the park.  By the time I get there, my ankle has figured out that there is a problem and decided to complain.  I hobble into the store to purchase a FIVE DOLLAR bag of ice.  Gas is also expensive at $5/gallon.  At these prices, I don’t even ask them if they have Ace bandages – I think I have another roll of Vet-wrap in the trailer.

Love the way the bark twists on these trees

So much for several days of hiking – New plan: Ice, Compression, Elevation

Even after ice and another wrap, my ankle is hurting a lot – fortunately, it’s only 4 steps from one end of the trailer to the other – so, I’m not overly inconvenienced.