"All this wide open space is uplifting to the soul!" We didn't get her name but a young woman hitchhiker from Germany said that. She also said that traveling America's public lands is like turning pages in a book, with each page marvelously different.
She asked me if I was the guy who jogged past her on the Lower Falls Trail, and indeed I was. She was the woman I ran past when I encountered Kay and Cathy.
Bob and I gave her a lift to Escalante where Bob was taking me to do laundry. He was going for a scenic drive. She was thrilled to meet us and get acquainted with our American Frontiers Journey, and you could see in her eyes the same light that is developing in the team. Our public lands are uplifting to the soul, and we want everybody, not just foreign tourists, to know it.

It may not be uplifting to the soul but it is uplifting to the spirit to have clean laundry. Ever wear gum?
In clean shorts and T-shirt, I decide to get dirty. Because my schedule didn't coincide with yesterday's schedule, I was alone in the laundry room today. Part of the team is going on a hike and another part is staying in camp to journal.
But back in camp with my clean laundry, I devise a plan to see Upper Falls. If there's a lower, there's gotta be an upper, right? In this case, there is.
Rather than commandeering a vehicle and taking it out of the team pool, I get a ride to the Upper Falls trailhead with Lorie MacGraw, who is always willing to help out in this way. The trailhead is several miles from the campground so I take along a mountain bike to ride back to camp. The beauty of this plan is not that I get to mix up activities but that I'm going to the "Upper" Falls, meaning my ride back to camp will be mostly downhill.
To get to Upper Falls requires that I hike a mile and a half down a steep sandstone slope to the stream at the bottom then skirmish upstream to the falls. The trail is terrible, meaning non-existant most of the way down and all the way upstream to the falls. Arriving at the stream I get frustrated looking for the trail, which I doubt exists -- there's not much room in the canyon to put a trail -- so I walk in the stream to the falls.
I don't stay long, not because I'm impatient but because the Upper Falls does not have the allure of the Lower and it is heavily vegetated and steamy. It's not nice when I'm there, and the pool is mossy and uninviting.
Scrambling out of the streambank, I encountered a couple who asked for directions. They went downstream rather than up so putting them on course was a matter of pointing.

It's hard for me to imagine why anybody would call a land feature a "hogs' back" but that's just me. My mountain bike liked the Hogsback, and so did I. Imagine a paved road running along the skinny back of, well, a hog the size of Mt. Rushmore and you'll get a weird picture. But take away the hog and keep the highway, and then imagine sandstone slopes and amazing washes where the hog was and you'll get a decent picture of the thrill of this road.
You know how they say that if you look at something you're likely to walk or drive right into it? Well, don't look over the edge, on either side, if you follow your look. It's a long way down.
That's why my mountain bike and I liked the Hogsback. This pig has a long back, too, which made for a long descent to our Calf Creek campsite. Oink! Oink!