A tough day at the office

Today I decided it might be nice to ride my bike up Nebo with Munkey so that we could go see the fall colors.  I thought that if I went early enough we'd see relatively few people.  Boy, was I wrong. 

We got all bundled up because it was about 45 degrees when we started up the Nebo scenic loop.  Also the higher you go the colder it gets. Munkey was wearing a pair of fleece footie PJ's and her fleece lined winter jacket as well as my winter jacket covering her feet in the kid bike trailer.  We started to ride a mile below Benny Creek. The fall colors up there were stunning and that part of the ride was very enjoyable.

The traffic was initially light, soon however we began to encounter traffic of another kind.  Apparently  it was free-range cattle roundup day on the mountain.  We ran into herds of cattle being driven right down the road by farmers in pickup trucks as well as on horse back.  The only thing I knew to do was to pull over on the side and wait for them to pass.  Luckily we did not run around a corner head on to one of these herds but at one point there were cattle on both sides of the road and we had to travel in the middle.

Beef, road hogs: 

I ended up cutting our ride short because of all of this hoopla but we did make it up to a wonderful meadow where I let Munkey out to play in the snow.  She thought it was a smashing idea and I had a very hard time dragging her away from it.  She was very interested in eating all of the snow before we left.  We also saw some turkey tracks and when I pointed them out to Munkey, she tried to make the gobble gobble sound.

Turkey Track:

Everything was all fun and games until I went to put her back in the bike trailer so that we could ride back to the car and I noticed she smelled a little stinky.  Ah man! Changing a baby with 10 layers of clothes on in the cold is no fun.  I had even put her in an overnight diaper hoping that I could put off changing her until we got back to the car.  Neither one of us was happy about this occurrence and especially when I realized I had biked three bags of crap up the mountain and none of them contained any baby wipes.  Well, we made due with all her extra clothes I brought along and I changed her in record speed into a new diaper and full body PJ suit.

Smelling fresh, we loaded up everything, I gave her a whole piece of bread to munch on, and we headed down the mountain.  What really sucked was that now we were headed down in the same direction as the cattle, so I had to watch ahead of us and behind me to make sure they weren't sneaking up on us.  Also the traffic flood gates opened up. Apparently a school trip was in progress with 2 buses of kids with about 12 cars of parents following, which added to the fall leaf on-lookers and the ranchers.  Geez, we might have done better riding on I-15, there would have been less cattle.

Pics of cattle taken when we were safely in the car, they do look pretty in fall colors :

Still, it was a fantastic outing consisting of about seventy percent enjoyment, twenty percent annoyance, and ten percent cattle poop.  If there is a God, I think that if he loved us he would see to it that someone puts more bike lanes in Utah because sharing the road means something entirely different here.  I think I will wait to ride up there again until after they have closed off the road with snow gates and the beef is on the store shelf.