The plan was that my family would again go to Ephraim Mountain, as we did last year, for the Larson family reunion near Danish Knoll. But, I’m not there.

My brother and sister are there and have been since last night. My parents will probably be there soon, if they’re not there already.

Christine didn’t go last year because she was eight months pregnant with Eli. This year she reluctantly agreed to go and to make her feel better, I offered to let her ride up with my parents on Friday instead of going down with me on Thursday so she would only stay one night.

Maya, Lucy, and I drove down on Thursday. The road up Ephraim Canyon has been under construction. It appears the Forest Service has been logging along the road in preparation for a widening project. This, combined with scattered thunderstorms in the area, made for some very muddy and slippery spots along the way up.

There were a couple people pulling trailers who had trouble getting up the mountain. My brother Tom was pulling a long horse trailer and joked that he went backwards up the mountain after he did a 360-degree turn at one of the switchbacks.

Once everyone got up to Skyline Drive, we decided to see what the road was like down to Danish Knoll, about 5-10 minutes away. About halfway there, we encountered a relative who lost their trailer to the mud. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but he had to disconnect the trailer in order to get his truck out. His trailer probably slid off into some really bad mud.

My sister Allison said, “Let’s just find some flat place to camp for tonight.” She and her husband found a spot along the road to Danish Knoll and started unpacking.

On top of the mountain there, we could get cell phone service so I called Christine and had her look up the weather report for the area. Weather.com said there would be scattered and isolated thunderstorms throughout the evening and early morning. At 5 a.m. it would be sunny until the afternoon and then there would be more thunderstorms through the evening and early morning again. This made me nervous. I called my parents and told them what the conditions were like and what the weather report was. My mom said she and my dad would not be coming down if the conditions were muddy like I said. That meant Christine wasn’t going to be coming either.

My brother and sister were adamant about staying and were confident the ground would dry up the next day.

Now, last year, there was a little rain off and on while we were there. It was just enough to keep the dust down. The first night we were there, it threatened to be worse, but it was tolerable.

I considered all my options and decided to head back home. My sister criticized me for my lack of a “sense of adventure” and that I was denying my daughters a memory they would... well, remember.

Maya was very disappointed with my decision to head back home. She had been looking forward to the campout for weeks.

I told Maya, if we had a trailer, I would have stayed, but we had to pitch a tent— a 2-room cabin tent I was able to borrow from my friend Mike— and I wasn’t comfortable doing that in the mud that had accumulated to a thickness of about 1 inch on the bottom of my sandals.

Oh, and it was 46-degrees there.

We pulled back into the garage this morning at 12:30 a.m.

After we got up this morning, my parents called to say they had heard from my brother and sister that it was “gorgeous” on the mountain and things were drying up good. So, my parents decided to head down. My dad encouraged me to go and said he would give me some money for gas if I wanted to go back up.

I declined.

This little 2-night campout, so far, was the only “vacation” I was going to get this year. I didn’t feel it was fair to me to spend my only vacation fighting mud, rain, and near-freezing temperatures.

I really just wanted to go find a quiet spot and read an O’Reilly book that Jayce gave to me to review for PLUG.