As a boy scout I camped near this marker. As a scoutmaster I camped here with my troop.
I woke up yesterday morning and decided to go paint or draw something different as I left my house at 6:30 a.m. I looked east towards the mountains and something told me to go west to the desert. I drove out into western Utah along the historic
Pony Express route. It must have been the ghost of
Maynard Dixon who told me to go west. As the early morning sun lit up the desert peaks and wide valleys I was reminded of Dixon’s clean, simple and elegant compositions. If you read my blog you will discover that
Maynard Dixon is one of my hero’s. I drove past several Pony Express markers and found myself out near Simpson Springs. I saw an interesting mountain to the south so I headed that way. I checked my GPS(Rhino 120) and noticed that I did not have the maps loaded for this particular part of Utah. For some unexplained reason I had neglected to tell my wife, Rhonda where I was headed as I was thinking that very thought my steering felt a little mushy. I was about 60 miles north of Delta, Utah that was my best chance at a cell signal I checked my phone and actually made contact with her although it was a very very poor connection. She was surprised when I told her I was out west. She had assumed that I was headed up into the mountains east of our home. I discovered that texting worked tons better so we continued our conversation via text messages. I am not very adept at that form of communication and I had to stop the vehicle for each text. On the second “text stop” I got out of the Jeep and noticed my left front tire was almost a pancake. I had been driving in and out of sand for 30 miles so I assumed the mushy felling I was getting was the sand….Not. To make matters worse to the south and west of me a large thunderstorm was brewing and the road I was on looked like it was a muddy beast when it got wet. I quickly repaired my tire and impatiently waited for my little compressor to do its thing while I watched the rain get closer.
Waiting on my little compressor to do its thing.
When the tire was pumped up I raced the storm across the desert, guessing at my route as my GPS and my jeep had no maps. After several snap road choices I made it to a gravel road north of the Little Sahara sand dunes just as the rain caught me. I was glad for a firm foundation. Well I took some interesting photos and made a couple of sketches but in all the fun I did not make a painting. Lessons learned today; tell someone where you are going, take a map or a loaded GPS with you, If the steering feels mushy check the tires and don’t go alone.
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Check out “Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express” (Random House/Broadway Books) by Christopher Corbett
[...] to spend an hour or two in my studio today looking at the drawings and photographs I took out along the Pony Express route last week. When I decided to go out west I was thinking about Maynard Dixon and some of his big sky desert [...]