HAWS.NET

I love Google Earth.  As of late it’s been harder and harder to take my existing adventures and plug them into google maps. We now we know why, the new google earth debuted this week. I’m still exploring and playing with it. However there is something kind of cool in the new Google Earth. My Jeep. My trip to the Moab area back in 2014 was a bucket list trip for me. I really need to sit down one day and write about it.

While I was there I had a day to myself where I explored. On that day I came across and interesting rock formation between Dead Horse State Park and Canyonland National Park. I later learned that this was Beehive Butte. I took some of those photos and added them to the old Google Earth. You could find them, but you had to turn of the photo layer and know what you were looking for. My photo of Beehive was the only one on Google Earth.

Well now if you look up Beehive Butte on the new Google Earth – guess what is in the upper right corner of the display as the featured photo of point of interest? One guess… Yeah, that’s right. My Jeep.

The Photo that started it all

So for the last few months I have been looking forward to this seasons opening camping trip. Dispersal camping in the Wenatchee NF just north of Liberty, WA. Then a few weeks ago I noticed a photo of a Jeep on a cliff edge in a Facebook group that I belong to. The moment I saw it, I knew I have to get a photo of my Jeep on that same rock. Turns out it was less than two miles from where we were planning on camping!

So asking on the group where this was, learning the name of the trail, Hole in the Rock, and then exploring the area with Google Earth – I found what I was pretty sure the right spot. So in it went as a waypoint into the GPS.

Well it was the right rock! It was a lot less dangerous than it looks in photos. It was fun to get our rigs (two Jeep Wranglers and a Toyota 4 Runner) up on that ledge get some great shots.

Now, for the REAL adventure. So back at the campsite at the end of the day, Dave starts speculating that you could hang your tires over the edge of that rock, and because of the angle you could rest your rig on the frame and be relatively safe. We were shut down pretty quickly by both our wives. We dropped the subject, however there was this silence and I am pretty sure at the moment Dave and I were thinking the same thing, “How can we do this…”

The next morning, we had just the opportunity we needed. A young man maybe 20 years old came to our campsite, he was looking for friends, and had very vague directions. It sounded like was describing the group of campers next to the rock, down the the “danger zone” signs that had posted around camp. So instead of trying to explain to him how to get there. I said, I’ll just take you, and Dave said he would come along too. With very little said, we knew what we were going to do.

So we led our visitor to the campsite – and it turned out it was not his friends. Who knew there was more than one campsite with “Danger Zone” signs around it?

Dave and I put a plan into action. So here is the video. We had a go pro and two iPhones. One of which went tumbling down over the cliff and subsequently rescued by Dave, that’s another video…