Monitor & Merrimac Trail

We wasted no time getting out on our ATV's yesterday. There will be no riding today since it is the day we scheduled for getting new shoes on our mechanical horses. It's okay because we'll use the free day to get breakfast in town, visit the quilt shop, do some grocery shopping, and possibly get some lunch at a local brewery we like.

As for yesterday, we rode a trail we've ridden before. The trail takes us past monolithic rock formations impressive enough for a repeat visit. It was a good day, although much of it was spent reading the map.

Our last visit here was in 2015, and some of the signposts listed in our book were either different or completely absent. We knew we were on the right trail as we rounded the formation known as Courthouse Rock.

Here, Mike decided to try something he's been itching to try since the beginning of our trip. He was going to try to have his drone follow us as we rode.

He has an app on his phone he can check to see if it is permissible to fly a drone at a particular location. Checking, it was. Nevertheless, we rode only a short distance before the drone would go no further and informed him he was in a restricted area. We suspect it was because we were within the  boundary of the nearby airport. And we took a wrong turn here, after riding over slabs of slickrock and some very rugged terrain.

Backtracking, we finally ended up on the right trail to take us to Determination Towers, a very impressive formation. We'd seen it on our previous ride, and we wanted to go back. If you look closely in the image below, you can see two things. First, a crescent moon indicated with an arrow to the right of the larger tower.

Also in the image above, you can see two "arches" at the upper right. Arches are formed by wind. Natural bridges are formed by water.  To our left were Monitor and Merrimac, shown in the image below.

Checking his app again, Mike was able to fly the drone all the way around the towers. We were hoping to get an aerial shot of us with the towers. It was difficult to see the screen in the bright sunshine. It was even more difficult to take a picture of the screen since it was also hard to see my camera screen. Nevertheless, I managed to get a shot so you could see what the drone could see.

We have video taken by the drone, but no way to move it to the computer. When we get home, I'm hoping to create a post including some of the drone footage.

From there, we headed for the second impressive site along this trail, Tusher Tunnel. Here, we ran into problems. The signpost marking it was missing, and we missed the turnoff. We were too far along to want to turn back when we realized our error, and so we just bagged that effort and headed back for the truck and the end of our riding day. It's worth clicking on this old blog post to see our previous visit to Tusher Tunnel. It's an impressive and unusual formation. You can also see more pictures of the area in which we were riding.

The only other thing I have to show you from yesterday is some slow-stitching. You might recall I was worried I didn't have the right color floss for stitching the sunflowers. As it turns out, I could pilfer some floss from the Sweet Land of Liberty I was working on when we started the trip. I had some variegated burnt orange to dark yellow, and I used that for the outer petals. It looks fine to me, and so I went with that.

So I've already mentioned what the coming day holds. It's still early and so I'll have some time to work on my embroidery before we start our day. We'll do some more riding tomorrow.