I'll probably do something very unusual, at least for me. Because I'm bringing the minivan instead of my much smaller car (because I need to haul my wife and two teenage boys back home, plus my daughter's stuff which has been in storage in Rexburg), I have all kinds of room that I don't normally have. And because I have established campsites that I can drive right to at every night that I'm not in a hotel... I'm almost certainly just going to fold down the seats, set up a bigger, more comfortable air mattress in the back of the van, put big, puffy, heavy and bulky sleeping bags over it, and sleep in the van. I don't have to carry any of this stuff, so why not? I'll be trialing this approach this weekend in a campground near Toledo, and we'll see how it goes. One interesting side effect; "breaking camp" means that I don't really have to do very much at all, do I? Pack up my camp chair (another luxury I wouldn't normally bring), scan the site to make sure I didn't inadvertently leave anything laying around, turn on the car and go. That's it!
Granted, this is an unusual trip. I normally wouldn't consider this, because normally I'd be trying to get out at least somewhere that I can't reach in a single day (I'm actually feeling just a bit constrained by that as I'm planning this trip this time) and normally I'd also not have access to a vehicle that's big enough for me to set up like this. In fact, I don't necessarily anticipate ever having access to a vehicle big enough to do that again; we're within a couple or so years striking distance of finally getting the car I want (instead of something too utilitarian for commuting to work and letting teenagers drive it) and also phasing out the need for a minivan at all. My wife will probably replace the van with something about the size of a Ford Escape or Edge, whereas I'm leaning right now towards a shorter Jeep Wrangler. I couldn't sleep in either of those things even if I wanted to, which I probably won't.
It is possible that I'll get a pickup truck instead of a Jeep, and have access to the bed, but honestly, most of those beds aren't really long enough for me to sleep in anyway—I'm a solid 6' 00" and I guess if I put the gate down, I could do it with my feet hanging out of the bed proper—but would I really ever want to cowboy camp in the bed of a pick-up truck? Actually—maybe. But that's still the plan B; I've wanted a Jeep since I was a little kid, and all of these options are now grossly overpriced compared to what they used to be even in the 90s.
Anyway, other than this, I still have one of my days where I only have about a half days worth of itinerary on my schedule. I'm having trouble finding something else to add, because I want to make sure that I don't do something too ambitious after I've already done 8.5 miles in the morning and early afternoon (and this is my last day of hiking around Grand Junction before heading to Utah) and Trying to get very far away from where I already am will also be challenging. Or rather, it will be challenging to do so without burning through too much time to allow me to actually still do anything meaningful after I get there. I may well just hang around the Monument and see more of it. There are a lot of smaller trails, only some of which I highlighted in my last post, so maybe I can do a few more of those. Or, depending on the time, maybe I'll do something a bit more ambitious like Rim Trail #8 or something. Maybe Rabbit's Ear is slightly better; big views payoff and a couple of miles shorter.
I may be stymied by road conditions. I'm actually having to go a little bit earlier than I'd prefer; later April rather than the very beginning of April would be better. Some hikes I've looked into have said outright that their trailheads aren't available by road until April 15, and even if they technically are, conditions on the road might be muddy with snowmelt. Again; what I should have done is either gone even further south (like to Big Bend National Park) in late February or early March, or gone to Grand Junction and Moab more like the last two weeks of April. I'm in a kind of uncomfortable position where conditions could be variable. And because it's been a high snow year, that means some stuff will be unavailable to me.
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