Jacqueline, the kids, and I love hiking to Starvation Point. It is just an ATV road right across the Arizona border in the Virgin River Gorge. We do it every year to see the wildflowers and the wildlife. This is where I saw my only in the wild Gila Monster and there are always numerous lizards. We even have a scoring system for wildlife. There are different point totals for different lizards. My favorite is the leopard lizard, but you can also see lots of horned lizards which is fun. The cactus flowers are in full bloom and it is perfect the last weekend in April.
We had been looking forward to this. While the views are not spectacular most of the hike, we usually have it to ourselves with an occasional ATV driving by to ask if we are hurt or lost. They can never believe that someone would actually want to hike out there. We started off with a great hike. There were many lizards being spotted and Conrad even saw a young rattlesnake. The hike was going well until about 2 miles in, we saw some people off in the distance. When we made it to where they were, we talked to them for a little bit. It seemed that they were out there doing long distance shooting. This seemed like a great way to spoil a beautiful area. We kept hiking for a bit longer until the nervousness of having people out there shooting overtook Jacqueline. She decided that this was too much. We were going to have to turn around. I assured her that where they were shooting was far away from the direction that we were hiking, but she just couldn't take it. We had no choice but to turn around. I was frustrated because this had taken a great little Saturday hike and turned it into a short walk. We took our points and our tails and headed home with me expressing my displeasure for quite some time on the way back.
This made us determined to return because we were not going to let some random people ruin our favorite hike. When we came back the next weekend, the random people were gone and the lizards were still there. The kids were troopers and we were able to get a full 10 miles in with many flowers and many lizards. We made it all the way out to the Virgin River Gorge view where we could see down to the Virgin River. My kids were amazing and we really had a fun day to make up for the lost hike from the shooting people. We had a lot to talk about on this hike because we had just accepted positions back at McKenzie.
There was going to be less hiking and a little more packing to do as we had to sell our house, buy a new one, and get all of our stuff moved a 1000 miles away. We had just made the pandemic more interesting for ourselves by trying to do a big move in the middle of it. At first, we were just focused on getting our house shown and sold. So Jacqueline was cleaning up the place and making it look just right. The unfortunate thing about that is as soon as you do that, the place will be not yours anymore. For now though, it was just going to be a lot of work making this project happen. So it was nice to be out with the kids enjoying a beautiful spring day hiking there and back to Starvation Point.
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