Fly-in Camping Trip-Southern Utah

Well during a slower time at work I requested a couple of three days off and decided that now's a good of time as any to go on a spontaneous vacation! I called up a friend and the arrangements with the plane were made and we were going to spend three days camping and flying in the Idaho backcountry. Well in finishing up flight planning the night before the weather decided to be nasty to us. A little saddened to not be flying in the lush green mountain valleys of Idaho I started looking at other places to go to. We decided to go to beautiful Southern Utah. I went down to the airport and picked up Glen Hanselman's book "Fly Utah." Its awesome! He has put so many hundreds of hours into this book it was worth the $60 and more! So we found a couple of backcountry strips in southern Utah that I thought the Cherokee 180 could handle! So we packed up the plane...and I mean PACKED the plane. There was a lot of stuff for three days and two guys! But it all fit and we were well within weight and balance with the wonderful loading capabilities of the 180. So we took off and headed from Bountiful Skypark in the metro Salt Lake City area, and headed off to the beautiful forests and deserts of Southern Utah. We didn't really have a plan, this was just going to be spontaneous. Which was fun. We flew down to Bryce Canyon airport to decide what we wanted to do. We spent well over an hour digging through Glens books and decided to head over to the eastern part of the state to check out five different strips and see if I felt comfortable in my piloting skills and the airplane's skills going into these strips. Well the thing I didn't think about as much was taking off from Bryce Canyon. By the time we were ready to launch the Density Altitude at the airport was 10,000 feet, and the plane didn't climb like I wanted it to...about 200 feet per minute. It defiantly was.......fun...... But with some help from some updrafts we were able to gain altitude. I didn't feel comfortable flying out east due to our lack of performance at this time of day so we decided to head to Ibex (Tule Valley Hardpan). Ibex is a dry lake bed in the West Desert of Utah and is a beautiful (beauty is in the eye of the beholder) place. So we set up camp next to a small lake and then flew down to Milford for some last minute supplies. The airport manager was awesome! She ran us into town in her own truck and waited for us to get our grocieries. She then fueled up the Cherokee and we were off again! Ibex was a lot of fun and we went exploring during the evening. But when we got back to camp we were ready to cook dinner but the wind never died down...ever! So we cooked some beans and then gave up on cooking anything else. We went to the tent and spent the rest of the night there in the howling wind. We got up the next morning...still windy...and packed everything up. We wanted to go to another backcountry strip but due to the wind, I didn't feel comfortable. So we flew over to Panguitch and spent the rest of the vacation with my Great Uncle Vee. We did some hiking in the area and played poker and just had a jolly ol time. When we were packing the plane back up (in the podunk town of Panguitch) we heard a plane on final approach and to our amazment it was a King Air B200! After the passenger deplaned we took a couple of pictures and the pilot's invited us in. This was my first time in a business aircraft...and it was awesome! We talked for a while and then we were on our way. We had a wonderful flight home even though we were burned and exhausted. I cannot wait to do it again!