The Fiery Furnace was definitely an interesting and confusing place. I felt very validated in my contention that we not attempt to hike in this area alone without a map, but Lynn insisted that it wasn't so bad and that we should still try to do Lomatium later in the afternoon. Brad was the swing vote, and agreed that it was a bad idea without a map or route information, and voted to head over to Zero Gravity in the afternoon.
By the time the tour ended, we were starving and wound up stopping at the Eklectic Cafe for lunch. The staff was very friendly and the food delicious (all organic), although the portions were small and the prices rather high. We were all still hungry afterwards, and wound up getting various desserts to fill up. From Moab, it was another 1.5 hours to the Zero Gravity trail head, so we hit the road. The "Good dirt road" leading the trailhead parking lot was not nearly as good as I expected, and there were definitely a few moments that I feared getting stuck in some deep sand, but we made it through. We wound up stopping about a mile short of the actual trail head because the road did become impassible, but we had expected that from the information we had gotten beforehand, so this was not a problem.
I don't think that Lynn was very excited to do this canyon, since he had voted against it and expected it to be too quick and easy. He estimated that it would only take us about and hour and a half to do the entire loop, despite the guidebook indicating that it would take approx 3-4 hours. After hiking to the trail head, we recorded the time to check (OK, make fun of) Lynn's time estimate. It was another 1.2 miles to get to the actual canyon entrance, which was not too long but no fun in the heat. Finally, we reached the down scramble into the canyon and visited the small arches (Tinky and Winky) at the canyon bottom that mark the start of the route.



The final obstacle was the one I had read about and was most worried about. As one point, the canyon becomes very narrow and drops out from below you, with a chokestone wedged in the canyon serving as a landmark for this obstacle. There are three options here. One is to climb above the stone, chimneying past it and leaving you nearly 30 feet above the canyon floor. You must then continue out until you reach a section where the canyon gets just wide enough to drop through using a rope tied to the stone to swing back into the canyon with. The second option is to get as close to the stone as possible, and make your way under it. At this point, and canyon is just barely wide enough for a skinny person turned sideways to make carefully their way down and

Back at the trail head, a check of the clock revealed our total round trip time to be just under 3 hours. Lynn continued to insist that we could have done it quicker, though the only stop we made the entire time was about 15 minutes to check out the arches at the top of the canyon. You have to admire his ability to stick to his guns, no matter what happens! Once again we tackled the dirt road back to the pavement, and the Prius made it through. (Prius Power!) The last adventure of the day was stopping at an Arbys on the way back for a bathroom break and to grab some food. I call it an adventure since I spent the whole time trying (and failing) to keep the hole in my pants covered, much to the amusement of one of the other patrons who got a good laugh out of the whole thing.
Back in Moab, I started packing up while Lynn and Brad drove downtown to hunt for souvenirs. We plan on getting up at 5:00am to drop Brad off at the airport and get started on the 18 hour drive back to Austin, so I was happy to get all packed up and into bed as early as possible.