Monday (Aug 29)
Despite last night’s earnest scientific inquiry I have again done a terrible job of predicting where the morning sun will come up. I’ve moved the van twice this morning to follow the shade. But thanks to my giant cottonwood at least I have shade, however poorly I predicted it.
Enjoy my peace and quiet and shade, then back the hill to the Visitors Center to take their cute little trolly up the hill to the covered fossil bed. What’s there is an upscale version of what Nevada has at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. A big ole building built by the CCC, covering the in-place fossil bed. There is a trail back into gullies and the open-air the fossil beds that I would have taken, but I didn’t find out about it until we were on the trolly back down. grrrr.
Back along the beautiful Green River to the highway, then on to Vernal UT to make a decision. The unfortunate new fact in my life is that I need to go to a Sprinter service place to get my fuse panel back in order. According to the Freightliner site, Logan Utah is the place to get it done. If I blow off Flaming Gorge I can follow the rest of my original Bear Lake plan and end up there in a couple of days.
Further research causes me to not go much of anywhere today. Yesterday the Welcome Center told me there is an Wildlife Refuge twenty miles south of here, and Allstays tells me there is a BLM camping area a few miles away across the highway. That sounds like my kind of combo, so I resolve to do that tonight. Since I have almost no driving to do I hang in the nice air conditioned coffee shop till 4-ish – it’s very hot down here in the flatlands – then head to Ouray National Wildlife Refuge.
WHUFU page for: Ouray National Wildlife Refuge
Not at all interesting on this visit. I hope I caught them at a bad time of day in a bad time of year, because there was neither wildlife nor good infrastructure.
Four or so miles into the auto tour loop the road was blockaded - no loop. They could have given some warning at the start of the tour that it was blocked.
No wildlife of any kind visible to me. There is camping nearby at Pelican Lake
tonight:
Not at all interesting on this visit. I hope I caught them at a bad time of day in a bad time of year, because there was neither wildlife nor good infrastructure.
Four or so miles into the auto tour loop the road was blockaded - no loop. They could have given some warning at the start of the tour that it was blocked.
No wildlife of any kind visible to me. There is camping nearby at Pelican Lake
The whole adventure was kind of a meh experience. At the Refuge I started down the dusty gravel auto tour loop, seeing literally NO wildlife except crows. The only hopefully interesting thing was the band of trees at the base of the hills in the distance. The map shows water there. It looked shady and … well at least shady. I get there and right at the point the road turns into the trees it is blocked off! Aaaarg. So much for the Wildlife Auto Tour Loop and so much for this whole worthless place.
I will confess that I went about 20 mph faster retracing my route on that straight gravel in that barren hellhole, and soon I was back to the highway. By now it’s quittin’ time for those hardworking oil field workers, so almost instantly I had a line of large pickup trucks on my butt. No hostility, but I wanted to take my time and cruise, and they wanted to get the f–k home or to happy hour, so we simply had different needs that afternoon.
I had one of those small incidents that makes you think you’re living right! The left turn to Pelican Lake was one of those intersections where the road comes in at an odd angle and makes a little dog leg in order to hit the main road perpendicularly. I was stressed about the pickup parade behind me so I so I just straightened the dogleg out, straight across both lanes so I could take my left at speed and not hold everybody up. The guy behind me took the left also (of course), so I immediately pulled over on the gravel so he could go on and I could chill out. It was a Ute Tribal cop car – yikes! He slowed, I waved go on, and he went! He probably had no jurisdiction, and probably everybody does what I did, but it gave me a feeling of dodging a bullet … so to speak …
Anyway, now there’s nobody on my butt and I drive 3/4 the way around Pelican Lake to the campground:
WHUFU page for: Pelican Lake Campground
Very hot here. But it's a dry heat. The lake sounds kind of underwhelming from the BLM page, but there is a boat ramp and picnic area which looks like it has the best morning shade in this whole godforsaken acreage.
The actual campground is a few hundred yards up the road before the boat launch. Once the sun got low it was really very pleasant there. Hawks and owls hanging out in the tree at my campsite!
tonight:
Very hot here. But it's a dry heat. The lake sounds kind of underwhelming from the BLM page, but there is a boat ramp and picnic area which looks like it has the best morning shade in this whole godforsaken acreage.
The actual campground is a few hundred yards up the road before the boat launch. Once the sun got low it was really very pleasant there. Hawks and owls hanging out in the tree at my campsite!
My first impression wasn’t good. I thought about parking right down next to the boat launch where there might be morning shade, but clearly the official campgroiund was a set of picnic tables in an unshaded field. I mulled it over for a while and decided to gut it out. I just angled myself to block the setting sun until closer to sunset when I angled myself into another spot what would block the sun in the morning. I figured the usual morning heat problem won’t be an issue because I won’t want to hang around here in the morning anyway.
But … now that the sun is getting lower I’m starting to like this place a little. It’s quiet and spacious and lonely in a good way. Flies suck pretty bad though.
As dusk approaches, turns out the three behind my site is the preferred hangout for the hawks. They are in silhouette and I’m terrible at raptor identification anyway, but let’s call them hawks. They sit, glide off, glide back, a very impressive site when they extend their wings to land. One time he made a go at some poor critter 40 feet away, missed ’em, but very exciting for me anyway.
There there was a shift change, the hawk left and was replace by an owl for the night shift. Those poor little field rodents don’t get a break!
Beautiful, peaceful, quiet sunset … enjoyable for me, since I am not a terrified field rodent!
Tuesday
Slept pretty well. It stayed cool in the morning so I hung around. This place ain’t so bad after all! I think complete solitude puts me more at ease than any other single factor.
I have phone reception, so I plan a different route back to the highway, taking the back roads to come out 30 miles down the road. When I do get back to the highway I find myself at the nerve center of the large Ute Reservation (Uintah and Ouray Reservation) that I have been in and out of all morning. There is a lunch place doing a big business, a grocery store, and a coffee shop! The grocery store didn’t do it for me, but the coffee shop had wifi, so I decided to do my daily wifi-ing here rather than in Roosevelt as I had planned. Worked out fine. The lady took a picture of me for their marketing materials. :)
I now have no business in Roosevelt, so I pass through and eventually stop for lunch in Duchesne. These little northern Utah towns are real dumps, excuse me for saying … The restaurants are awful, the grocery stores are shabby, the people aren’t particularly nice. It makes me long for Oklahoma, god help me :)
Towards the end of the drive it starts to get prettier. I drive past Strawberry Reservoir and head up out of the barren flatland into Daniels Canyon, where there are trees and cooler temps, and my campground is right on the other side of the pass.
WHUFU page for: Lodgepole Campground
Elevation 7,800'. Across the valley from busy US 40. Open, well-maintained, paved roads. Pretty deluxe as these things go, but nothing to do that i could see. From here it's straight downhill for a long time to Heber City
There's a resort with restaurant and store right up the hill, but you gotta drive to it.
tonight:
Elevation 7,800'. Across the valley from busy US 40. Open, well-maintained, paved roads. Pretty deluxe as these things go, but nothing to do that i could see. From here it's straight downhill for a long time to Heber City
There's a resort with restaurant and store right up the hill, but you gotta drive to it.
Today’s plague is not flies but those little mothy things again. I had all my doors open to get it to cool off, and I think I left them open just a little too long. Some combination of the breeze and temperature differential between inside and outside made my van just the place for all little mothy things to get out of the wind and warm up. I didn’t discover my fatal mistake until I closed up for the night – to keep the bugs out of course, but it was way too late, the bugs were already in. A week later I am still chasing little mothy things.
A helicopter just flew overhead towing one of those huge buckets they carry fire retardant to fight fires. Must be some excitement northwest of here. It sure is quiet here tonight. My site and three others are all reserved under the same name for the weekend, so so it ain’t gonna be quiet in four days!
Wednesday
Man the truck noise from US 40 travels across this valley loud and clear. It didn’t disturb my sleep, but even with the doors shut it’s still very noticeable.
Coast downhill a looong way to Heber City – it’s 15° hotter down here. In Heber City everything works for me! My very pleasant coffee shop is right across the highway from the Smith’s, where I do my shopping, get cash from the US Bank office there, and diesel from their service station. So I accomplished every little mundane thing on my todo list in a 100 yard radius. … Except wine, Smith’s don’t sell wine in Utah, so I had to backtrack to the State Liquor Store for that.
It was an interesting day insofar as I traversed a stretch of Utah I’ve always wondered about, namely the urban corridor from Salt Lake City to Ogden. To be clear, I’ve never been particularly tempted to come here, I’ve just wondered about it. Well, I’m going to get to know it better than I’d like over the next couple of days.
But at this point I don’t know that yet, I am heading to a campground outside Brigham City because I think I’m going to the Sprinter place in Logan, UT tomorrow. Boy was I wrong.
WHUFU page for: Box Elder Campground
Pretty name, but kind of a dusty little trailer park of a campground. It felt like a lot of folks there are semi-permanent residents. There is a tiny creek. A short walk up the hill is the town of Mantua, where there is a reservoir and a swimming beach. The full service town of Brigham City is a right down the hill.
tonight:
Pretty name, but kind of a dusty little trailer park of a campground. It felt like a lot of folks there are semi-permanent residents. There is a tiny creek. A short walk up the hill is the town of Mantua, where there is a reservoir and a swimming beach. The full service town of Brigham City is a right down the hill.
My campground seems like a cluttered little slum at first glance, kind of a run-down trailer park vibe. And really, that’s what it was, but it was also a real community. The hard-working Camp Host wife never stopped – tidying the ancient bathroom, ferrying old ladies to the water spigot and back. Campgrounds are supposed to have a 14 day limit, but these folks seemed to have been there forever.
I took an evening walk that turned out really nicely. Out the back of the campground, up the hill and across the wheat field(?) to the tidy little Mormon town of Mantua. This is the real America that Trump’s disaffected white people are longing for. Interesting to me was the town’s ditches being full of pure running water in some kind of low-tech irrigation system. There is a little lake at the other end of town, but I lacked the energy to walk that far, so I looped back to my campsite. Drove by in the morning, the lake has a swimming beach and looked real nice!
Thursday
Pretty long day, ended at a beautiful spot, but a lot of stress and driving and striving to get there.
- Awaken, call Sprinter place in Logan
- Dude says I was misinformed – they’re not an official Sprinter repair shop. In particular, they do not have fuse diagrams
- sigh … I investigate other options, the Salt Lake City official Sprinter repair is “only” 80 minutes of freeway driving away.
- Deeeeep sigh, take a few minutes to re-think the next few days, then head out.
- Back down the hill to Brigham City, get coffee, get on I-84 South and aim for to the SLC Sprinter place – it’s now 2-ish.
Sprinter repair, Salt Lake City - Arrive, wait, eventually get checked in. They do their thing, I am supposedly all fixed by 4:30-ish, wasn’t really that expensive!
- Pay, back to the van. Notice that they door they fixed is wobbly. He grabs a wrench and tightens the bolt – all good. I ask them to hose me down since they managed to get white crap all over the van in some wierd air conditioner mishap back in the garage.
- Start to go again, get a block away and realize my entire temperature panel is dead.
- Back again, he takes it back inside to the dude that worked on it. He fiddles with the fuses a little more – apparently a fuse assignment was mislabeled.
- Finally ready to start the rest of my life at almost 6.
The service rep was a nice man but I am sure he was as glad to see the last of me as I was of him. Oddly, for all those little missteps, I think they did a good job and I am pleased and relieved. That fuse shit is complicated.
Also, the fellow assures me that there is no fan of any kind on the part of the engine where I hear the hum. His best guess is an actuator (whatever that is) that my little rodent friends might have gnawed the wiring on so it occasionally shorts. So pulling fuses ain’t going to stop it. He shows me a master circuit breaker which disconnects the battery from everything, kind of a nuclear option – disconnect the whole van till morning … great.
Eat at a chain Hawaiian rib joint nearby, then start the drive back north on I-84. I have a vague plan to stay in the Brigham City Walmart parking lot, but on a whim I get off at the state park campground on Williard Bay jsut to check it out for next time. It’s so nice I decide to splurge on the $20 even thought I only have about ten minutes of light left. Glad I did, it’s a cool place!
WHUFU page for: Willow Creek Campground
On lovely Williard Bay, the northeastern, freshwater(!) arm of the Great Salt Lake.
tonight:
On lovely Williard Bay, the northeastern, freshwater(!) arm of the Great Salt Lake.
When I walk over to pay the camp host he tells me of a little trail to the lake’s edge. Even though it’s pretty dark I really want to do hop in the Great Salt Lake, so I do it. It was really a cool experience, all by myself on a lonely wind-blown shore in the last trace of sunset, but … It’s not salty! Just another freshwater lake! I asked the ranger on the way out, and it turns out that Williard Bay is blocked off from the main lake to keep it fresh for recreation. It is possible to hike to the salty shore, but that’s not for me this time.
I am very content and happy to be here. Swam in the lake, took a nice hot shower to wash the stress of the day away, and my van is fixed and in tip-top shape for the Labor Day Weekend – woo!