Tuesday (Oct 17)
It is 1.5 hours to the next civilization at Cedar City. Yelp and my previous visits tell me the dining choices here in Caliente are kind of sucky, so I decide to leverage my civilized status as a motel dweller and have breakfast in! The kitchen has basically nothing in it except a couple of paper cups and a basket of tea bags and individual serving “coffee bags”. I grab my own coffee cup and microwave up one of the coffee bags. Then I microwave up my leftover chicken dinner from the Tonopah Brewery last night (chicken + green beans + cole slaw), and have myself a darned nice breakfast. If you’re not real choosy like me, it’s worth noting that I got like four cups out of that coffee bag – drink, refill with cold water, nuke it 45 seconds again, repeat four times! Your mileage may vary :)
I was still loitering in my van fifteen minutes after 11 am checkout time, and got to talk to the owners again – earnest, young (I think) city folks. I am really pulling for them to make this work.
At Caliente, US 93 turns north to follow the valley between mountain ranges up to Ely. I stay on till the turnoff for Panaca. I gave brief though to continuing on to funky old wild-west Pioche, but didn’t. Just as Pioche is emblematic of the “wild” west, Panaca is the classic buttoned-up, orderly to the point of anal, Mormon town. The do have that cool green rock formation a little north of Main Street. It really is always called Main Street in a Mormon town. Anyway, I watched my speed limit in Panaca. Nothing much to report about the rest of the trip out of Nevada and into Utah until … Cedar City.
I happened upon the perfect coffee shop for me (on Main Street of course) – good food, wifi, get your own refills, and college kids. Cedar City is hereby added to the list of towns where I could see myself living – a college town next to natural beauty. I had to backtrack a few blocks for diesel and happened to go past the campus. It’s a pretty substantial institution for a college I’d never heard of – Southern Utah University, SUU. I liked Cedar City.
Now I am going to Cedar Breaks. I came here once in the misty distant past with my Mom, but on all my Utah jaunts since the 90’s when I wanted to go, the road was always closed for the season. It’s open now, so I’m really looking forward to seeing it.
On the way up the mountain I realize I am now in the Mountain Time Zone. Hint; the van clock is suddenly an hour off from the cell phone clock. I must remember to correct for this when I process my Canon pictures.
Cedar Breaks is pretty awesome. It’s cold up there. The campground is closed for renovation, so I head down the hill a ways to try my luck at the National Forest campgrounds. The first two I passed were closed for the season, so I decided to disperse myself. There was a promising gravel road a few miles back from the second campground at Panguitch Lake, so I drove down it a mile or so and pulled over by a stream:
WHUFU page for: Dixie dispersed
bad: right next to a dusty, gravel road
good: right next to a happily burbling brook
I am here because the campground a mile away is closed for the season, so my hope is there won't be much traffic on this road tonight.
Really pleasant to set myself up by the creek here. The creek itself has a kind of cow-poopy feel to it, making me think I might not actually be in the National Forest after all. But I ain’t gonna swim in it and I ain’t gonna drink it, so I’ll just listen to the pretty sounds and not think about the bacteria count.
Wednesday
Slept badly, but my spot turned out to be pretty nice. Total vehicles driving past in my sixteen or so hours on this little road: 1 truck and 2 OHVs.
Once I got back on the highway, the campground ten miles down the road was open – aaargh! In the morning I re-read the Forest Service pages, and it was indeed flagged as open on the web site, so my bad. I might have slept better there. Anyway, I continue down the very long hill to Panguitch (rhymes, they say, with “sandwich” :).
I remember the only other time I had a meal in Panguitch years ago it was exceptionally bleak and depressing. So I did not have high hopes this time. I wish I could say I was pleasantly surprised, but that would be a lie. First of all, almost any town of any size nowadays has some kind of bakery/coffee shop, but not Panguitch. The highest rated place open at 1 pm was 3 1/2 stars. I went to a place call the Fish something and had over-fried fish and over-fried potatoes, and pretty good coffee. Panguitch is a culinary disaster, possibly a cultural disaster in every way. Cool name though …
Drive down the Sevier Valley a short ways to 12 East, one of the most scenic drives anywhere. In a very few miles you’re in the middle of the first scenic attraction, Red Canyon. Its campground is closed for the season, so just power on to Bryce.
WHUFU page for: North Campground
The other campground at Bryce, open longer into the fall. I like this one better, more convenient to the Lodge and Visitor's Center (wifi) and right next to the Rim Trail, which is what Bryce is all about.
It’s only 2:15 in the afternoon so I have my choice of many open spots. I settle on site 64, in the tents-only loop and with the best combination of privacy and an open feel. I walk my payment back over to the kiosk, and while I’m at it, continue to the Visitors Center, a short distance further on across the road.
Thursday
Slept like crap again. My plan is to stay at Kodachrome State Park, which is less than thirty miles away. According to Yelp I have literally only two choices of where to get a hot meal between here and there. I choose Foster’s Steakhouse, a familiar sight on Route 12 just outside the Bryce turnoff, and it worked pretty well … except for my spazz attack.
I ordered a nice club sandwich, then noticed a pecan pie in their display, so I added pie ala mode and a to-go box for 3/4 of the sandwich – awesome, right? Finished my pie, concentrating on the laptop, ns I aet my coffee down on the edge of my phone. No big deal, right? But in my spazzy mood I JUMPED! My coffee cup knocked over my water, liquids flying everywhere. I wiped the coffee/water off my keyboard – no harm done, thank goodness. I had a $200 keyboard replacement a few years ago for spilled whiskey and my backlighting is still broken.
I did the same for my phone, and the news was not quite so good. My screen is pretty badly cracked, so it has zero integrety in terms of holding water off. THe phone seemed to work, but there were weird gray streaks on the screen. Two days later when I had phone bars again I had a series of concerned messages from Martha because my ever so cute “no answer” message got thrashed! I am only three weeks away from the end of my two-year bondage, and I REALLY want this poor abused phone to make it to then. [Spoiler alert: by the next day the gray streaks were gone and the phone functions as well as ever. Haven’t checked the message yet.]
Somewhat rattled by this new fuck-up, I start the short distance to Kodachrome. It is nine miles up the canyon from the little town of Henrieville, and there is a Grand Staircase Visitors Center there. A visitor said the campground was full when she left, so that’s that for Kodachrome. I’m not even gonna drive up there just to look at more rocks. ;-\ The information lady said there is some kind of State Park fan club event this weekend that has this area unusually packed (ugh :-/). So, onward.
There is a long stretch of meadow-y road west of Escalante called The Blues which I will forever remember because I traversed it in pretty heavy snow in my little sporty Peugeot back in the 90’s. I mush have been more of a risk-taker back then, because that seems crazy to me now.
I really do like Escalante. All Utah towns don’t suck! I had good times the two times I stayed here. Since I’ve become a van guy I haven’t had much occasion to stop. After Escalante are the serious white rocks. The road follows some extra hard cap rock that is I think the Cedar Mesa Formation(*), the same stuff I will be driving over much of tomorrow, just packaged a little differently.
(*)Further research says that this is actually the Navajo Formation, which I think of as red, but isn’t necessarily according to the iron content locally!
Anyway, it’s on both sides of the road for miles, and there is one magic stretch where the follows a very narrow ridge sloping off to canyons on both sides. The cottonwoods in the canyons are at peak color, so it’s quite dramatically pretty.
Last time I marked a place called Calf Creek Canyon in my memory as a cool place. I stopped there today and it was insanely busy. Not only was the campground full, but day-use parking area was full to overflowing. I got a spot cuz someone left and explored a little while. It is mighty pretty here, too bad I can’t stay. The books say the hike up to Lower Calf Falls is beautiful. Hope I get to do it some day. A little after Calf Creek is this amazing short stretch of road on a pretty narrow ridge, where there are very scenic canyons on both sides of the road. The one on the left is the very same Calf Creek Canyon.
Next landmark is the town of Boulder. It’s bigger and nicer than I remembered. Foliage here is amazing. Fifty miles further up the road when I was out of the fall color and back in the gray piney mountains I thought that if I had it to do over I would have looked into renting a room and spending the afternoon enjoying the colors. Duh.
Now I am climbing the flank of massive Boulder Mountain (11,300′) soon back at high altitude. Goodbye cottonwoods, willows, and oaks. Hello aspen and pine. Yellow aspens leaves are quite beautiful interspersed with the pines, but their season is long gone for this year up here. The aspens are completely bare. I’ve gone up at least 2,500′, outside temp went from 64° to 53° in fifteen miles. The miles of white-barked bare tree trunks do have their own austere, deathlike beauty I guess.
Most of the campgrounds are closed, but one was open. It’s quite high up and I am over the heater-running-all-night thing, so I pressed on. Six miles later, the last campground before Torrey was closed also, so after contemplating for a few minutes I drove back up the hill – the steepest part of the drive, I’ll bet I gained 1000′ in those six miles. Anyway, it turned out to be pretty nice:
WHUFU page for: Oak Creek Campground
Elevation 8,800'. Small, very handy campground in the high mountains Route 12 traverses between Boulder and Torrey. All the other campgrounds up here are closed for the season.
Not much to report. Nestled into a spot that will get the morning sun pretty early. It was warm enough that I could do my laptop thing outside till dark, which wasn’t that much time considering how late into the day I had to search for a campground. It was quite still when I went to bed, but got quite windy in the middle of the night.