Utah 24 to 95 – Fruita, Hanksville to Blanding

Friday (Oct 20)

It was calm and pleasant when I went inside after sunset, but sometime in the middle of the night it got very windy, windy enough to blow a beer bottle off the picnic table! This morning it’s clear (no clouds) and still pretty warm for this altitude (40’s), but high winds in the high mountains set off primal alarm bells in me and give me a primal urge to get the hell off the mountain and back to safer altitudes. So I don’t hang around too long here this morning.

12 north off Boulder Mountain is all downhill, no uphill for like eighteen straight miles. I know the first six miles pretty well because I drove them both directions last night. I do have a regret: the view of the Grand Staircase badlands off to the right of me is spectacular, and it turns out that there is only one opportunity at one shabby-looking pull-off to see it. I blew past because I’d blown past it last night, but there was never another chance and I kept thinking there would be another so I didn’t turn back, Darn.

Eventually the road leveled off into the fertile fields of the blessed Fremont River Valley. Soon I’m at the intersection of 12 and 24, which means the town of Torrey is right down the road.

The coffee place at the junction gas station was closed for the season, but that just meant I had to look a little harder and found a better place, a couple of miles west in the actual town. woo!

A very nice little place: order at the counter coffee, apple danish, a Reuben as the closest thing I could get for breakfast, wifi and lots of serve-yourself coffee. Also, as a bonus, a truly weird conversation with one of those weird old patriarch-type white guys you run into out here. I forget how he started the conversation, but the seemingly harmless question “Are you traveling alone?” crept in. His wife came to the table then it started getting weird. This was his second wife – his first was named Mary, and this one is also named Mary, so he doesn’t have to change towels (joking of course, but weirdly serious in retrospect).

Then he sez: “Do you want a wife? You should have a wife. Come on up to Loveland (Colorado), I can get you a wife.” I was pretty definite on the “No, thank you“, but he persisted. I did end with some crack about if I was in Loveland I’d come by and see what he’s got. He started describing his house, on a plateau where he could see Wyoming and Nebraska, and there’s a giant illuminated cross in the yard to honor his first wife Mary, so he is easy to find. I’ll bet. By this time I’m heading for the door, but I would like to know what was going on in the head of the second Mary, sitting right there listening to all this nonsense about the first Mary … One of those things were in the moment you just kind of go along, but looking back it was some weird shit.

On to where 24 traverses Grand Escalante National Monument through Fruita. Such a blessed place, but always so insanely crowded. The campground is reliably full by 9 am, so I didn’t even try. I went straight to the picnic area, where the cottonwoods are at peak foliage, and spent a really nice couple of hours clicking away on both cameras. On a beautiful Saturday afternoon it was overrun with Mormon families, which are numerous, blond, often pregnant again, and pleasantly cheerful. Husbands may be dark-headed and bearded, but wives and kids are blond, blond, blond. The kids, especially the boys, but the girls too I think have this air of confidence, even entitlement that I don’t see in other places. Not sure what’s that’s about, some kind of flashback to 50’s white America maybe.

On the way out I score a parking spot on the road in front of the crazy-busy Visitors Center so I park and go in, mostly to admire the comprehensive Southern Utah relief map. Then back to the van,to continue heading east up the Fremont River Canyon towards Hanksville. So many excellent picture spots … I skip the first few very crowded ones, but still take my share of pics. I am very bummed that my favorite stop along here – a small waterfall and series of rapids where the little river cavorts over the red-brown rock – is permanently closed, with a guardrail blocking off every possible parking place for those few hundred yards. No doubt because lf all the idiots who hurt themselves at the unsupervised spot. Bummer.

A few miles on the narrow canyon opens up into a wide valley, and you leave the red rock beauty for an entirely different category of amazing Utah rocks. This is not the slickrock and sheer red cliffs, this is some kind of 30 mile long psychedelic gravel pit – think Death Valley. Mostly grays and gray-greens with a touch of lavender. They look like what I would call Book Cliffs but my neighbor tonight wearing a Book Cliffs tee shirt assures me they are not, the real Book Cliffs are up around Green River.  These look pretty bookish to me.

 

It’s nearing dark on a Friday night, so along with admiring the beauty  I am scanning for possible place to come back to to spend the night if my campground is full. Turns out I didn’t need it, but Be Prepared!

I am happy to say my campground has space for me! It has been re-organized and remodeled, and there is now a special tent camping area in a grassy space behind the bathrooms and laundry. I scored the optimal spot for me, parked parallel so my door faces onto the grassy area and away from the campground. The campground is noisy and hyper-busy, but I’m stoked to be here and it’s quiet sitting on my chair in the grass with the van blocking the afternoon sun and all the hubbub.

After dark I walked over to the restaurant. Many things have improved here, but the restaurant service here is just as terrible as it was six years ago. I had them seat me in the (unused) bar area. Nobody came for a long time, so I found the channel changer behind the bar and turned on the tv and found the Warriors game, which made it all a win-win. Because now I didn’t care how long they take, and when they do get around to me they will get happy John instead of cranky John. Watched the whole first half of a Warriors-Pelicans. The meal was actually quite decent when it arrived, so no complaints.

My first shower since the Hot Springs Motel in Nevada was awesome. It’s not a cold night here, so the van heater didn’t come on often and I slept relatively well.

Saturday

Most of my tent neighbors are gone by the time I emerge, but not the old timer with the Book Cliffs tee pulling a Harley on a trailer next door. Really nice fella, but I hope he leaves before I do so backing out isn’t such a pain (the red truck at the right edge of the photo above). Steak & eggs at the restaurant was … ok, medium rare was a little too rare, and much worse, over easy was way too runny bordering on clear, raw egg white. Ah, Utah cuisine.

My dining experiences last night and this morning were so underwhelming that I did a drive-by on the burger place at the junction on my way out for future planning. If I come to this excellent place again I may try a different dinner and/or breakfast solution.

The first part of 95 south out of Hanksville is pretty nondescript, but then it descends into a red rock canyon and I stopped at a place I’d always driven past before – Hog Springs Picnic Area. There is also a lovely little hike up the canyon of Hog Springs Creek to the actual spring. I went maybe 1/3 of the way, to the first big bend just to get the flavor, it was really pretty this time of year with the cottonwoods and willows doing their foliage thing.

Then it’s not much farther to the very dramatic Hite Overlook and the canyon of the Colorado River ats Glen Canyon Dam (blow it up!) and the bridge over the Dirty Devil River and the Colorado An option for tonight would be to take the exit for Hite and camp on the rocky shore of the lake near the boat launch. It’s pretty cool, but I’m hoping for Natural Bridges tonight.

When I emerge from that canyon I am in White Canyon, which I will forever remember as blowing my mind the first time I came through in the 90’s. I travelled east to west that time, so this was the first mind-blowing thing I saw back then, so maybe that’s why it sticks. The canyons are still remarkable. I now know that this is the Cedar Mesa Sandstone, which is the same formation as the Natural Bridges.

I also remember an ever so alluring motel/lodge tucked away in a place called Fry’s Canyon. There were hip looking people sitting in lawn chairs enjoying the panorama. It stuck in my mind as a place to stay someday. This was going to be the day that I stopped to at least find out how much it would cost, but it’s out of business and shut down! Weeds growing in the parking lot, it looked very derelict. I am sad.

But, onward. Eventually 95 climbs out of White Canyon to a mesa, only to have to drive back down to canyon level because I want to see Natural Bridges National Monument.

I bypass the Visitor’s Center to go straight to the campground. It was full. Since staying here is off the table I can relax and to the Visitor’s Center to see what’s up. I mentioned to the nice lady that it felt like I just missed getting a spot by a half hour or so, and she laughed in my face (in a nice way :), “more like four hours“. That made me feel better. They have a handout about dispersed campimg on BLM land right outside the park boundary – very nice. Natural Bridges is at the edge of the new Bears Ears National Monument, the one that the fucking Trumpers want to roll back and give to the mining and oil interests.

Anyway, I ain’t staying here. So I took a deep breath, went ahead and did the scenic loop, dutifully stopping at each of the Natural Bridge Viewpoint parking areas and viewing each of the big three natural bridges. Then headed back up the canyon and on down the road. The dispersed camping looked easy but pretty boring, so I am going to try another place that has intrigued me since the first time I drove this road 20-ish yeas ago.

Where I am typing this right now is so awesome I am getting chills of blessedness just thinking about it. Sun is behind the ridge to the west, and I am maybe 1/2 mile from the “impossibly vertical”(*) Comb Ridge looking at probably a 12 mile stretch of uninterrupted vertical face.

What a cool place. The sheer cliff, the highway climbing diagonally up it to the huge notch plasted out of the top lip of the face. then the wide valley peppered with cottonwood trees in peak foliage. Really quite spectacular.

(*) Roadside Geology of Utah, Felice WIlliams, Lucy and Halka Chronic – p. 64 – a really cool book. Utah geology is of course amazing, but additionally the three ladies write with more vivid imagery and even poetry than the average geology book.