Category: Trips

One Swell Day

There aren’t many places in southern Utah canyon country I haven’t visited.  I found one today.

Years ago, I picked up a free booklet touting sights to see along the San Rafael Swell, a sandstone anticline west of Green River.  We’ve cut across the Swell countless times on Interstate 70, stopping at numerous viewpoints to admire the terrain and the pit toilets.  We were always on our way to somewhere else, so we never had time to get off the highway and explore what’s out there.

After leaving Capitol Reef, we had planned a three-night stop at Goblin Valley State Park.  When no sites were available at Goblin, we booked a site at Green River State Park.  We finally had an opportunity to visit the Swell.

Our chosen route was up a series of gravel roads that began at I-70’s exit 131.  In the finest Utah tradition, the road surface was seriously washboarded.  Fortunately, none of our tooth fillings fell out as we vibrated up the roadway.

After numerous stops to ogle the scenery and water the plants, we reached the old “Swinging Bridge” across the San Rafael River.  It may be a cable bridge, but it didn’t really swing.  It’s closed to motor traffic now, but maybe it did back in the day. 

We would have enjoyed the bridge more, but the area soon became overrun by an infestation of third graders on a school field trip, each trying to out-shout his or her schoolmate.  Adding to the din were a gaggle of teachers futilely shouting “don’t do that” commands to the kids.

With the false assurance that they would be there most of the day, we took off to our next objective – the Buckhorn Pictograph panels.  Here, members of the Barrier Canyon culture painted figures on the sandstone that have endured for perhaps a thousand years or more.  I only wish Sherwin-Williams paint lasted that long.

As we examined the artwork, the unthinkable happened.  We saw a large, yellow bus approaching.  The school kids had arrived and were soon swarming over the site.  With the promise from the bus driver that their next stop would be nowhere near ours, we evacuated the area and fled up the road.

A small, BLM (Bureau of Land Management, not Black Lives Matter) sign beside the road alerted us to another rock art site – this one largely consisting of petroglyph figures pecked into the rock. 

As we examined the site, I saw the bus pass us on the road below.  Thankfully, they didn’t stop.

Our next stop was the Wedge Overlook.  Here, the San Rafael River cuts through the uplift forming a deep canyon that local folks like to call the Little Grand Canyon.  We ate our lunch atop the canyon rim, wishing we had something better than midday light to photograph the grandeur spread below.

Reaching Utah Highway 10, we made drive-through examinations of Huntington and Millsite State Park campgrounds.  We then turned toward our final planned stop – the Rochester Creek petroglyph panel. 

Over the years, I’ve seen hundreds of petroglyph sites where prehistoric peoples have pecked figures into the rock.  I have never seen anything like this.

There were the usual drawings of hunters after bighorn prey.  There were depictions of identifiable animals and some that could have come straight from a horror film.  There were the commonly seen figures that X-File folks might say depict extraterrestrial visitors from another world.  Arcing over many of the pecked drawings were a set of curving lines that could have easily represented a rainbow. 

With the exception of what looked like a couple of bullet holes along with the names and initials of a few vandals from decades ago, the site was largely unmolested.

We returned to the interstate to make the 70-mile drive back to Green River.  From here to “home” it was all familiar territory.  Stopping at Ray’s Tavern in downtown Green River, we ended the day with burgers and brews.  No third graders in here.

Needles Outpost

Next stop was a five-night stay in Canyonlands National Park.  Like the porridge Goldilocks sampled in the three bears’ den, Canyonlands is divided into a trio of distinctly different districts. 

There’s Island in the Sky, which lies across the street from Arches.  With its proximity to Moab, that’s where most visitors go.  It’s a beautiful place to visit if you like lofty canyon views that extend forever.

Then there’s the Maze, which requires a serious 4×4 vehicle or a river raft to get in.  We bent a tie rod on our old truck when we visited the area a few decades ago.  Needless to say, few make it to the Maze.

For our Goldilocks “just right” tastes, the Needles District was the perfect destination.  Offering little more than rocks and ravines, it is largely visited by folks like us who want to lace up hiking boots and explore slickrock country.

We tried to get reservations in the park’s small campground, but all of the reservable sites were taken for the dates we needed.  So, we did the next best thing.  We reserved a site in the Needles Outpost, which lies just outside the park boundary.

Privately owned, the Needles Outpost is a commercial campground without most of the usual, RV park amenities.  There are no electrical, water or sewer hookups.  There’s no dump station, no wi-fi and no cable TV.  Roads may have some gravel, but the sites are just good ol’ Utah sandstone-country red dirt.  There is a flush-toilet restroom with showers ($3 for five minutes) and a small convenience store selling water, ice and if you’re lucky, fresh-squeezed lemonade. 

What the campground lacks in amenities, it more than makes up for in beauty.  We camped beside juniper trees and towering sandstone walls.  Instead of watching the sunset in the western sky, we looked to the east and watched as the last crimson rays of day ignited the rock into glowing shades of flaming orange.

Unfortunately, the site is open to the west and when the wind blows, everything in camp gets caked with that good ol’ Utah sandstone-country red dirt.  Dianne had to work overtime trying to keep the inside of the trailer clean and keep the flying grit out of meals cooked outside on the grill.  I think I’ll keep her around for another 40 years.

Confluence and Joint

Other than buying $30 t-shirts at the Visitor Center, there’s not much to do at the Needles but hike.  The park brochure lists four “short” hikes and eight “strenuous” hikes. 

We, of course, did the shorties on our “days off.”  It was a pair of the strenuous hikes that filled our dance card. The first was a 10-mile hike (11 for us) to the Confluence Overlook where the Green River meets the Grand to form the mighty, canyon-cutting Colorado.

Yes, I know it’s really the Green meeting the Colorado.  The Grand River lost its given name when the Colorado legislature, in a fit of self-righteous vanity, petitioned to have the stream that flows through Grand Lake and Grand Junction renamed the Colorado.

In mountaineering terminology, the hike to the Confluence was “interesting.”  It wasn’t so much a trail but rather a somewhat arduous route.  We followed cairns, picking our way down the walls of one steep canyon and up the other side, depending on the friction of our boot soles to hold us on to steep slabs of sandstone.  In one place where there was no other option, the Park Service bolted in a steel ladder.

We crossed another canyon followed by two more shallow valleys before reaching our objective. There, a thousand feet below us, the Green River met the Grand (Colorado).

A century and a half ago, John Wesley Powell and his men floated through.  Today, we saw four tiny kayaks paddling downstream.

Our second strenuous hike was to a place known as the Joint.  This is a quarter-mile-long, two-foot-wide slot between two massive sandstone slabs. 

Getting there took us through 11 miles (12½ miles for us) of beautiful sandstone canyons in the needles section of the Needles District.  While slightly easier than the Confluence trail, the terrain still required a lot of cairn following and friction climbing.  The beauty made it all worthwhile.

Winter Camping in Comfort

There once was a time when Dianne and I loaded tent, sleeping bags and cooking gear into backpacks and traipsed into the Colorado high country to camp atop snow.  Those days are long gone.

Still, we miss the beauty of awakening, ensconced in the snow-covered wild.  One relatively painless way we’ve found to do that is to reserve a yurt at one of the Colorado state parks.

A yurt is a tent-like structure that has been used by the nomadic people of Central Asia since before Marco Polo.  They are round with a conical roof, which makes them look like a straight sided cupcake.  The Asian yurts consist of layers of felt stretched over a wooden latticework.  Roof rafters connect the frame to a circular crown where a hole lets smoke and cooking fumes out. 

Many improvements have been made to the original Mongolian design.  Space age fabrics replace felt with foil laminates helping to retain 97% of all radiant heat.  Acrylic domes cap the top opening.  Cheaper than cabins to construct, they’ve become quite popular in state parks from coast to coast.

In the past, we’ve gone with friends up Poudre Canyon to Colorado State Forest State Park where Never Summer Nordic rents out yurts in the backcountry.  On snowshoes or cross-country skis, we’d carry or sled our gear (sleeping bags, clothes, beer, wine and food) out to the yurt for multi-night stays.  We’d gaze at stars shimmering in the cold night air and look out at moose dining nearby in the morning.

With close distancing with friends out this year due to Covid, Dianne and I decided to hit a different yurt by ourselves.  We opted for Golden Gate Canyon State Park located off the Peak-to-Peak Highway west of Golden.  Unlike the State Forest’s backcountry yurts, here we could park a few feet away.

Located in the Reverend’s Ridge Campground, the yurt features two bunkbeds with full-size mattresses on the bottom and twins on top.  There’s a circular table with six chairs and a taller counter to one side.  A gas/stove fireplace plus a pair of baseboard heaters provide warmth.

One thing we quickly discovered was how far away the bathroom is.  Our backcountry yurts have outhouses located a few feet away.  At Golden Gate Canyon, we were in Yurt #2, which lay a couple hundred yards from restrooms in the campground office building.  At least they were flush toilets located in a heated environment.

We booked a two-night stay, which meant we had one completely free day to get out and enjoy our surroundings.  We decided to hike the Racoon Trail, a 4-mile loop that goes from the campground to an overlook known as Panorama Point before looping back.  There wasn’t enough snow to warrant snowshoes, so we donned hiking boots.  A pair of Nano-spike traction aids turned our boots into the footwear equivalent of studded snow tires.

The day was clear and the wind, which had howled during the night, had diminished to a light breeze.  We hiked the wide, easy to follow trail through conifer and aspen glades, listening to snow crunch underfoot. 

At Panorama Point, we stood on the decking platform and gazed out at the snow-covered peaks along the Front Range.  The return trip took us past the log cabin of Reverend Donald Tippit, the man for whom the campground is named.

Back at the yurt, we kicked back in 70-degree warmth, brewed up a pot of tea and scooted up next to the fireplace.  That’s a pleasure we couldn’t experience back in the days when we loaded tent, sleeping bags and cooking gear into backpacks and traipsed into the Colorado high country to camp atop snow.

Tent Camping in Canyon Country

We had so much fun on our previous tent camping experience, I was able to convince my lovely wife to allow me to buy a tent.  Our former Korean-made, Walmart special given to us by the in-laws was replaced with a Big Agnes Big House four-person tent.  It’s spacious and tall enough we can stand up inside.

Of course, we had to test the tent out in the wild.  For that I booked four nights at Colorado National Monument in western Colorado near Grand Junction.  We loaded up the truck and set out with our local weather gal promising 70-degree highs and lows in the 40s.

One of the things we discovered on our August tent camping trip was how much harder the ground has gotten over the years.  To mitigate that, we decided we needed fatter pads under our sleeping bags. 

Years ago, at some travel writer gathering, I was given a Big Agnes Q-Core insulated air mattress.  I never used it.  In fact, I never took it out of the stuff sack it came in.  After all, we have a real mattress with a 2½-inch memory foam topper in the trailer.

It was in the Covid-cleanup, donate-to-charity box when I looked it up online and discovered it was a $100+ pad.  We pulled it out and decided to give it a try on this trip, with Dianne being the designated guinea pig.  She loved it so much, we decided to order another, now 50% more expensive.

Our reserved site at Colorado National Monument was ideal for tent camping.  We had a flat spot for the tent with piñon and juniper trees sheltering the site.  We erected our new camp tent, set up our folding camp kitchen, pulled out the camp chairs and in less than three hours, we were kicking back, downing a couple of camp beers.

That night we discovered one of the major drawbacks to tent camping in a formal campground.  Motorhomes all have generators, and for some reason, they need to run them constantly.  The site next to us, a good 20 or 30 yards away, was occupied by a succession of motorhomes, each with progressively louder generators.  It was like we were once again camping next to the interstate.

Four nights in camp gave us time for three full days for hiking.  Our first day’s hike was up Monument Canyon from the bottom to the base of Independence Monument.  We spotted several groups of bighorn sheep on the way up.  A longtime resident of the area we met along the trail said they were common in this canyon.  She was a park volunteer (not on duty), and as we chatted (at the proper social distancing distance), she told us about several other off-the-beaten-path hikes we should try.  We didn’t take notes, and of course at our ages, we don’t remember a single one of them.  But they sure sounded good.

The nice thing about the Monument Canyon to Independence Monument trip is that we could make it a loop trip by hiking back on the Wedding Canyon Trail.  At the bottom, on Nebraska-flat ground not far from the truck, Dianne somehow tripped over a flat rock fully buried in the dirt.  She lurched forward only to be saved from mashing into the ground by her loving husband who flung his body between her and the great beyond.

In the process of staggering forward, she managed to badly tweak her hamstring.  She was only able to mitigate the subsequent pain, she insisted, by downing a three-scoop ice cream sundae at Enstrom’s in nearby Fruita.

With Dianne unable to hike on her injured hammie, we spent our second day playing tourists.  We drove Rim Rock Drive stopping at every viewpoint along the way.  Dianne did manage to hobble down few short overlook trails, but it was clear she wasn’t going to cover any major ground the next day.

Unable to hike, Dianne became my third-day Uber driver.  She dropped me at the upper end of the Monument Trail along Rim Rock Drive.  I hiked down past the Coke Ovens formation and along the cliffs back to Independence Monument.  With towering redrock on one side and a canyon on the other, I burned up a slew of digits shooting photos along the way. 

Not wanting to duplicate my wife’s tripping on a flat rock, I chose to forego the Wedding Canyon option and trudge down the trail we had taken up the first day.  Along the way, I cautiously passed a carnivorous rock and spooked a gaggle of bighorn rams. 

Dianne was waiting by the truck at the bottom.  In the backseat sat our 12-volt cooler, chilled to 39 degrees.  Liberating a cold brew from its clutches, I unfolded one of our chairs and kicked back.  It was the perfect ending to a fun hike.

Our next tent trip is already inked on the calendar.  Because of the ongoing Covidemic, we decided not to get ski passes this year.  As a partial consolation, we booked campsites for two weeks in February at a pair of hiker-friendly, county parks in the Phoenix area.  Instead of towing the trailer over mountain roads in the winter, we will take the tent. 

Not only will we have flush restrooms and showers available at the campground, but we’ll be in tent-only campgrounds where generators are totally banned.

Robb Retreat

We had originally planned to head west for a six-week trip that would take us across Utah and Idaho to the Columbia River, then down the Oregon Coast to the California redwoods. 

We were going to attend a Mini Lite trailer rally and visit Dianne’s parents in California followed by a visit to her sister in Nevada.  We would then camp in Denver for a few days before heading south to Arizona for a two-week camping excursion with friends in the desert east of Phoenix.

Because of the Covidemic, all of that was cancelled.  Although some places graciously didn’t charge their normal fees, we still ended up absorbing $188.12 in campsite cancellation fees.

In place of relatives and redwoods, we are doing a Colorado Covid Compromise trip. We were able to book a trio of two-week stays at Colorado State in the western part of the state.  First stop is Robb State Park Island Acres Section, which lies 18 miles east of Grand Junction.

Getting here presented a challenge.  A huge wildfire broke out in Glenwood Canyon that closed the Interstate highway through the canyon.  Alternative routes were required.

We chose to go north through Steamboat Springs and then south to Rifle.  Other than a few miles of road construction that coated the front of the trailer in mud, it was pretty much uneventful.  It only took about two hours longer than normal.

We arrived and set up camp in pleasant 100-degree, one-percent humidity warmth.  On went the air conditioner.  It’s good to not be tent camping.

Hiking Grand Mesa

Some camping trips are truly memorable.  This looks to be one of them, but for all the wrong reasons.

While the name may sound exotic, Robb State Park Island Acres section lies sandwiched between the cliffs, about 18 miles east of Grand Junction.  There’s no island.  On one side of the campground lies the Colorado River and the Union Pacific railroad tracks.  On the other lies Interstate 70, a major transcontinental truck route.  Even though we’re about as far away from the interstate as we can get, it’s still noisy.

The sites are nicely spaced with grassy lawn between them, but shade is at a premium.  Our site does have a canopy over the picnic table.  We have full hookups (electricity, water and sewer), which means we can use as much water and power as we want.  That’s handy because with temperatures only a shade under 100, we’ll be showering frequently and will have the air conditioner running pretty much all afternoon.

Then there’s the smoke.  Another major wildfire, the fourth largest in Colorado history at last count, is burning north of Grand Junction.  Smoke from that conflagration blankets the area, making distant views appear as if we’re seeing them through waxed paper.  The air smells of burning wood and ash settles on everything overnight.

The one saving grace is that Grand Mesa lies about a half-hour drive away.  At 10,000 feet, world’s largest flat-topped mountain offers a cool, relatively smoke-free place to escape for hiking.  The first day, we did a short, six-mile hike through glades of aspen and spruce to a series of small lakes and creek-fed reservoirs. 

Yesterday we hiked eight miles from a set of roadside fishing lakes near the campground where we stayed three nights last July.  I think we each lost over a liter of blood to the ravenous mosquitoes back then.  We saw nary a mosquito on this trip. 

After four miles of relatively flat walking, we reached the top of a chairlift at the Powderhorn Ski Area.  The steep, black-diamond ski trails look far more frightening when they don’t have snow on them.  If we can do it in Covid-free conditions, we may come back this winter on a ski vacation.

Dianne is still having issues with her replaced knee, so we’re limiting hikes to every second day.  On off days when the air is good, we’ll do some more biking.  On the bad days, we’ll probably hang out in our trailer’s air-conditioned luxury and catch up on reading.  There are some definite advantages to “camping” in our summer cabin on wheels (SCOW).

Phase one comes to a close

We just completed our last active day at Island Acres with a 40-mile bike ride on the Riverfront Trail.  From Las Colonias park in Grand Junction, we pedaled 14 miles out to the Robb State Park in Fruita.  From there we continued nearly to the Kokopelli Trailhead in Loma.  At the 20-mile point, we turned back.

Heading downriver, the first half of the trip was predominantly downhill, and we had a nice tailwind.  Going back was uphill, pedaling into a stiff breeze.  At Dianne’s insistence, we ensured success by stocking up on calories at Enstrom’s with triple-scoop ice cream sundaes before facing the final 14 miles of trail.

This was our fourth day of bicycling over our 14-night stay at Island Acres.  We also enjoyed five days of hiking up on Grand Mesa.  In all, we covered nearly 94 miles on bikes and over 32 miles on hiking trails.  Monday was a shopping and laundry day, and tomorrow will be the same as we prepare for departure.  We also had two photo days up on the Mesa (not retired yet) and a stay-in-the-trailer day when the smoke from the Pine Gulch fire blanketed the valley and beyond.

Saturday, we begin the second leg of our Covid-escaping, getaway trifecta.  After enjoying full-hookup “camping” here at Island Acres, we will be staying at Mancos State Park near Mesa Verde where water fill-ups will have to be carted in jerry cans, the battery will be recharged with solar panels and the gray- and black-water tank contents will be hauled to the dump station using Bob, our 25-gallon, Barker four-wheel sewer tote. 

At Mancos, we’ll be boondock camping in the whispering pines.  No din of the interstate.  No freight trains rumbling by.  I’m really looking forward to spending the next two weeks ensconced in rustic quiet.